Useful Websites (for Students): Below is a list of websites that provide visual, textual, and cultural context for the major works, artists, and literary ideas included in Volume 2 of the anthology.

  1. The Literatures of the New Negro Renaissance: c.1920–1940
  2. African Age: African African Diasporan Transformations in the 20th Century, Schomburg-Mellon Humanities

This website is provided by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City.It examines the African diaspora in twentieth-century African American history and culture through photographs of black nationalists, pan-Africanists, and the Black Power Movement.

  1. The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Project, UCLA African Studies Center

The African Studies Center at the University of California in Los Angeles provides links to primary sources from Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association(UNIA) of the 1910s and 1920s.Valuable sources include sound recordings of Garvey’s speeches in New York City in the 1920s and photographs of UNIA rallies and memorabilia.

  1. Paintings by Aaron Douglas at the New York Public Library online exhibit “Treasures of the New York Public Library”

As a leading artist of the New Negro Renaissance, Aaron Douglas provided illustrations for Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, and other poets of the era.His murals of African American life and allegorical representations of African American history provide iconic images of modernist renderings of the New Negro experience.

  1. “NAACP: A Century in the Fight for Freedom” Library of Congress online exhibit, 2009
  1. “In Motion: The African American Migration Experience” online exhibit,Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
  1. Smithsonian Folkways online exhibit“Jazz Education Website”
  1. Ken Burns’sJazz

Ken Burns’saward-winning documentary, Jazz (2000), offers a comprehensive history of this American musical form, which emerged from African American cultural traditions in Louisiana and has informed all aspects of American music.As a cultural aesthetic, jazz has directly influenced African American literature from the New Negro era through the present.This website provides a summary of the music’s history as well as links to recordings by leadings artists from Louis Armstrong to Billie Holliday.

  1. last.fm: Free Listening

This site provides free recordings of Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, and other jazz artists whose music directly informs the work of Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, and others.

  1. Glenda R. Carpio and Werner Sollors, “The Newly Complicated Zora Neale Hurston,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 2, 2011

After the discovery of previously unpublished short stories by Zora Neale Hurston, scholars Glenda Carpio and Werner Sollors describe how Hurston’s prolific work as a short-story writer complicates traditional notions of Hurston as a cultural anthropologist and apolitical novelist.This short article published in TheChronicle of Higher Education provides a brief history of how Hurston’s works were discovered and the potential impact of this discovery on African American literary history.

  1. The Mississippi Flood of 1927, Louisiana Folk Life Center

Until Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the most devastating flood in American history occurred on the lower Mississippi River in 1927. The images of this event can be discussed in comparison with the depiction of interracial conflict in Richard Wright’s short story “Big Boy Leaves Home,” which is included in the anthology in Wright’s 1938 collection Uncle Tom’s Children. The website provides the historical context of the flood and audio recordings of white survivors.

  1. Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, Ferris State University

This exhibit provides images of racist African American images that depict many of the literary tropes that African American writers challenged in their work.These images are valuable as a form of historical and cultural context for the works of writers like Charles W. Chesnutt, who subvert popular images of African American “sambos,” “jezebels,” and “mammies.”

  1. The First Blues Records

This website offers recordings of the first blues performances and albums, which provide a cultural context for much of the blues writings of Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, and others.

  1. Films by Oscar Micheaux

Oscar Micheaux was the leading African American filmmaker of the 1920s and the only filmmaker to express themes of New Negro racial consciousness on film.Within Our Gates (produced and directed in 1919) provides a counterpoint to the racialized images of African American plantation caricatures propagated in films such as TheBirth of a Nation (1915).Other films provide examples of African American subversion of the “tragic mulatta,”“jezebel,” and “sambo” tropes in popular culture.

  1. The Literatures of Modernism, Modernity, and Civil Rights: c.1940–1965
  2. Jacob Lawrence, The Migration Series,The Phillips Collection

Jacob Lawrence (1917–2000) was one of the leading African American painters of the twentieth century.His 1941 exhibition “The Migration Series” at the New York Museum of Modern Art provided the visual background for much African American literature of the era.This website provides images from “The Migration Series” and analysis of Lawrence’s aesthetic.As such, this website can be used to place writings by Gwendolyn Brooks, Ann Petry, and other African American writers of the mid-twentieth century within the context of the Great Migration and its cultural impact.

  1. The Literatures of Nationalism, Militancy, and the Black Aesthetic: c.1965–1975
  1. The Black Power Mixtapewebsite

This website accompanies the 2011 film Black Power Mixtape, which documented the major figures and events of the Black Power Movement.This website can be used to gain further historical context for the Black Aesthetic and the radical black nationalism that it espoused.

  1. “She Sang So Sweet: Lucille Clifton’s Children’s Literature,” Emory University

This website is an online exhibit of Lucille Clifton provided by Emory University.It contains Clifton’s work in children’s literature and provides images that accompanied her poetry.

  1. The Literatures of the Contemporary Period: c.1975 to the Present
  2. Negro Leagues Baseball Players Association
  1. The Roots, “Something in the Way of Things,” Phrenology, 2002 (with Amiri Baraka)

This website provides song lyrics and recordings of various artists.This recording of “Something in the Way of Things” is from The Roots’ 2002 album Phrenology.The album features Amiri Baraka and various cultural references to the Black Arts Movement and the movement in spoken word performance that emerged from this era.

  1. Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School (BART/S), Harlem Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University, online collection
  1. “The Known World,” Morning Edition, NPR, October 28, 2003

The National Public Radio website contains an interview with Edward P. Jones concerning his writing process and his inspiration for writing his Pulitzer Prize winning The Known World (2003).

  1. The Romare Bearden Foundation

This website includes biographical information on the twentieth-century collage artist, who influenced various African American writers including playwright August Wilson.It introduces students to past exhibits and to Bearden’s work, influences, and aesthetic.It can be used to further place works by August Wilson and others within their cultural context.

  1. Charles R. Johnson website

Charles R. Johnson’s literature is informed by his early career as a cartoonist and his scholarship as a philosopher.This website provides biographical information on Johnson.

  1. Harryette Mullen, University of Buffalo

This site contains information about Harryette Mullen and the evolution of her literature.It also contains links to interviews with the author and analysis of her poetry.

  1. Jean-Michel Basquiat

Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–1988) was a leading artist of the 1980s whose work is often linked with the field of Afro-futurism – a cultural genre that informs the work of Percival Everett, Harryette Mullen, and other contemporary African American artists.Much of Basquiat’s work focuses on subverting symbols of racial and economic power.This website provides images of Basquiat’s most famous works and a narrative of the Afro-futurist genre that provide cultural context for contemporary African American literature.

  1. NPR Books: Toni Morrison

This website provides a link to all of the interviews that Toni Morrison has given to National Public Radio, including her comments about her analysis of race, American literature, and African American literary history.It provides a glimpse into the mind of one of the leading African American authors in the contemporary period.