FOREWORD

BY HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR.

WRITING in 1853 in Frederick Douglass' Paper, a pseudonymous columnist who called himself "Dion" argued that the literature of "colored Americans" was as yet a nascent thing, existing "only, to too great an extent, in the vast realm of probability." Nevertheless, he felt comfortable predicting "the future will yet reveal to us the names of colored Americans so gloriously illustrated in the catalogue of literary excellence, as to remind the world of the days when dark-browed Egypt gave letters to Greece." Already, he continues, "various colored Americans" had begun to publish historical and imaginative literature, arguing a "future glory in the persons of her sons, who have been cast upon a different shore."

Despite these noble if fledgling efforts, however, Dion worries about their preservation: "Still, even those efforts are not to be spoken of without regret, for they were mainly contained within the narrow limits of pamphlets, or the volumes of newspapers, ephemeral caskets, whose destruction entails the destruction of the gems which they contain." Because of the fragility of newspapers, Dion argues, the intellectual heritage of the Negro American will be imperiled, doomed to "become the subject of vague tradition," unless "some capable person may take measures to effect a speedy collection of those valuable evidences of the genius and integrity of our gifted brethren. Such a work," Dion concludes with a flourish, "is due to them, is due to ourselves, is due to posterity."

James Danky and Maureen Hady have heeded Dion's call. Their national bibliography constitutes the most complete census of the newspapers and periodicals published and edited by African-Americans between 1827 and the present. A guide to more than 6500 titles, African-American Newspapers and Periodicals is a map to a veritable dark continent of journalism that black Americans have created, circulated, and digested for the past one hundred seventy-one years.

And what wonders this bibliography can unveil! Let us consider the field of African-American literature, as just one example of the potential import of this bibliography upon scholarship in African-American Studies. Tens of thousands of pieces of creative literature--poems, short stories, serialized novels--were published in these black periodicals. Perhaps not surprisingly, most of the critical discussions of the nature and function of African-American literature took place in black periodicals. Because they were frequently denied a forum in white-owned magazines, newspapers, and publishing houses, African-American writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries found a market for their work in their neighborhood black periodicals, which printed an overwhelming majority of those stories, short novels, and poems written by blacks prior to 1920. Much of the periodical literature was also written at the urging of newspaper editors and other black leaders who hoped that black literature, by demonstrating blacks' intellectual prowess, would erode racial prejudice. Until recently, however, these literary works have remained largely forgotten, scattered among the collections of historical societies and university libraries. The entire history of African-American literature will have to be revised to account for the black periodical literature published between 1827--the year when Freedom's Journal, the first black periodical, appeared--and 1940. It is as if we have rediscovered a hermetically sealed library of the African-American tradition after a century of neglect.

Of course, white racism continued and Jim Crow and other discriminatory measures increased as the number of black literary works grew towards the end of the century. This literature is, therefore, of great social and historical importance in understanding the African-American experience in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But it also has considerable literary significance because, while there are few "masterpieces," it shows that relatively uneducated black people produced literature of similar quality as fairly well-educated white people writing in publications at the same time.

Who were these black authors whose works have been so overlooked? While some were middle class, many others belonged to the working class. A black person would come home after a long day's work as a domestic or laborer, and sit down to write a novel, short story, or poem--and this at a time when black people historically have been accused of being undereducated and illiterate. In addition, a remarkable amount of nineteenth-century periodical literature was written by women. Black women make frequent mention in their writings in these periodicals of the necessity of establishing a women's literary tradition. They also discuss sexual exploitation and the fact that black women had even less freedom than black men. They write about love and explore normal human emotions and relationships more fully than is found in the black male literary tradition, and they do so without ignoring the culture of racism.

This bibliography, then, is a conduit into an almost self-contained universe of thought and feeling of the African-American people, their aspirations and dreams, but also their everyday concerns and occurrences. Once scholars have begun to utilize this bibliography as the enabling tool that it is, a remarkable amount of information about the world's impact every day upon African-Americans, and their impact upon the world, can be scrutinized by scholars, thus filling in lacunae that even the most subtle intellectual history cannot otherwise address. Few reference tools have a greater potential impact upon the development of African-American studies than this one.

Excerpt copyright © 1998, 1999 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved.