CANR
WORK TITLE: A Plausible Man
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://susannaashton.com/
CITY: Clemson
STATE:
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY:
LAST VOLUME:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Married; has children.
EDUCATION:Vassar College, B.A.; University of Iowa, M.A., Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, scholar, and educator. Clemson University, SC, chair of department of English, 2017-21, professor, 2021—; Harvard University, Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Cambridge, MA, W.E.B. DuBois Fellow, 2021-22; Twain Center, Elmira, NY, scholar-in-residence. Co-director of National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute on Reconstructing the Black Archive, 2023.
AVOCATIONS:Baking, gardening, reading.
AWARDS:Fulbright Scholarship; Phil and Mary Bradley Faculty Award, Clemson University, 2008; research award, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina; Sylvia Lyons Award, Charles W. Chesnutt Association, 2018, for Approaches to Teaching Charles W. Chesnutt; fellowships from organizations, including Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center, University of Pennsylvania’s McNeil Center, American Printing History Association, Harvard University’s Houghton Library, Emory University, and University of Notre Dame’s Center for the Study of American Catholicism.
WRITINGS
Contributor to publications, including American Literary Realism, MELUS, Southern Spaces, Studies in the Novel, College English, Commonplace, Frontiers, Biography, the American Literary Review, the Southern Literary Journal, History Ireland, American Periodicals, and Libraries and Culture.
SIDELIGHTS
Susanna Ashton is a writer, scholar, and educator. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Vassar University and both a master’s degree and a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. Ashton has served as a professor and department chair at Clemson University, and she was a W.E.B. DuBois Fellow at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. She has received several other fellowships, as well as awards from Clemson University and the Charles W. Chesnutt Association.
Ashton has written, edited, and co-edited books, and she has contributed to many academic journals and publications, including American Literary Realism, MELUS, Southern Spaces, Studies in the Novel, College English, Commonplace, Frontiers, Biography, the American Literary Review, the Southern Literary Journal, History Ireland, American Periodicals, and Libraries and Culture.
Ashton is the editor, with Tom Lutz, of the 1996 volume, These “Colored” United States: African American Essays from the 1920s. In this volume, Lutz and Ashton include essays from contributors, including Wallace Thurman, Theophilus Lewis, J. Egert Allen, George Schuyler, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and Charles S. Johnson. Some of the essays focus specifically on the African American experience in a single state or region, while others discuss race relations in the U.S. as a whole. In Anita Scott Coleman’s essay, she includes historical information on Black people’s contributions to the colonization of what is now the American West, while Mama Elaine Francis calls for a more robust activist community in support of civil rights. In a lengthy assessment of the work in MELUS, Andrew Furman suggested: “Almost all of these essays offer a precious glimpse of the distinct challenges and opportunities facing African Americans across the country in the 1920s.” Furman also stated: “Lutz and Ashton deserve a good deal of credit for compiling this worthy volume.”
In the 2010 collection, I Belong to South Carolina: South Caroline Slave Narratives, Ashton, as editor, includes writings by seven people who had been enslaved in South Carolina. Some of the accounts were written before the Civil War, while others were written in its aftermath. Before each entry, Ashton includes a preface in which she includes historical information that relates to that particular entry. B.M. Banta offered a favorable assessment of the book in Choice, asserting: “The volume belongs in every US academic library.” Banta also categorized it as “essential.”
Ashton is the author of A Plausible Man: The True Story of the Escaped Slave Who Inspired Uncle Tom’s Cabin, released in 2024. In the book, she describes an interaction between Harriet Beecher Stowe and John Andrew Jackson, the man who became the inspiration for Stowe’s essential literary work, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Jackson escaped slavery and fled via ship from Charleston, SC, settling in Boston, MA. During an evening he spent with Stowe, Jackson recounted his escape, the treatment he received while enslaved, and the indignities suffered by his family members and others. After inspiring Stowe, Jackson, whom Ashton describes as abrasive, moved to Canada, then England, and ultimately settled back in South Caroline, where he attempted to start a Black farming community where he was once enslaved. A Kirkus Reviews critic asserted: “It’s a story worth knowing and makes a solid complement to Ilyon Woo’s Master Slave Husband Wife.” The same critic described the book as “a capable contribution to the literature of slavery and abolition.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Choice, November, 2010, B.M. Banta, review of I Belong to South Carolina: South Carolina Slave Narratives, p. 575; October, 2014, J.W. Hall, review of The South Carolina Roots of African American Thought: A Reader, p. 259.
