Movements & Debates unit test

Booker T. Washington's Atlanta Compromise (1895)

The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965)

War on Drugs and sentencing disparity

Respectability politics

Malcolm X

Black Studies and San Francisco State (1968)

COINTELPRO

The Talented Tenth

Black Panther Party Ten-Point Program (1966)

Nation of Islam

Mass incarceration

Kimberlé Crenshaw and the origin of intersectionality (1989)

DOCUMENT-BASED QUESTION (7 points). Explain how African American writers and intellectuals debated the purpose of Black art and literature between 1920 and 1970. The five sources, summarized in our own words: Source 1 — W. E. B. Du Bois, "Criteria of Negro Art," address to the NAACP conference published in The Crisis, October 1926. Du Bois argues that all art is propaganda and ever must be, and that he does not care for any art that is not used for propaganda for gaining the right of Black folk to love and enjoy. He criticizes the demand for art divorced from purpose and insists that Black artists have an obligation to the political struggle of Black people. Source 2 — Langston Hughes, "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," The Nation, June 1926. Hughes, responding to a young Black poet who told him he wanted to be a poet rather than a Negro poet, argues that the desire to be white is the mountain standing in the way of Black art. He defends the use of blues, jazz and the speech of ordinary working-class Black people as artistic material against the objection that such subjects embarrass the race, and declares that Black artists intend to express their dark-skinned selves without fear or shame, and that if white or Black audiences are displeased, it does not matter. Source 3 — Zora Neale Hurston, "How It Feels to Be Colored Me," The World Tomorrow, 1928, together with her ethnographic collection Mules and Men, 1935. Hurston, trained in anthropology under Franz Boas, collected folklore, songs and hoodoo practice in Florida, Alabama and Haiti, and argued in her essays that Black southern vernacular culture was a complete and self-sufficient artistic tradition rather than raw material requiring elevation. She wrote that she was not tragically colored and belonged to no sorrow school of Negrohood. Source 4 — Richard Wright, "Blueprint for Negro Writing," New Challenge, 1937, together with his introduction to Native Son. Wright argues that Black writing to that point had largely consisted of pleading with white readers for acceptance, and calls instead for a literature grounded in the actual conditions of Black working-class life and informed by Marxist analysis. He argues that the Black writer's audience should be Black people, and that a literature which does not confront the material conditions producing Black life is decorative. Source 5 — Larry Neal, "The Black Arts Movement," The Drama Review, Summer 1968. Neal argues that the Black Arts Movement is the aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept, that it proposes a separate symbolism, mythology, critique and iconology, and that the Black artist's role is to speak to the needs and aspirations of Black America rather than to a white audience or to Western critical standards. He calls for the destruction of the double consciousness Du Bois described, arguing that Black people should stop viewing themselves through white eyes.