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Ronald LaMarr Sharps - Black Folklorists in Pursuit of Equality, Inbunden

Inbunden, Engelska, 2023

Black Folklorists in Pursuit of Equality

African American Identity and Cultural Politics, 1893–1943

Av Ronald LaMarr Sharps

Del i serien Studies in Folklore and Ethnology: Traditions, Practices, and Identities

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Beskrivning
After the Civil War, Emancipation purportedly brought physical freedom to African Americans. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, blacks continued to experience inequality in all phases of American life—social, cultural, political, and economic. In pursuit of equality, African American movements interpreted folklore to reveal in their rhetoric the soul of a race and a path toward civilization. This book provides a comprehensive chronicle of these competing initiatives and their reception starting with the folklore society organized by Hampton Institute in 1893 and continuing through the early 1940s with the American Negro Academy, Fisk University graduates, William Hannibal Thomas, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Urban League, the Friends of Negro Freedom, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, and blacks associated with the Communist Party USA. Disavowing a culture of fear, money, guns, and death, black folklorists in these movements exposed a racial inner life ranging from loving, loyal, and happy to imitative, tragic, spiritual, emotional, and creative. Each characterization of the race justified a distinct path and possible contributions to civilization. If unable to know their past, members of the movements and other folklorists were fearful that African Americans would be an anomaly among humanity.
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Ronald LaMarr Sharps serves as associate dean of the College of the Arts at Montclair State University.

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Sharps’s 50-year history is rooted in extensive research in archives and the literature. It [addresses] in great detail the personal, social, political, and literary contexts in which a smattering of African American folklore is expressed. These include detailed descriptions of the Hampton Institute, Tuskegee University, Fisk University, the American Negro Academy, the Friends of Negro Freedom, the NAACP, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, the Urban League, and figures such as W. E. B Dubois, Marcus Garvey, Robert Moton, Carter Woodson, Charles S. Johnson, Alain Locke, and, especially, Booker T. Washington. Sharps reviews Black scholars' and writers’ relationships to communism and how it influenced perceptions of folklore. Folklore themes and subjects often referenced include the egregious misappropriation of folklore to fabricate a happy plantation and enslavement narrative, slave oral histories, “sorrow songs” and work songs, and the figure of John Henry. Sharps contrasts lower-class jazz, blues, and ragtime with the elites’ reconceived and supposedly improved folk songs, referring to the banjo and fiddle as “rude instruments.” The book primarily focuses on using folklore to help prepare Black people for full and equal participation in American society and includes much information not previously available. Bibliographic documentation is thorough. Recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty.

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