Abstract
In this chapter, Vernon follows how the political purchase of the Middle Ages could be marshaled to renegotiate the terms of belonging in the nation in ways that planted intercultural contact and fusion within the core of American identity. While white Americans often read the Anglo-Saxon period as an era of purity interrupted by the Norman invasion, these African-American scholars read the hyphen; they focused on the Middle Ages as a period of racial mixing and political possibility between Angles, Saxons, and Normans. Vernon then offers a historical reading of archival materials charting the earliest writing about and teaching of the Middle Ages among African-American intellectuals. He reveals how the philological approach that was important to early medieval research could be wielded to the political ends of African-American education, in particular as a set of tools for understanding African-American history through linguistic study.
“We can never be a people without education.”
—G.M. Elliott, “We Must Educate,” AME Church Review 1 (1884): 330.
The problem with which [the Negro] is confronted is whether he shall be an alien in the land of his birth or shall continue to hold unimpaired and undiminished the rights guaranteed to him by the United States Constitution.
—Frederick Douglass, “The Negro in the Present Campaign,” AME Church Review 9 (1892): 115.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
Frederick Douglass, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, ed. Ira Dworkin (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), 104.
- 2.
A.C.C. Thomson, “Refuge From Oppression. From the Delaware Republican to the Public. Falsehood Refuted.” The Liberator, 12 December 1845.
- 3.
Frederick Douglass, “Letter to William Lloyd Garrison, Jan 27, 1846,” in The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, vol. 1, ed. Philip S. Foner (New York: International Publishers, 1950), 133.
- 4.
This was a common reading of American expansion. An example of this perspective’s reach within American culture can be read in Walt Whitman’s editorials for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle about the need to people the “New World” with the “noble race” of Anglo-Saxons. See Heidi Kathleen Kim’s arguments about this in “From Language to Empire: Walt Whitman in the Context of Nineteenth-Century Popular Anglo-Saxonism,” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 24 (Summer 2006): 1–19.
- 5.
See Reginald Horsman’s discussion of the freedoms with which descendants of Anglo-Saxons were to be naturally endowed: Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 18–23.
- 6.
Frederick Douglass, “The Nation’s Problem: An Address Delivered in Washington D.C. on 16 April 1889,” The Frederick Douglass Papers: Speeches, Debates and Interviews, vol. 5, eds. John W. Blassingame and John R. McKivigan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 407.
- 7.
Ibid., 415.
- 8.
Ibid., 411.
- 9.
“Introduction,” in Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 14.
- 10.
W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Souls of White Folk” in The Oxford W.E.B. Du Bois Reader, ed. Eric J. Sundquist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 508.
- 11.
Ibid.
- 12.
James McCune Smith to Robert Hamilton, 27 August 1864, Weekly Anglo-African in Black Abolitionist Papers Vol. 5, eds. C. Peter Ripley et al. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press: 1992), 300–301; James McCune Smith, The Works of James McCune Smith: Black Intellectual and Abolitionist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 259.
- 13.
Frederick Douglass, “A Composite Nation” (1869). In Racism, Dissent, and Asian-Americans from 1850 to the Present: A Documentary History, eds. Philip Foner and Daniel Rosenberg (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1970), 215–231.
- 14.
Ibid.
- 15.
Ibid.
- 16.
Both Douglass and Smith had spent time in Britain. Smith even received his medical training at the University of Glasgow. Their readings of medieval history must be read as inflected by their lived experiences in Britain.
James McCune Smith, “The German Invasion”, The Anglo-African Magazine 1 (1859), 44.
- 17.
Ibid., 48.
- 18.
Jack London, The Valley of the Moon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 17.
- 19.
This sentiment is particularly significant as London writes this the same year that California passed the “Alien Land Law” which restricted the rights of Asian immigrants to own land.
- 20.
London, 40.
- 21.
This argument borrows from T.J. Jackson Lears’ No Place for Grace, which presents the wide usages to which medieval narratives were put in this period. See: No Place of Grace: Anti-Modernism and the Transformation of American Culture 1880–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 96.
- 22.
Medieval narratives were also mobilized as a spur to chivalric action and self-sacrifice for the nation. This is the premise of Allen J. Frantzen’s Bloody Good: Chivalry, Sacrifice and the Great War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
- 23.
Allen Frantzen, Desire for Origins: New Language, Old English and Teaching the Tradition (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 22.
- 24.
Thomas Jefferson, An Essay towards Facilitating Instruction in the Anglo-Saxon and Modern Dialects of the English Language (New York: John F. Trow, 1851), 8.
- 25.
Jefferson’s initial encounters with Old English derived from his study of the law. He flatly denied that the contemporary language of English speakers was substantially different from that of the Anglo-Saxons. He goes so far as to dismiss the influences of Latin, Greek, French, and Italian upon the language as mere “engraftments in [English’s] idiomatic stem.” Ibid., 4, 8.
- 26.
