PLEADING OUR OWN CAUSE : A CONTINUING STRUGGLE
By NORRIS P . WEST
Even in this era of widespread book banning that disproportionately targets Black writers , Black literature is flourishing in the United States .
As of 2020 , more than 10,000 Black authors and writers were honing their craft . And now African American literature is sometimes acknowledged with humanity ’ s highest honors , such as Percival Everett ’ s 2024 best-selling masterpiece , “ James ,” recently winning the National Book Award .
Today ’ s success can be attributed – at least in part – to an inflection point exactly 100 years ago , when a large collection of black writers , poets and visual artists burst onto the American cultural landscape .
The March 1925 special issue of the magazine Survey Graphic was dedicated to “ Harlem : Mecca of The New Negro .” This issue of the Black periodical published works by Langston Hughes , Claude McKay , Zora Neale Hurston , Countee Cullen and almost 30 more Black writers . The issue ’ s poems , short stories , essays , drawings and color reproduction of paintings were aggregated later that year in book form as the landmark anthology , “ The New Negro .”
Alain Locke , the first Black Rhodes scholar , edited both the magazine and the anthology . With his book , Locke “ changed the conversation about what it meant to be Black in the United States , from one of being a ward or problem to that of being an asset ,” Jeffrey C . Stewart said in an Oxford University Press interview about his book , “ The New Negro : The Life of Alain Locke ,” which won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for biography .
The book published the poem , “ The Negro Speaks of Rivers ,” which Hughes wrote as a teenager , and begins : I ’ ve known rivers … I ’ ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins My soul has grown deep like rivers
19