Kirkus Reviews, June 1, 2024, review of A Plausible Man: The True Story of the Escaped Slave Who Inspired Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Library Bookwatch, May, 2018, review of Approaches to Teaching the Works of Charles W. Chesnutt.
MELUS, spring, 1999, Andrew Furman, review of These “Colored” United States: African American Essays from the 1920s, p. 262.
ONLINE
Clemson University, College of Arts and Humanities website, https://www.clemson.edu/ (July 15, 2024), author faculty profile.
Susanna Ashton website, https://susannaashton.com/ (July 15, 2024).
Susanna Ashton
Professor
Contact
Department of English
Office: 611 Strode
Email: sashton@clemson.edu
Education
Ph.D. English, University of Iowa; M.A. English, University of Iowa; B.A. English, Vassar College
Research Interests
Notions of authentication and identity in slavery & freedom narratives; 18th-, 19th-, and early 20th-century American Literature; collaboration; surveillance studies; copyright; history of the book; periodical culture; abolitionist literature; Charles W. Chesnutt; American Literary Realism; Life Writing
Dr. Ashton is a scholar of literature and testament and works as an expert on contested authorship of slavery or freedom narratives.
From 2021-2022 she was a W.E.B. DuBois Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University, has held a Fulbright to Ireland, has held a research fellowship with Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Abolition, and Resistance, and also one at the University of Pennsylvania’s McNeil Center for Early American Studies (a non-stipendiary sabbatical award). In 2023 she served as a co-director of a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute on Reconstructing the Black Archive. South Carolina as Case Study with Dr. Rhondda Thomas of Clemson and Dr. Gregg Hecimovich and Dr. Kaniqua Robinson of Furman University. Other notable national awards include an American Printing History Association fellowship, the William Dean Howells Fellowship at Harvard University’s Houghton Library at Harvard, a Woodruff Library research fellowship in African American Studies at Emory University, a Cushwa Center Award from the University of Notre Dame’s Center for the Study of American Catholicism, and a research award for the South Caroliniana Library at the University of South Carolina. She was also a Twain scholar-in-Residence with the Mark Twain Center in Elmira, New York (ask her about living alone in the Twain house!).
Dr. Ashton is the author of Collaborators in Literary America, 1820-1920, and co-editor of various collections, including “I was Born in South Carolina,” South Carolina Slave Narratives; (with Rhondda R. Thomas) The South Carolina Roots of African American Thought; (with Tom Lutz) These ‘Colored’ United States; (with William Hardwig) Approaches to Teaching Charles W. Chesnutt; and Samuel Williams’ autobiography “Before the War and After the Union.” She has additionally authored chapters and articles in journals and magazines such as American Literary Realism, MELUS, Southern Spaces, Studies in the Novel, College English, Commonplace, Frontiers, Biography, the American Literary Review, the Southern Literary Journal, History Ireland, American Periodicals, Libraries and Culture, JSTOR Daily, Symplok?, and others. Her edition of 28 Years a Slave or My Life on Three Continents by Thomas Lewis Johnson is in process for Clemson University Press.
Her biography of John Andrew Jackson titled A Plausible Man. The True Story of the Escaped Slave Who Inspired Uncle Tom’s Cabin from The New Press (NY), is forthcoming 2024.
Learn more about her work and projects at www.susannaashton.com .
Awards
Du Bois Fellow (Harvard's Hutchins Center); Fellow (Yale's Gilder Lehrman Center); Fulbright (University College Cork); (PI) NEH Summer Institute 2022-2023,
Selected Professional Works
Books (Published)
Collaborators in Literary America 1870-1920. Palgrave MacMillan Press, 2003.