Gregory A. VanHoosier-Carey, “Anglo-Saxon Studies in the Postbellum South,” in Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity, eds. Allen J. Frantzen and John D. Niles (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1997), 157–172.
- 27.
Ibid., 161.
- 28.
Tom Buchanan, a pompous blowhard, expounds to his friend Nick Carraway the details of a “scientific” theory about race about which he had been reading:
This idea is that we’re Nordics. I am, and you are, and you are, and—” After an infinitesimal hesitation he included Daisy with a slight nod, and she winked at me again. “—And we’ve produced all the things that go to make civilization—oh, science and art, and all that. Do you see?
Tom here refers to Theodore Lothrop Stoddard’s popular work The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (1920) which advanced the notion of that the “white race”—the race that had guarded its “racial integrity”—was in danger of being overwhelmed by the other races of the world. Although the book focuses on creating an international, atemporal, “Nordic” race, Stoddard would clarify in his later work that America was founded by the “Anglo-Saxon Nordics.” Within The Rising Tide, Stoddard makes reference the essay “The African Roots of War” by fellow Harvard-educated intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois. The relationship between WWI and Du Bois’s theories about race are discussed in the introduction to this book.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2004), 19.
- 29.
Jerome Karabel, The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale and Princeton (New York: Mariner Books, 2006), 83–84.
- 30.
Here I am borrowing the terms used by Frederick Douglass throughout his “The Civil Rights Case: Speech at the Civil Rights Mass-Meeting Held at Lincoln Hall, October 22, 1883” in The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, ed. Philip S. Foner (New York: International Publishers, 1950) 4: 393.
- 31.
Henry Sipkins and Philip A. Bell, “Second Annual National Negro Convention” The Liberator, September 22, 1832, in A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States: From Colonial Times Through the Civil War, ed. Herbert Aptheker (New York: The Citadel Press, 1968), 134. See Christopher Z. Hobson’s discussion of this line where it appears elsewhere in African-American speeches in The Mount of Vision: African American Prophetic Tradition, 1800–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 91. Similar lines appear in George W. Bethune’s popular song “Patriotic Hymn,” however his Lays of Love and Faith: With Other Fugitive Poems, which contains the song was published in 1847.
- 32.
Ibid., 135.
- 33.
Walter Scott, The Lay of the Last Minstrel (London: James Ballantyne & Co., 1808), i.
- 34.
Aptheker, 135.
- 35.
Howard Brotz, African American Social and Political Thought, 1850–1920 (New York: Basic Books, 1966), 281.
- 36.
Lydia Maria Child was an abolitionist and an early advocate for transracial adoption, about which she wrote extensively. The implications to this overlap in ideas between historical surrogacy and adoption are rich, but beyond the scope of the present study. See the discussions of Child’s writing on family and adoption in Mark Jerng’s, Claiming Others: Transracial Adoption and National Belonging (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: 2010).
- 37.
“The Black Saxons” The Liberator (Boston, MA) January 08, 1841; Issue 2; col. E.
- 38.
That is, with the notable exception of Daniel John McInerney’s The Fortunate Heirs of Freedom: Abolition and Republican Thought (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1994), 41. McInerney’s book examines this text in the context of several other abolitionist works that deal with Anglo-Saxons, but this treatment is quite short.
- 39.
Evidence of the initial version of this poem is found in the Oberlin College Archives. See: “The Black Saxon: A Tale of America.—A Poem.” William Howard Day June 10, 1846 (Student Life: Literary organizations: Phi Kappa Pi-Box 1-History) I have only been able to locate a fragment of the poem, which is reproduced in the appendix to this chapter. Neither the newspaper nor the literary society program produced the poem in its entirety. Harry E. Davis provides more of the history of William H. Day in his “Early Colored Residents of Cleveland,” Phylon 4.3 (1941), 233–245.
- 40.
Ivy Wilson, “The Brief Wondrous Life of the Anglo-African Magazine or, Antebellum African American Editorial Practice and Its Afterlives” in Publishing Blackness: Textual Constructions of Race Since 1850 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 23–24.
- 41.
The Anglo-African Magazine Vol. 1 1859 (New York: Arno Press, 1968), 1.
- 42.
Ibid., 3.
- 43.
By “the great commoner,” the authors refer to William Pitt who strongly argued that England would greatly benefit from a stronger union with Ireland. For more on “the Irish problem” in relationship to “the Negro problem” see Chap. 3.
- 44.
The writer goes yet further, describing the two as “Fratres patrueles—the Anglo-Saxon and the Congo negro!” S.S.N. “Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-African” The Anglo-African Magazine, 1, 1859 (New York: Arno Press, 1968), 249, 250.
- 45.
Charles Spenser Smith and Daniel Alexander Payne, History of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (Philadelphia: Book Concern of the A.M.E. Church, 1922), 342.
- 46.
