Description
Book SynopsisIn pursuit of equality, African American movements turned to folklore to reveal the soul of a race and find a path toward civilization. This book provides a comprehensive chronicle of these 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, graduates of Fisk University, William Hannibal Thomas, the NAACP, the Urban League, the Friends of Negro Freedom (black socialists), the Universal Negro Improvement Association, and blacks associated with the Communist Party USA. Disavowing a culture of money, guns, and death, black folklorists in these movements, Sharps finds, variously exposed an inner life of the race ranging from loving (forgiving) and loyal to imitative, tragic, happy, faithful (spiritual), emotional, and aesthetic (creative). To complete freedom, they primarily reconciled racial identity with a path to an ever-perfecting civilization, ranging from e
Table of Contents
Introduction: Not to Be an Anomaly
Chapter 1: Folklore in Pursuit of Identity and Survival
Chapter 2: Folklore in Pursuit of Economic Equality
Chapter 3: Folklore in Pursuit of a Cultural Education
Chapter 4: Folklore in Pursuit of Political Equality
Chapter 5: Folklore in Pursuit of Loyalty
Chapter 6: Folklore in Pursuit of Nation-Building
Chapter 7: Folklore in Pursuit of Social Equality
Chapter 8: Folklore in Pursuit of Full Equality and Self-Determination
Conclusion: Happy Days and Sorrow Songs
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