Books (In Production or Under Contract)
A Plausible Man. The True Story of the Escaped Slave who Inspired Uncle Tom’s Cabin. -- The New Press, NY, Forthcoming 2024.
28 Years a Slave by Thomas Lewis Johnson, in a new edition with an introduction and annotations by Susanna Ashton under contract with Clemson University Press.
Books (Edited)
Before the War and After the Union by Sam Aleckson. Written by Samuel Williams. Edited by Susanna Ashton (Clemson University Press / Liverpool University Press, 2021)
Susanna Ashton & William Hardwig, eds. Approaches to Teaching Charles W. Chesnutt. (New York, NY: Modern Language Association, 2017)
- Winner of the Sylvia Lyons Award from the Charles W. Chesnutt Association (2018)
Rhondda R. Thomas & Susanna Ashton, eds. The South Carolina Roots of African American Thought. A Reader. (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2014).
"I Belong to South Carolina." South Carolina Slave Narratives. University of South Carolina Press, 2010.
-A Choice magazine Outstanding Academic Title by the American Library Association for 2010
An edited and annotated edition of Moondyne, by John Boyle O'Reilly. University College Cork - electronic press (CELT Project).
These "Colored" United States: African American Essays from the 1920s, Co-Edited with Tom Lutz - (Rutgers UP, 1996).
Journal Articles & Book Chapters (Published)
“Ablaze: The 1849 White Supremacist Attack on the Pendleton Post Office.” Southern Spaces (Fall 2022).
“The Fugitive Slave Act and the United States of Slavery” Book chapter for African American Literature in Transition, Volume 3 1830-1850. Series General Editor: Joycelyn Moody (Cambridge UP, 2021).
“Serendipitous Juxtapositions” American Periodicals 25.1 (April 2015)
“Re-Collecting Jim. Discovering a coda, a name, and a slave narrative’s continuing truth.” Common-place.org The Interactive Journal of Early American Life. 15.1 (December 2014)
“’The Weight of that Crush.’ Jacob Stroyer and the Battle for Fort Sumter” The South Carolina Review. 46.2 (Spring 2014). 135-139.
With Jonathan Hepworth, “Jackson Unchained: Reclaiming A Fugitive Landscape.” The Appendix. A New Journal of Narrative and Experimental History. TheAppendix.net. October 2013
“The Genuine Article” John Andrew Jackson and Harriet Beecher Stowe – Common-place. The Interactive Journal of Early American Life. Vol 13. Issue 4 (Summer 2013) See Common-place.org.
“Slavery Imprinted - The Life and Narrative of William Grimes,” an essay in Early African American Print Culture, edited by Lara Cohen and Jordan Stein (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). This collection is the winner of an "Outstanding Academic Title" from the American Library Association's Choice Magazine for 2012.
“Recreating a Tour, Recreating a Sense of Scholarly Engagement." - MMLA Journal 45.1 (Spring 2012), 17-25.
"Why Should a Library Invest in You? Short-Term Library Grants, an analysis." ADE Bulletin 115 (Association of Departments of English) (Spring/Summer 2011). (SAR 3.5:1)
“Entitles: Booker T. Washington and the Signs of Play” - The Southern Literary Journal 39, 2 (Spring 2007.): 1-23. (SAR 10:1)
“Don’t You Mean ‘Slaves’ Not ‘Servants’?” - Literary and Institutional Texts for an Interdisciplinary Classroom” College English, 69, 2 (November 2006): 156-172. (SAR 26:1)
Reviews & Interviews
“John B. Cade’s Project to Document the Stories of the Formerly Enslaved.” A digital collection reviewed for JSTOR Daily, 26 January 2022. (1,600 word feature essay)
Hello
In addition to being a scholar and teacher, I am also a baker, a gardener, a reader, an active political citizen, and part of a family. In order to create a richer and more compassionate world for everyone, I am convinced it is vital for us all to understand and honor how our work and personal lives are intertwined. Here I am with my husband, kids, and some friendly llamas.
**Scroll further down if you are looking for llama-free professional information.**
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MORE ABOUT ME (in third person, no less!)
Susanna Ashton is a Professor of English at Clemson University, and her work has been profiled in the New York Times, CNN and dozens of other media outlets across the country.
She has authored, edited, or coauthored multiple titles on American literary and cultural history, including Collaborators in Literary America 1870-1920; “I Belong in South Carolina.” South Carolina Slave Narratives; (w/ Tom Lutz) These ‘Colored’ United States: African American Essays from the 1920s; (w/ Rhondda R. Thomas) The South Carolina Roots of African American Thought; (w/Bill Hardwig) Approaches to Teaching Charles W. Chesnutt. In addition to those book projects, she has published in many scholarly journals as well as popular newspapers and public-facing digital media. She has appeared in various media interviews and served as a featured expert in the documentary film, Gina’s Journey: The Search for William Grimes.
A seasoned and engaging presenter, Susanna Ashton speaks with humor, verve, and thoughtful storytelling for both public and academic events
Awards, grants, and honors include:
~W.E.B. Du Bois Fellow at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Studies
~Fellow at Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition
~A Fulbright Scholar at University College Cork in the Republic of Ireland
~The National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute -Co-Director for
The Black Archive: South Carolina as Case Study
~American Printing History Fellow, Printing History Association~
~Twain Scholar-in-Residence, Quarry Farm Fellowship, Center for Mark Twain Studies
~Irish Research Fellowship, Irish American Cultural Institute
~Hibernian Research Fellowship, CUSHWA Center for the Study of American Catholicism, University, University of Notre Dame
~William Dean Howells Memorial Fellowship in American Literature, The Houghton Library, Harvard University
~Lewis P. Jones Research Fellowship in South Carolinia History, South Caroliniana Library at the University of South Carolina
~Robert Woodruff Library Research Fellowship in African American History, Emory University
Recent Academic Appointments
Summer 2021-present, Full Professor, Department of English, Clemson University
Spring 2022, W.E.B. Du Bois Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, Harvard University
Fall 2017-Spring 2021 Chair, Department of English, Clemson University
Education
Ph.D. in English, University of Iowa
M.A. in English, University of Iowa
B.A. in English, Vassar College
Teaching
At Clemson University I’ve taught graduate and undergraduate seminars on topics ranging from Life Writing, and The American Novel to Representations of Slavery. I especially love teaching English 3980, an American Literature Survey class from the beginnings (whatever that might be) to 1900.
Along with student teams, I have conducted original research with real world impact; mentoring students so that they might build well-sourced Wikipedia pages, working with them to design an extensive digital museum exhibit, presenting with them at conferences, and co-authoring with them in professional venues. One of these collaborative endeavors even resulted in a collection, I Belong in South Carolina: South Carolina Slave Narratives that won an American Library Association “Choice” award as an Outstanding Academic Title for 2010.
In 2008 I was awarded the Clemson University-wide Phil and Mary Faculty Bradley Award for Mentoring in Creative Inquiry —a prize given to outstanding work in teaching and mentoring undergraduates in research.
As a scholar of book history, my first work was on authorship and collaboration and I’ve taken that expertise into everything I do. While collaboration is never frictionless and does occasionally fail, I believe it is always an effort worth pursuing and I have consistently sought to see students as collaborators with the goal of always pushing inquiry farther, together.
QUOTED: "It's a story worth knowing and makes a solid complement to Ilyon Woo's Master Slave Husband Wife."
"a capable contribution to the literature of slavery and abolition."
Ashton, Susanna A PLAUSIBLE MAN The New Press (NonFiction None) $30.99 8, 6 ISBN: 9781620978191
A scholarly detective story about a man who would inspire a world-changing book.