J.A.M. Jones, “The Proverbial Philosophy of the Colored Race,” AME Church Review 1 (1884), 127. The proverbs he quotes encompass the serious and the playful; they sometimes have European counterparts in mind. He describes them as: “coined in our own mint, not borrowed, but circulated as our own race currency in all our social merchandise and not losing one iota of value, either by frequent usage or from the lapse of time.” The following examples contain a range of expressions: “A parasite has no root; every tree is its kindred”; “The thread follows the needle”; “The tide carries me in and out”; “Riches are the pillars of the world”; “‘Labor comes wealth’ or as a Roman would express it, ‘Labor omnia vincit’” (130–131). Here too, the relationship between African-American and other literary traditions is apparent.
- 47.
T. Thomas Fortune, “Civil Rights and Social Privileges,” AME Church Review, 2 (1885), 220.
- 48.
Stanley Hauer discusses Thomas Jefferson’s controversial (and counterintuitive) support of an emergent “American dialect” of English. This opinion was based in his interest in his study of Old English and his belief that archaisms and dialects should not be abandoned. See “Thomas Jefferson and the Anglo-Saxon Language,” PMLA 98.5 (October 1983), 879–898.
- 49.
Allen J. Frantzen offers a rich study of these nineteen-century attitudes as a crucial part of “orientalist” projects and the expansion of empire in his Desire for Origins: New Language, Old English, and Teaching the Tradition (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 27–61.
- 50.
Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 19.
- 51.
Ibid., See also: Noah Webster, “Author’s Preface,” in An American Dictionary of the English Language (Originally Published in 1826), Revised and Enlarged (Springfield: Merriam, 1862), xiii, xxi.
- 52.
Thomas Jefferson, A Summary View of the Rights of British America (Williamsburg: Clementina Rind: 1774), 17.
- 53.
For a full discussion of the legal reasoning behind Jefferson’s Summary View see: Brian Steele, Thomas Jefferson and American Nationhood (Birmingham: University of Alabama Press, 2012), 29.
- 54.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Oorigin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd edition (London: Verso, 2006), 12.
- 55.
Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny:The Origins of American Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 180.
- 56.
Nicholas Howe, Migration and Mythmaking (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 2.
- 57.
Rev. R.L. Beal, “The Successful Mission of Oliver Cromwell and Napoleon Bonaparte,” AME Church Review, 5 (1888), 97.
- 58.
Ibid., 98.
- 59.
AME Church Review 1 (January 1885), 231.
- 60.
“The Democratic Return to Power—Its Effect?,” AME Church Review 1 (January 1885), 213–230.
- 61.
This language of “supremacy” abuts the notion of “white superiority,” one was used as a foil for the other. Frederick Douglass to Robert Adams, December 4, 1888 (Gilder Lehrman Collection).
- 62.
“The Democratic Return to Power—Its Effect?” AME Church Review. Vol. 1 (1884), 213.
- 63.
This discussion should recall the famous anecdote about Thomas Jefferson’s design for the great seal of the United States which would have the Israelites being led through the desert by a pillar of fire one side and Hengist and Horsa arriving in Britain on the other.
- 64.
“The Democratic Return to Power—Its Effect?,” 223.
- 65.
Ibid., 215–216.
- 66.
Ibid., 218.
- 67.
Gregory A. VanHoosier-Carey presents the history of Anglo-Saxon study in the South in “Byrhtnoth in Dixie: The Emergence of Anglo-Saxon Studies in the Postbellum South.” He quotes Schele De Vere (1820–1898) a University of Virginia professor who advanced the idea that Anglo-Saxon history could be read as a story of cultural triumph against the invading Norman forces: “The Normans had conquered the land and the race, but they struggled in vain against the language that conquered them in its turn, and by its spirit, converted them into Englishmen.” Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity, ed. Allen J. Frantzen (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1997), 161.
- 68.
Frederick Douglass lamented that the Republican Party traded away its moral authority and thus its most potent asset against the Democratic Party:
The defeat of the Republican party in 1884 was due rather to its own folly than to the wisdom of the Democratic party. It despised and rejected the hand that had raised it to power, and it paid the penalty of its own folly. The life of the Republican party lay in its devotion to justice, liberty, and humanity. When it abandoned or slighted these great moral ideals and devoted itself to materialistic measures, it no longer appealed to the heart of the nation, but to its pocket. It became a Samson shorn of its locks.
Frederick Douglass, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (Mineola: Dover, 2007), 406.
- 69.
The full version of this poem is reproduced in the appendix to this chapter.
- 70.
“Dante,” AME Church Review (January 1885), 25.
- 71.
Ibid.
- 72.
Ibid., 214.
- 73.
Dennis Looney discusses Frederick Douglass’ connections to Dante throughout his book Freedom Readers. While he does build an argument about Cordelia Ray’s poem, he does so on the basis of a 1910 revision to the work. Given its place of prominence within the AME Church Review, particularly its relationship to “The Democratic Return to Power—Its Effect?” I would argue that it is essential to read the earlier version. See: Dennis Looney, Freedom Readers (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press: 2011), 58–61.
- 74.
AME Church Review, 2 (1885), 220.
