Book ReviewsSaints, Sinners, Saviors: Strong Black Women in African American Literature. By Trudier  Harris. New York: Palgrave, 2001.Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African American Men’s Literature and Culture, 1775–1995. By Maurice O.  Wallace. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.

In The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. DuBois discusses the historical and cultural beginnings of the black preacher as “the most unique personality developed on American soil.” He writes, “[the black preacher] found his functions as the healer of the sick, the interpreter of the Unknown, the comforter of the sorrowing, the supernatural avenger of wrong…Thus as bard, physician, judge, and priest within the narrow limits allowed by the slave system rose the Negro preacher.” Far from being a monolith, the preacher figure embodies many complexities and variances on how the preached Word can be delivered. This begs the question, in what ways can we reimagine DuBois’s black preacher figure in his words, “the most unique personality developed on American soil,” as a black woman? What remains to be seen in scholarship of the mid-twentieth century is an articulation of the black woman preacher in African American literature. By reimagining and refiguring a response to DuBois’s assertion above, how is the role of the black woman preacher and impact of her sermons portrayed in African American literature? Using the art of the sermon, the intersection of music, and James Baldwin’s The Amen Corner as a central text, this article examines the black woman preacher in character and African American women’s spirituality in twentieth century literature. I argue that the way in which Margaret Alexander, as a black woman preacher in the text, creates sermonic spaces of healing and restoration (exegetically and eschatologically) for herself and others outside of the church becomes a new mode of social and cultural resistance. This article works to re-envision the black woman and reposition her in the center of religious discourse on our way to unearthing the modes of transfiguration black women preachers evoke in and out of the pulpit.

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Book reviews : The Norton Anthology of African American Literature Edited by HENRY LOUIS GATES JR and NELLIE MCKAY (New York and London, W.W. Norton & Company, 1997). 2,665 pp. £21.00 / The Oxford Companion to African American Literature Edited by WILLIAM L. ANDREWS, FRANCES SMITH FOSTER and TRUDIER HARRIS (New York and Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1997). 886pp. £35.00. / The Oxford Book of the American South Edited by EDWARD L. AYERS and BRADLEY C. MITTENDORF (New York and Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1997). 597pp. £22.50

Race & Class ◽

10.1177/030639689803900417 ◽

1998 ◽

Vol 39 (4) ◽

pp. 105-108

Author(s):

Louis Kushnick

Keyword(s):

New York ◽

African American ◽

American Literature ◽

African American Literature ◽

American South ◽

Oxford University ◽

Henry Louis Gates ◽

The American South ◽

Oxford University Press

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James Weldon Johnson

American Literature ◽

10.1093/obo/9780199827251-0044 ◽

2012 ◽

Author(s):

Michael Nowlin

Keyword(s):

New York ◽

African American ◽

African Americans ◽

American Literature ◽

African American Literature ◽

The United States ◽

James Weldon Johnson ◽

New York University ◽

Daily Newspaper ◽

Fisk University

James Weldon Johnson (b. 1871–d. 1938) was born and raised in Jacksonville, Florida. After graduating with a BA from Atlanta University, he became principal of his former grammar school, established the first daily newspaper for Jacksonville’s African American population, and gained admission to the Florida bar. With his brother, the musician J. Rosamond Johnson, he also wrote the song “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” for a commencement ceremony (in 1900), and it eventually became known as the “Negro National Anthem.” He joined his brother in New York in 1902 to launch a successful songwriting team with Bob Cole. Johnson gave up show business in 1906 to become US Consulate, first in Venezuela, then Nicaragua, where he completed his novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, which was published anonymously in 1912. In 1914 he moved to Harlem with his wife Grace Nail Johnson (whom he married in 1910). He began writing editorials on a range of subjects for the New York Age, a nationally circulating African American newspaper, and in 1915 he joined the recently established National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He became secretary of the organization in 1920 and remained so until 1930. Fifty Years and Other Poems, his first collection, was published in 1917. In 1922 he edited The Book of American Negro Poetry, the first anthology of its kind, and established himself as a pioneering theorist of African American poetics and a guiding light of the Harlem Renaissance. Johnson modeled his poetic ideas in the 1927 volume God’s Trombones, which appeared in the same year he reissued The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man under his name. In 1929, a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship enabled him to devote a year to writing, which resulted in Black Manhattan, a history of African Americans in New York. From 1930 onward, Johnson taught creative writing and African American literature at Fisk University as well as New York University. His 1933 autobiography Along This Way was widely acclaimed, and he collected both new and old poems in the 1935 volume St. Peter Relates an Incident. When he died in a car accident in 1938, Johnson was one of the most honored and respected African Americans in the United States, recognized at once as a man of letters, an advocate of black America’s cultural achievements, and a tireless political opponent of America’s Jim Crow system.

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