In December 1850, writes Clemson English professor Ashton, John Andrew Jackson, a formerly enslaved person in South Carolina, spent a night in Maine with Harriet Beecher Stowe. He showed her the scars left by the whippings he had endured, likely told her of the family members who had been sold away from him, and recounted his flight from Charleston to Boston as a shipboard stowaway. He left the next day, having unknowingly provided Stowe the germ from which Uncle Tom's Cabin would grow. He might have become a powerful symbol for the abolitionist cause, but, writes Ashton, Jackson had a talent for alienating fellow travelers: "His is a tale of individual hustle; separate from most established Black and white organizations, he would almost always go it alone." His path would take him to Canada, then to England, where, having decided to "forcefully intervene in the global politics of slavery with nothing more than his witness and testimony," he tried to become known on the lecture circuit while subsisting on work as a whitewasher and rough painter. Perhaps daringly--or perhaps out of desperation, once he'd burned enough bridges--he returned to South Carolina after the war with the intention of creating a Black farming community on the land held by his former enslaver. Ashton sorts diligently through what she memorably calls "obfuscatory nineteenth-century ledger lines," piecing together the life of a man who might have been better known had his former allies not repudiated him. The narrative she unfolds has moments of both tragedy and victory as she capably returns a "canceled" man to history. It's a story worth knowing and makes a solid complement to Ilyon Woo's Master Slave Husband Wife.
A capable contribution to the literature of slavery and abolition.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Ashton, Susanna: A PLAUSIBLE MAN." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A795673786/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a577aaf1. Accessed 25 June 2024.
The South Carolina roots of African American thought: a reader, ed. by Rhondda Robinson Thomas and Susanna Ashton. South Carolina, 2014. 408p bibl index afp ISBN 9781611173147, $49.95
52-0711
PS558
2013-18490 CIP
Educator and activist Kelly Miller remarked in his 1925 essay on South Carolina: "There is not a dull period in her history." In presenting Miller and 18 other black writers from the antebellum era to the present, Thomas and Ashton (both, Clemson Univ.) underscore the major role of African Americans in recording the state's tumultuous past. Inspired by William Andrews's The North Carolina Roots of African American Literature: An Anthology, ed. by William Andrews (CH, Sep'06, 44-0175), the present title includes scholarly but extremely readable introductions to each author and his or her "nuanced complexity." Writers and their representative works are grouped into four sections: "Slavery and Abolition" (Daniel Payne, Martin Delany, John Jackson, Robert Smalls, Archibald Grimke, Francis Grimke); "The Talented Tenth" (Miller, Mary Bethune, Max Barber, Jane Hunter, Benjamin Mays, Septima Clark); "The Civil Rights Legacy" (Marian Edelman, James Clyburn, Jesse Jackson); "The Media Generation" (Randall Kennedy, Eugene Robinson, Armstrong Williams). An afterword treats Ty'Sheoma Bethea. Including African Americans' memories of slavery and early struggles to achieve full citizenship, the first two divisions are longest and most powerful. Summing Up: Highly recommended. *** Lowerdivision undergraduates through faculty; general readers.---J. W. Hall, University of Mississippi
Hall, J.W.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Hall, J.W. "The South Carolina roots of African American thought: a reader." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, vol. 52, no. 2, Oct. 2014, p. 259. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A384341414/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a484f174. Accessed 25 June 2024.
Approaches to Teaching the Works of Charles W. Chesnutt
Susanna Ashton & Bill Hardwig, editor
Modern Language Association
26 Broadway, 3rd floor, New York, NY 10004-1789
www.mla.org
9781603293310, $40.00, HC, 193ppp, www.amazon.com
Growing up in Cleveland after the Civil War and during the brutal rollback of Reconstruction and the onset of Jim Crow, Charles W. Chesnutt could have passed as white but chose to identify himself as black. An intellectual and activist involved with the NAACP who engaged in debate with Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, he wrote fiction and essays that addressed issues as various as segregation, class among both blacks and whites, Southern nostalgia, and the Wilmington coup d'etat of 1898. The portrayals of race, racial violence, and stereotyping in Chesnutt's works challenge teachers and students to contend with literature as both a social and an ethical practice. Collaboratively compiled and co-edited by Susanna Ashton (Professor of English at Clemson University) and Bill Hardwig (Associate Professor of English, University of Tennessee) "Approaches to Teaching the Works of Charles W. Chesnutt", in Part 1 of this volume, "Materials" the editors survey the critical reception of Chesnutt's works in his lifetime and after, along with the biographical, critical, and archival texts available to teachers and students. The essays in part 2, "Approaches", address such topics in teaching Chesnutt as his use of dialect, the role of intertextuality and genre in his writing, irony, and his treatment of race, economics, and social justice. An outstanding anthology of erudite and insightful articles by an impressive roster of contributors, "Approaches to Teaching the Works of Charles W. Chesnutt" is very highly recommended for both college and university library collections. It should be noted for the personal reading lists of students, academia, and non-specialist general readers with an interest in the subject that "Approaches to Teaching the Works of Charles W. Chesnutt" is also available in a paperback edition (9781603293327, $24.00) and in a digital book format (Kindle, $22.80).