- 75.
“The Negro-His Past and Present.” AME Church Review, 10 (1893), 472. This is not to say that Bancroft minimized slavery’s importance or its cruelty. He spends a considerable amount of time tracing its history. However, as mentioned above, his emphasis is on its implications for America. See George Bancroft’s The History of the United States of America, from the Discovery of the American Continent, 1 (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1870), 162.
- 76.
See George Bancroft, The Necessity, the Reality and the Promise of the Progress of the Human Race: An Oration Delivered before the New York Historical Society (New York: New York Historical Society, 1854).
- 77.
George Bancroft, The Life and Letters of George Bancroft. Edited by Mark Anthony de Wolfe Howe, 2 vols. (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1908), 2:36.
- 78.
“The War with Mexico,” North Star, January 21, 1848, quoted in Roderigo Lazo, “The Ends of Enchantment: Douglass, Melville, and U.S. Expansionism in the Americas,” Frederick Douglass & Herman Melville: Essays in Relation, eds. Robert S. Levine and Samuel Otter (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 218.
- 79.
Edward L. Blackshear, “The Negro as Passive Factor in American History,” AME Church Review, 20 (1901), 62–363.
- 80.
Arthur Gilman, First Steps in English Literature (New York, A.S. Barnes & Company, 1870), 30. Textbook used by Atlanta University during the final quarter of the nineteenth century.
- 81.
Max Muller, Lectures on the Science of Language (London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1871).
- 82.
Richard Chenevix Trench, English, Past and Present (London: Macmillan and Co., 1877), 31.
- 83.
Hannis Taylor, The Making of the Constitution (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1899), 81.
- 84.
Desire for Origins, 29.
- 85.
Christopher Hanlon, America’s England: Antebellum Literature and American Sectionalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 11.
- 86.
W.E.B. Du Bois uses this term “cultural mission” to describe the educational philosophy behind Atlanta University. He underscores the financial and social pressure the school was under to alter its principles to teach subjects deemed befitting for the “caste” of African-Americans.
W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Cultural Missions of Atlanta University,” in W.E.B. Du Bois: A Reader, ed. Meyer Weinberg (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 187–200.
- 87.
For example, among his other courses, Turner took classes in Old English poetry, Beowulf, and “The Structure and Growth of Language” at the University of Chicago while also employed at Howard University. See: Margaret Wade-Lewis, Lorenzo Dow Turner: Father of Gullah Studies (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2007), 43.
- 88.
Here I am referring to the OED’s etymology of “vernacular”: f. L. vernacul-us domestic, native, indigenous (hence It. vernacolo, Pg. vernaculo), f. verna a home-born slave, a native.
- 89.
He traveled throughout the country to speak on this subject and was even a research fellow at Yale University, during which time he spoke about “the survival of 400 African words and phrases that are still in use in coastal South Carolina and Georgia.”
- 90.
Lorenzo Dow Turner, Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), xi.
- 91.
Turner was not alone in this endeavor. The instructor of Old English at Atlanta University from 1927–1957, Nathaniel Tillman, demonstrated a similar interest in the African roots of southern English dialect. In 1942 he published a brief article that suggested a possible African derivation for the word “tote.” “A Possible Etymology of ‘Tote’,” American Speech 17:2 (1942): 128–129. His doctoral dissertation was entitled “Lydgate’s Rhymes as Evidence of Pronunciation” and was similarly oriented towards philological research.
- 92.
James Boswell, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, ed. George Birbeck Hill (London: Oxford University Press, 1934), 186.
- 93.
Noah Webster Dissertations on the English Language (Boston: Isaiah Thomas and Company, 1789), 406.
- 94.
Ibid., 20, 397.
- 95.
Noah Webster, Dissertations on the English Language: with Notes, Historical and Critical (Boston: Isaiah Thomas and Company, 1789), 19, 107.
- 96.
Horace E. Scudder, Noah Webster (Boston: Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1890), 210.
- 97.
Howard University Course Catalogue 1908–1909, Howard University Archives, 46.
- 98.
The use of older texts as a reflection of the present was by no means a ubiquitous intellectual maneuver. In an analogous class taught in 1898 at Oberlin College, the students are instructed using Stubbs’ Selected Charters and the description warns that “the work of the year may not extend beyond the War of the Roses and the beginning of the Tudor dynasty, A.D. 1485.” The course shows none of the insistence on the relation between medieval history and the immediacy of the present.
- 99.
Carter G. Woodson, The Mis-education of the Negro (Washington, DC: The Associated Publishers, 1933), 1.
- 100.
Wade-Lewis, Lorenzo Dow Turner: Father of Gullah Studies, 35.
- 101.
Turner in his initial description of Gullah writes: “Gullah is a creolized form of English revealing survivals from many of the African languages spoken by the slaves who were brought to South Carolina and Georgia during the eighteenth-century and the first half of the nineteenth. These survivals are most numerous in the vocabulary of the dialect…” Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect. 3rd edition (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002), lix.
