As long as white newspapers were unwilling or unable to attack ‘anti-Negro’ forces or to air the views of black reformers, there was a service black newspapers could provide. Darryl Pinckney Read Quote
Slave narratives had their greatest influence on public opinion and on literature in the U.S. between 1830 and 1860. After Reconstruction’s defeat, their urgency of tone was replaced by the softer one of reminiscence. Darryl Pinckney Read Quote
Frederick Douglass had charged the air with rebellion and redemption, and these in turn had supported him in the heat of abolitionism. But the atmosphere changed to one of repression after the Civil Rights Act of 1875. Darryl Pinckney Read Quote
The demise of Reconstruction had made it hard for blacks to acquire capital or to pass on property to their children. As blacks were driven from all but the most limited spheres of business and political life, the prestige of the professional rose in the black community. Darryl Pinckney Read Quote
Invisible Man’ holds such an honored place in African-American literature that Ralph Ellison didn’t have to write anything else to break bread with the remembered dead. But he did try to go on, because if a writer has done one great thing, then the pressures to do another are intense. Darryl Pinckney Read Quote
A few of Ellison’s short stories from the 1940s and 1950s were widely anthologized over the years. After a while, it became generally known that he was at work on another novel. Though he remained aware ever afterward of the authority ‘Invisible Man’ gave to him, no second novel followed his brilliant debut in 1952. Darryl Pinckney Read Quote
Ellison was prominent on the lecture circuit even in the Black Aesthetic days of the Sixties when his defiantly pro-American and prickly-proud intellectual act met with some hostility. Darryl Pinckney Read Quote
Whatever was said about Ralph Ellison, ‘Invisible Man’ was considered untouchable. Darryl Pinckney Read Quote
Paule Marshall does not let the black women in her fiction lose. While they lose friends, lovers, husbands, homes, or jobs, they always find themselves. Darryl Pinckney Read Quote
The name James Baldwin had been around the house for as long as I could remember and meant almost as much as that of Martin Luther King. Darryl Pinckney Read Quote