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Midwest Book Review
http://www.midwestbookreview.com
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Approaches to Teaching the Works of Charles W. Chesnutt." Library Bookwatch, May 2018, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A710341691/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=df386b04. Accessed 25 June 2024.
QUOTED: "The volume belongs in every US academic library."
"essential."
I belong to South Carolina: South Carolina slave narratives, ed. by Susanna Ashton with Robyn E. Adams. South Carolina, 2010. 317p index afp ISBN 9781570039003, $59.95; ISBN 9781570039010 pbk, $24.95
Clemson Univ. English professor Ashton and her associates have done readers of southern history and African American history a real service by compiling, editing, and making readily accessible the personal memories of seven individuals who lived at least a portion of their lives as slaves in South Carolina. The chronology ranges from the middle of the 18th century through Reconstruction and redemption. These accounts of the slave experience are collected memories, not a collective history. They do not form a complete picture of South Carolina slavery. Rather, they provide insight into the slave experience. Ashton's introductory essay illuminates the selection process and explains how the narratives complement one another. A brief preface provides context for each narrative. The afterword examines how these selections fit into the body of South Carolina slave narratives, including the interviews conducted by the Federal Writers' Project. As with all compilations, individual readers will identify favorites here, but this work has no weak links. The volume belongs in every US academic library, and public libraries with a robust general reading clientele should consider it. Summing Up: Essential. **** All levels/libraries.--B. M. Banta, Arkansas State University
Banta, B.M.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2010 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Banta, B.M. "I belong to South Carolina: South Carolina slave narratives." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, vol. 48, no. 3, Nov. 2010, p. 575. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A249221583/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=715955e0. Accessed 25 June 2024.
The South Carolina roots of African American thought: a reader, ed. by Rhondda Robinson Thomas and Susanna Ashton. South Carolina, 2014. 408p bibl index afp ISBN 9781611173147, $49.95
52-0711
PS558
2013-18490 CIP
Educator and activist Kelly Miller remarked in his 1925 essay on South Carolina: "There is not a dull period in her history." In presenting Miller and 18 other black writers from the antebellum era to the present, Thomas and Ashton (both, Clemson Univ.) underscore the major role of African Americans in recording the state's tumultuous past. Inspired by William Andrews's The North Carolina Roots of African American Literature: An Anthology, ed. by William Andrews (CH, Sep'06, 44-0175), the present title includes scholarly but extremely readable introductions to each author and his or her "nuanced complexity." Writers and their representative works are grouped into four sections: "Slavery and Abolition" (Daniel Payne, Martin Delany, John Jackson, Robert Smalls, Archibald Grimke, Francis Grimke); "The Talented Tenth" (Miller, Mary Bethune, Max Barber, Jane Hunter, Benjamin Mays, Septima Clark); "The Civil Rights Legacy" (Marian Edelman, James Clyburn, Jesse Jackson); "The Media Generation" (Randall Kennedy, Eugene Robinson, Armstrong Williams). An afterword treats Ty'Sheoma Bethea. Including African Americans' memories of slavery and early struggles to achieve full citizenship, the first two divisions are longest and most powerful. Summing Up: Highly recommended. *** Lowerdivision undergraduates through faculty; general readers.---J. W. Hall, University of Mississippi
Hall, J.W.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Hall, J.W. "The South Carolina roots of African American thought: a reader." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, vol. 52, no. 2, Oct. 2014, p. 259. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A384341414/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a484f174. Accessed 25 June 2024.