- 102.
Woodson, 25. Here I am also referring to some of the language Larry Scanlon employs when he refers to the work of early African-American scholars and poets who are reacting against a tradition of sociolinguistics and philology. “Poets Laureate and the Language of Slaves,” in The Vulgar Tongue, eds. Fiona Somerset and Nicholas Watson (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), 227.
- 103.
“The Origin and Progress of the English Language,” AME Church Review 4 (1887), 280.
- 104.
Ibid., 284.
- 105.
The Oxford Handbook of the History of English, ed. Terttu Nevalainen and Elizabeth Closs Traugott (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 449.
- 106.
“Contemporary Poets of the Negro Race” The Crisis 17 (1919):275–280, Reprinted in The William Stanley Braithwaite Reader (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), 50.
- 107.
Ibid.
- 108.
Ibid., 54.
- 109.
George Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (Cambridge: Harvard University Press: 1996), 151.
- 110.
“Contemporary Poets of the Negro Race,” 53.
- 111.
W.G. Sears of the Lincoln Institute, in part quoting the educational reformer J. G. Fitch. AME Church Review 3 (1885), 13.
- 112.
Letter to Horace Bumstead from Board of Trustees, Box 12, Clark-Atlanta University Archives.
- 113.
Brainard Kellogg, English Literature. (New York: Clark & Maynard Publishers, 1882), 22. Kellogg’s text goes on to frame the survival of language as akin to a military victory, citing how resilient English was against the invasions of both Scandinavian and Norman forces:
But that which happened to the Danes happened to the Normans also, and for the same reason. They were originally of like blood with the English, and of like speech; and though, during their settlement in Normandy they had become French in manner and language, and their literature French, yet the old blood prevailed in the end. The Norman felt kindred with the English tongue, became an Englishman, and left the French tongue to speak and write in English… There are early sermons of the same century, and now early in the next century, at the central time of this struggle, after the death of Richard the first, the Brut of Layamon and the Ormulum come forth within ten years of each other to prove the continuity, survival and the victory of the English tongue.
- 114.
Henry Spackman Pancoast, An Introduction to English Literature (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1895), 11. Emphasis in the original.
- 115.
Vincente Rafael, “Translation, American English and the National Insecurities of Empire,” Social Text 27.4 (2009): 7, 9.
- 116.
R.R. Wright, president of Georgia State Industrial School for Colored Youth (1891–1921) issued this call for African-Americans to begin to make their own distinct tools for education:
But it is requisite to remark that not all has been gained, nor could be gained under Anglo-Saxon teachers. Good and successful as those noble teaches have been, I yet propose to say I think the negro is on the eve of graduating from their tutorage. This, too, is in the line of progress. The next stage of our development is to be under Negro teachers and by Negro methods and not without textbooks written by Negros.
R.R. Wright, AME Church Review Vol. 10. No. 4 (1893), 460.
- 117.
He, however, did not serve. Believing his calling was religious work in South Africa, he demurred and Mordecai Wyatt Johnson, another African-American man, was elected and served. See: Walter Dyson, Howard University: The Capstone of Negro Education (Washington, DC: The Graduate School Howard University), 398.
- 118.
Benjamin Brawley, A New Survey of English Literature (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1925), xiv.
- 119.
He does write the book The Negro in Literature and Art in the United States, but his premise in the book is that African-American letters have a promising future:
No race can rise to the greatest heights of art until it has yearned and suffered. The Russians are a case in point. Such has been their background in oppression and striving that their literature and art are to-day marked by an unmistakable note of power. The same future awaits the American Negro. The Negro in Literature and Art in the United States (New York: Duffield & Co., 1918), 7.
- 120.
Benjamin Brawley, review of The Negro in Contemporary Literature by Elizabeth Lay Green, Opportunity 6 (1928), 381.
- 121.
Quoted in John W. Parker, “Benjamin Brawley—Teacher and Scholar,” Phylon 10.1 (1st Qtr., 1949): 22.
- 122.
Benjamin Stolberg, “Minority Jingo,” The Nation, 145 (October 23, 1937), 437–39. His scathing review drew enough attention to spur Alain Locke to write a response, “Jingo, Counter Jingo and Us,” Opportunity, 16 (1938), 8.
- 123.
Although there was fervent opposition to Brawley’s positions on African-American literature—he believed that the Harlem Renaissance would not produce great literature, which set him against many of the most prominent writers of his time—their positions were perhaps not quite as far apart as they might seem. Brawley himself once claimed African-American literature to be on equal footing with other world literatures because there is “something very elemental at the heart of the race, something that finds its origin in the African Forest, in the sighings of the night wind, and in the falling of the stars.” The Negro in Literature and Art, 7.
- 124.
Charles I. Glicksburg “The Negro Cult of the Primitive,” The Antioch Review Spring 10.1 (1944): 48, 52.
- 125.
James Weldon Johnson, editor, The American Book of Negro Poetry (New York, Harcourt Brace and Company, 1922), 197–199.
- 126.
Brawley fully engages with the tropes of medievalisms in “My Hero” by touching upon chivalry, martyrdom, and the other knights who engage in the grail quest but fail. This poem is a fitting but probably unconscious counter to the poetry of the Civil War that evoked similar language and themes to describe members of the Confederate army. For example, the General Turner Ashby was nicknamed the “Knight of the Confederacy” and his life was memorialized by verse that framed the conflict between the North and South as akin to a war between Christians, “Moors and Pagans.” Ashby led his side with his “sabre” and “manly breast.” See Cynthia Wachtell, “The Author of the Civil War,” The New York Times, 6 July, 2012. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/06/the-author-of-the-civil-war/.
- 127.
A New Survey of English Literature, xiii.
- 128.
Ibid.
- 129.
In his preface to the volume, Johnson sardonically argues that the book needed to be written so people would know that there were African-American poets. The American Book of Negro Poetry, vii.
- 130.
Haille E. Queen, Personal Note written to James Weldon Johnson. Mss. 797, 3.4. Emory University Archives. Queene also corresponded with Du Bois. In a 1907 letter she mentions that she is her club’s literary critic and sole African-American member. “Letter to W.E.B. Du Bois” Ithaca, February 11, 1907. The Correspondence of W.E.B. Du Bois, Vol 1. Edited by Herbert Aptheker. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1973.
Works Cited
Primary Sources
1908–09: Catalog of the Officers and Students of Howard University. Howard University Catalogs. 39, 1908.
The Anglo-African Magazine, vol. 1, 1859. Reprint: New York: Arno Press, 1968.
Beal, Rev. R.L. “The Successful Mission of Oliver Cromwell and Napoleon Bonaparte.” AME Church Review 5 (1888), 97.
Blackshear, Edward L. “The Negro as Passive Factor in American History.” AME Church Review 20 (1901), 362–363.
Boswell, James. Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Edited by George Birbeck Hill. London: Oxford University Press, 1934.
Braithwaite, William Stanley. “Contemporary Poets of the Negro Race.” The Crisis 17 (1919), 275–280, Reprinted in The William Stanley Braithwaite Reader. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972.
Brawley, Benjamin. The Negro in Literature and Art in the United States. New York: Duffield & Co., 1918.
———. A New Survey of English Literature. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1925.
———. review of The Negro in Contemporary Literature, by Elizabeth Lay Green, Opportunity 6 (1928), 381.
Brotz, Howard. African American Social and Political Thought, 1850–1920. New York: Basic Books, 1966.
Clark-Atlanta Board of Trustees. Letter to Horace Bumstead from Board of Trustees, Box 12, Clark-Atlanta University Archives.
Day, William H. “The Black Saxon: A Tale of America.—A Poem.” 10 June 1846, Student Life: Literary organizations: Phi Kappa Pi-Box 1-History, Oberlin College Archives.
Douglass, Frederick. Frederick Douglass to Robert Adams, Anacostia, DC, December 4, 1888, Gilder Lehrman Collection, Yale University. https://www.gilderlehrman.org/content/frederick-douglass-disfranchisement-black-voters-1888.
———. “The Negro in the Present Campaign.” AME Church Review 9 (1892), 114–126.
———. The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, Vols. 1–5. Edited by Philip S. Foner. New York: International Publishers, 1950.
———. “A Composite Nation,” 1869. In Racism, Dissent, and Asian-Americans from 1850 to the Present: A Documentary History, eds. Philip S. Foner and Daniel Rosenberg. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1970.
———. Frederick Douglass: The Narrative and Selected Writings. Edited by Michael Meyer. New York: McGraw-Hill Inc., 1984.
———. “The Nation’s Problem: An Address Delivered in Washington D.C. on 16 April 1889.” In The Frederick Douglass Papers: Speeches, Debates and Interviews, eds. John W. Blassingame and John R. McKivigan, vol. 5. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.
———. The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Edited by Ira Dworkin. New York: Penguin Books, 2004.
———. The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. Hartford: Park Publishing, 1881. Reprint: Mineola: Dover, 2007.
Douglass, Frederick, et al. “The Democratic Return to Power—Its Effect?” AME Church Review 1 (1884), 213–250.
Du Bois, W.E.B. “The Cultural Missions of Atlanta University.” In W.E.B. DuBois: A Reader, ed. Meyer Weinberg. New York: Harper & Row, 1970, 187–200.
———. “The Souls of White Folk.” In The Oxford W.E.B. DuBois Reader, ed. Eric J. Sundquist. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Elliott, G.M. “We Must Educate.” AME Church Review 1 (1884), 330.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2004.
Fortune, T. Thomas. “Civil Rights and Social Privileges.” AME Church Review 2 (1885), 119–131.
Gilman, Arthur. First Steps in English Literature. New York, A.S. Barnes & Company, 1870.
Jefferson, Thomas. A Summary View of the Rights of British America. Williamsburg: Clementina Rind, 1774.
———. An Essay towards Facilitating Instruction in the Anglo-Saxon and Modern Dialects of the English Language. New York: John F. Trow, 1851.
Johnson, James Weldon, ed. The American Book of Negro Poetry. New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1922.
Jones, J.A.M. “The Proverbial Philosophy of the Colored Race.” AME Church Review, 1 (October 1884), 126–133.
Kellogg, Brainard. English Literature. New York: Clark & Maynard Publishers, 1882.
Locke, Alain. Jingo. “Counter Jingo and Us.” Opportunity 16 (1938), 7–11.
London, Jack. The Valley of the Moon. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
Muller, Max. Lectures on the Science of Language. London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1871.
Pancoast, Henry Spackman. An Introduction to English Literature. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1895.
Parker, John W. “Benjamin Brawley—Teacher and Scholar.” Phylon 10.1 (1949), 22.
Queen, Haille E. Personal Note written to James Weldon Johnson. Mss. 797, 3.4. Emory University Archives.
Ray, Henrietta Cordelia. “Dante.” AME Church Review (1885), 231.
S.S.N. Anglo-Saxon, and Anglo-African. The Anglo-African Magazine, Vol. 1, 1859. Reprint: New York: Arno Press, 1968.
Scott, Walter. The Lay of the Last Minstrel. London: James Ballantyne & Co., 1808.
Sears, W.G. AME Church Review 3 (1885), 13.
Sipkins, Henry and Philip A. Bell. “Second Annual National Negro Convention” in The Liberator, 22 September 1832, A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States: From Colonial Times Through the Civil War. Edited by Herbert Aptheker. New York: The Citadel Press, 1968.
Smith, James McCune. “The German Invasion.” In The Anglo-African Magazine, Vol. 1.2 (February 1859), 44–52.
———. “Letter to Robert Hamilton, 27 August 1864.” In Black Abolitionist Papers, eds. C. Peter Ripley et al. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1992.
———. The Works of James McCune Smith: Black Intellectual and Abolitionist. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Stoddard, Theodore Lothrop. The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1921.
Stolberg, Benjamin. “Minority Jingo.” The Nation, 23 October 1937, 437–439.
Sundquist, Eric J., ed. Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Taylor, Hannis. The Making of the Constitution. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1899.
Thomas, Rev. C.O.H. “The Negro-His Past and Present.” AME Church Review, 10 (1893), 470–477.
Thomson, A.C.C. “Refuge from Oppression. From the Delaware Republican to the Public. Falsehood Refuted.” The Liberator, December 12, 1845.
Trench, Richard Chenevix. English, Past and Present. London: Macmillan and Co., 1877.
Turner, Lorenzo Dow. Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect, 3rd edition. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002a.
Turpin, Josephine. “The Origin and Progress of the English Language.” AME Church Review 4 (1887), 280.
Webster, Noah. Dissertations on the English Language: with Notes, Historical and Critical. Boston: Isaiah Thomas and Company, 1789.
———. An American Dictionary of the English Language (Originally Published in 1826), Revised and Enlarged. Springfield: Merriam, 1862.
Woodson, Carter G. The Mis-education of the Negro. Washington, DC: The Associated Publishers, 1933.
Wright, R.R. AME Church Review 10.4 (1893), 460.
Secondary Sources
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd edition. London: Verso, 2006.
Bancroft, George. The Necessity, the Reality and the Promise of the Progress of the Human Race: An Oration Delivered before the New York Historical Society. New York: New York Historical Society, 1854.
———. The History of the United States of America, from the Discovery of the American Continent, vol. 1. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1870.
———. The Life and Letters of George Bancroft, 2 vols. Edited by Mark Anthony de Wolfe Howe. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1908.
Child, Lydia Maria. “The Black Saxons.” The Liberator, 8 (January 1841), 5–6.
Davis, Harry E. “Early Colored Residents of Cleveland.” Phylon 4.3 (1941), 233–245.
Dyson, Walter. Howard University: The Capstone of Negro Education. Washington, DC: The Graduate School Howard University, 1941.
Frantzen, Allen J.. Desire for Origins: New Language, Old English and Teaching the Tradition. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990.
———. Bloody Good: Chivalry, Sacrifice and the Great War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
Glicksburg, Charles I. “The Negro Cult of the Primitive.” The Antioch Review 10.1 (1944), 47–55.
Hanlon, Christopher. America’s England: Antebellum Literature and American Sectionalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
Hauer, Stanley. “Thomas Jefferson and the Anglo-Saxon Language.” PMLA 98.5 (October 1983), 879–898.
Hobson, Christopher Z. The Mount of Vision: African American Prophetic Tradition, 1800–1950. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Horsman, Reginald. Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981.
Howe, Nicholas. Migration and Mythmaking. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989.
Hutchinson, George. The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996.
Jerng, Mark. Claiming Others: Transracial Adoption and National Belonging. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.
Karabel, Jerome. The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale and Princeton. New York: Mariner Books, 2006.