QUOTED: "Almost all of these essays offer a precious glimpse of the distinct challenges and opportunities facing African Americans across the country in the 1920s."
"Lutz and Ashton deserve a good deal of credit for compiling this worthy volume."
These "Colored" United States: African American Essays from the 1920s. Edited by Tom Lutz and Susanna Ashton. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996. 304 pages.
The problem with regional literary movements is that they are rarely as regional as we would like to believe. Several of the celebrated New York Intellectuals of the 1930s, for example, were by no means New Yorkers, but shared enough qualities with those thinkers in New York writing for Partisan Review (say, radical anti-Stalinism or Judaism) to become associated with this cohort. The same might be said for several African American artists and writers of the 1920s, whom we somewhat misleadingly represent on our course syllabi as card-carrying members of the Harlem Renaissance, as if African American arts and letters flourished only above 125th Street in New York. Tom Lutz and Susanna Ashton, the editors of These "Colored" United States: African American Essays From the 1920s, should be commended for implicitly challenging this particular misconception. For their collection makes it perfectly clear that African American artistic expression in the 1920s, and African American life itself, was being played out in each and every state of the union.
As its title suggests, the essays collected in the volume were originally published in "These `Colored' United States," a series of essays run by The Messenger between 1923 and 1926. In his eminently useful introduction (in which he limns the diverse and often conflicting models of African American artistic and political expression in the 1920s), Lutz explains that the editors of The Messenger, an important but short-lived organ of the African American cultural Renaissance, began running the essay series to respond to the series run by The Nation, "These United States." The editor of The Nation, Ernest Greuning, hoped that his series would promote the diversity of the United States and counter the increasing standardization of American culture brought on by industrialization and urbanization. The rub: the African American experience was conspicuously absent from each of The Nation's essays (save for the entry on Georgia, written by the only African American contributor, W.E.B. Du Bois). Thus, the editors of The Messenger invited African American authors to write their own surveys of life in their respective states. Collectively, these 31 essays--each republished with copious bio-critical introductions--"convey a sense of the diversity of African American intellectual and cultural opinion in the 1920s."
The essayists who contributed to the series include some of the most prominent African American writers and thinkers earlier in this century, such as Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Charles S. Johnson, George Schuyler, Nathan B. Young, Wallace Thurman, Roy Wilkins, Theophilus Lewis, E. Franklin Frazier, Kelly Miller, and J. Egert Allen. To be sure, the quality of the entries varies greatly, from Lewis's terse, artistically rendered entry on Maryland to George W. Lee's downright shabbily written piece on Tennessee. Still, almost all of these essays offer a precious glimpse of the distinct challenges and opportunities facing African Americans across the country in the 1920s. Uniting most of the essays are sections devoted to the geographical features of the respective states, the historical role of African Americans in forging the state's character, their accomplishments to date (with particular attention paid to educational advancements and businesses owned), and the state's racism in the past and the present. What mainly distinguishes these essays from one another is the degree of attention paid to each of these discrete topics.
As one might expect, the states with particularly pernicious legacies of anti-black racism provoke more reflection upon this topic than upon bucolic descriptions of the landscape or optimistic accounts of African American strides toward equality. Young begins his section on Alabama, for example, by assiduously documenting the brutal harassment and eventual expulsion of the Indians from the state in the 1850s, and brings his essay to a conclusion by vividly describing the anti-black racism in Birmingham in the 1920s. "Here," Young writes, "is the meanest Jim Crow street car system in the world." By contrast, Noah D. Thompson scarcely mentions racism in his entry on California, a state with comparatively "very little Klan activity," the editors note. Rather, Thompson takes pains to list exhaustively the types and number of businesses owned and the important positions in professional organizations held by African Americans in the state. Unironically penning such lines as, "History records the heroic events leading up to and following California's admission into the sisterhood of these United States, and the romantic manner of her entrance into the Union is being retold on stage and screen in a way that should quicken the pulse of every lover of conquest, romance, and beauty," Thompson seems unperturbed that the United States, under President James K. Polk, wrested California from the Mexicans in a bloody, imperialist war.