Kim, Heidi Kathleen. “From Language to Empire: Walt Whitman in the Context of Nineteenth-Century Popular Anglo-Saxonism.” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 24 (Summer 2006), 1–19.
Lazo, Roderigo. “The Ends of Enchantment: Douglass, Melville, and U.S. Expansionism in the Americas.” In Frederick Douglass & Herman Melville: Essays in Relation, eds. Robert S. Levine and Samuel Otter. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2008, 207–232.
Lears, T.J. Jackson No Place of Grace: Anti-Modernism and the Transformation of American Culture 1880–1920. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
Looney, Dennis. Freedom Readers. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011.
McInerney, Daniel John. The Fortunate Heirs of Freedom: Abolition and Republican Thought. Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1994.
Nevalainen, Terttu, and Elizabeth Closs Traugott, eds. The Oxford Handbook of the History of English. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Rafael, Vincente. “Translation, American English and the National Insecurities of Empire.” Social Text 27.4 (2009), 451–468.
Scanlon, Larry. “Poets Laureate and the Language of Slaves.” In The Vulgar Tongue, eds. Fiona Somerset and Nicholas Watson. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003.
Scudder, Horace E. Noah Webster. Boston: Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1890.
Smith, Charles Spenser, and Daniel Alexander Payne. History of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Philadelphia: Book Concern of the A.M.E. Church, 1922.
Steele, Brian. Thomas Jefferson and American Nationhood. Birmingham: University of Alabama Press, 2012.
Tillman, Nathaniel. “A Possible Etymology of ‘Tote.’” American Speech 17.2 (1942), 128–129.
Turner, Lorenzo Dow. Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002b.
VanHoosier-Carey, Gregory A. “Byrhtnoth in Dixie: The Emergence of Anglo-Saxon Studies in the Postbellum South.” In Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity, ed. Allen J. Frantzen. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1997.
———. “Anglo-Saxon Studies in the Postbellum South.” In Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity, eds. Allen J. Frantzen and John D. Niles Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1992.
Wachtell, Cynthia. “The Author of the Civil War.” The New York Times, July 6, 2012. Accessed August 12, 2015. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/06/the-author-of-the-civil-war/.
Wade-Lewis, Margaret. Lorenzo Dow Turner: Father of Gullah Studies. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2007.
Wilson, Ivy. “The Brief Wondrous Life of the Anglo-African Magazine or, Antebellum African American Editorial Practice and Its Afterlives.” In Publishing Blackness: Textual Constructions of Race Since 1850. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Appendix: Dante
Appendix: Dante
Verse
Verse Henrietta Cordelia Ray Rare medieval Spirit! brooding Seer! Grand, lonely Poet! scaling heights divine, And lifting from grave mysteries the veil, Through the dim centuries thou speakest still In tones of thunder; and subdued by awe We listen, for thy intuitions fine, Thy insight keen discovered motives hid, And aim close wound in aim thou couldst perceive, Unwinding minor aims in which ’twas wrapt. Knit with the very fibres of thy soul, Thy country’s weal a cherished charge became; And Destiny stern frowning o’er the land, Upheaved thy feelings and inflamed thy speech. Indignant at the wrongs that Florence bore, Florence, thy well-beloved, thy hallowed home, With stern denunciation thou didst wage Against the law’s lax mandates bloody war, And all unawed, rebuked the false decrees Of kings, of conquerors, popes and cardinals, The pure “white flower” waving in thy hand. Thy thought self-poised, self-centered, dragged thy soul Into what depths of grief and deepest pain! But to posterity thou didst bequeathe— Despite the scathing of the contest fierce— Thy reveries’ illuminated page. The groans of spirits plunged in woe’s abyss, The sweet repentance of the wistful souls Climbing in patience Purgatory’s steep, Called thee to muse on life’s strange mystery. Before thy vision what fair vistas stretched, Empurpled with the glow of Paradise! Thou heardst in dreams the harmonies sublime Of martyr glorified and rapturous saint. And she, Beatrice the celestial one, Who woke thy heart’s best love and sweetest joy, Alone was meet to guide thy willing steps From planet to fixed star, and onward still, Above the splendor of the luminous stars, Where blessed souls their orisons uplift, And isles supernal bloom with amaranth fair, Up to the Empyrean’s crystal courts, Where Majesty Divine enthrones itself. And soon the Perfect Vision met thy gaze, The mystic Trinity all solved by light, Three colors, three reflections in the one, Christ was revealed—the Human, the Divine! God’s plan for our redemption clear to thee! And now, O lonely Spirit, brooding Seer! So long in conflict, weary with unrest, Within the beatific realms above, Bathed in that Light Ineffable thou dwell’st, O yearning Soul, at last, at last in peace!
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Vernon, M.X. (2018). Medieval Self-Fashioning: The Middle Ages in African-American Scholarship and Curricula. In: The Black Middle Ages. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91089-5_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91089-5_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-91088-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-91089-5
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)