Most of the contributors to the series, unlike Thompson, reckon thoughtfully with the issue of racism. Especially striking are the various rhetorical strategies that the contributors to the series use to combat racial discrimination in their respective states. Writers such as Wilkins and Mamie Elaine Francis criticize the complacency of African Americans to stir them into action for their civil rights. Wilkins laments, "While the forces of discrimination make inroads upon his freedom the Negro in the North Star state [Minnesota] rests in satisfaction, contenting himself with the thought that Georgia is so many and so many miles away." Francis, for her part, describes a single case of job discrimination against a qualified African American teacher and then suggests, rhetorically, "A most unfortunate case--but one case could never constitute a Negro Problem. And who could persuade the twenty thousand Negroes in Newark to worry about it?" Young, Lewis, and Ernest Rice McKinney use mordant humor to spur on their African American readers. "Florida," Young writes, for example, "is making strenuous efforts to win the pennant in the lynching league for 1923." Most affecting, perhaps, is Schuyler's matter-of-fact account of the nearly insurmountable economic discrimination in New York: "[The New York Negro] is not in large enough numbers anywhere to control an industry or a single factory.... The unions control many industries and it is next to impossible for the dark brother to get admitted to many of them. The union workers do not hire Negro apprentices...." Also worth mentioning is Frazier's subtle analysis of the psychological underpinnings of the anti-black hatred expressed by poor whites in Georgia.
As powerful as these moments devoted to combating racism may be, the sections in which the writers highlight the considerable accomplishments of African Americans in their respective states are equally absorbing and probably more edifying for most readers. In Dunbar-Nelson's entry on Delaware--one of the more comprehensive essays in the series--we learn that "Delaware is the home of the foremost woman astronomer in the country, Anna Jump Cannon, and also the birthplace of one of the most famous and beloved of American artists, Howard Pyle." J. Egert Allen reveals that even a state as ravaged by racism as Mississippi has produced the likes of "Hiram Revels and B.K. Bruce, the only two `sun-kissed' senators to grace the Chamber in Washington." More surprisingly, African Americans, one learns, played major historical roles in states like New Mexico and Arizona. "[I]n 1538," Anita Scott Coleman writes, "Estevan, the Negro slave in the role of interpreter and guide to the Friar Marcos de Niza, was sent on ahead to spy upon the people and the strange lands they were entering, and send reports to his peers. Thus it was that Estevan the Negro was first to behold the wonders of the seven cities, and though he himself was killed, sent back the report:--`Advance, the find is worth it.'" Indeed, entries like Coleman's illustrate persuasively the inextricable connection between the African American experience in this nation and our nation's history itself.
Most of the notable weaknesses of These "Colored" United States are weaknesses of the individual essays themselves and, thus, not the fault of the editors. For example, some of the essays fail to do justice to the "colored" experience in their state. As insightful as Schuyler's entry on New York is, he only sparsely describes the African American experience outside of New York City. Similarly, McKinney focuses almost exclusively on Pittsburgh in his entry on Pennsylvania. One editorial quibble: Lutz and Ashton err, I believe, in organizing the essays alphabetically by state rather than printing them in the chronological order that they appeared in The Messenger. A chronological arrangement would more accurately convey the flavor of the original series. That said, Lutz and Ashton deserve a good deal of credit for compiling this worthy volume, a vivid "snapshot of each state's culture, society, history; economics, and even geography from the perspective of its African American citizens."
Andrew Furman is an Assistant Professor in the English and Comparative Literature Department at Florida Atlantic University and the Associate Editor of Studies in American Jewish Literature. He has published numerous articles and reviews on such writers as Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, Saul Bellow, and Anne Roiphe, and he is the author of Israel through the Jewish-American Imagination (1997).
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1999 Oxford University Press
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Furman, Andrew. "These 'Colored' United States: African American Essays from the 1920s." MELUS, vol. 24, no. 1, spring 1999, p. 262. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A58411680/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=65a11cd1. Accessed 25 June 2024.