Chapter 1: 1890-1899. Introduction
Introduction to this Decade:
General Historical Context: While in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War there were impressive gains for Black folks around the U.S. (especially reflected in the passage of the 13th and 15th Amendments of the U.S. constitution), that progress slowed after the end of the Reconstruction. The 1890s was a tough time for African American civil rights. In the U.S. south, it was the period during which Jim Crow segregation was on the rise, officially sanctioned by the Supreme Court with the notorious Plessy vs. Ferguson decision of 1896 (which ruled that segregation by race in public accommodations was legal as long as facilities were equal). It was also a period of widespread racialized violence, with an average of 186 lynchings per year. Some of these lynchings were not incidental middle-of-the-night mob attacks but planned spectacles, where thousands of people would gather to watch a Black person tortured and killed. Journalists and activists like Ida B. Wells-Burnett tried to raise awareness of the barbarity of this violence, but it was difficult going. (For more on the 1890s, a good summary of the decade is here)
All that said, partly as a result of segregation, during this period African American schools and colleges and universities were growing rapidly, and institutions like the Tuskegee Institute (under the leadership of Booker T. Washington), Atlanta University, Howard University, Lincoln University, and many others, were growing and educating thousands of Black middle class people. These HBCUs would also become important starting points for many African American writers. Overall African American literacy was on the rise, from approximately a 70% illiteracy rate in 1880 to 44.5% by 1900.
For literary historians, the 1890s are usually talked about as the decade of Paul Laurence Dunbar – he published several collections of poetry during the period that were highly successful (especially Lyrics of Lowly Life), and he was in high demand for readings and performances. He also had crossover appeal with white audiences, though that would later be proven controversial since part of that crossover success was his use of AAVE dialect in many of his poems.
Unfortunately, the singular emphasis on Dunbar means that the contributions of many other important poets of the period are often overlooked, especially contributions by women. Frances E.W. Harper, whose career had already spanned four decades, published three lively and engaged collections of poetry during this decade. Also active were Josephine Heard, Mary Weston Fordham, Gertrude Mossell, Eloise A. Bibb, H. Cordelia Ray, and Olivia Ward Bush-Banks.
A particularly helpful book published in the 1890s is Gertrude Mossell’s The Work of the Afro-American Woman (1894). Mossell’s book contains several essays as well as her own original poems, some of which are quite memorable. The book also contains an essay called “The Afro-American Woman in Verse,” which is a survey of poetry by African American women up through the time of publication. Alongside some of the names mentioned above, she includes long extracts and sometimes complete poems by writers who today are more obscure, including M.E. Lambert and Mary Ashe Lee. Mary Ashe Lee’s writings seem particularly noteworthy, including a poem called “Tawawa” that honors the indigenous people who inhabited the land on which an HBCU (Wilberforce University) would be built. Her “Afmerica” is also a powerful and memorable statement.
The themes poets focused on in the 1890s speak to the lives and conditions that prevailed at that time. Given the prevalence of institutionalized racism and Jim Crow segregation, many poets are deeply invested in activism and advocacy for the Black community. We mark these poems as focused on “Progress and Racial Uplift.” Alongside poems on this theme are poems dealing with the historical legacy of slavery, race relations, and lynching. A small subset of poems from this period express feminist sensibilities in a forthright manner, the most memorable of which might be Frances E.W. Harper’s “A Double Standard.”
Finally, we’ll also include a section exploring poetry that is more personal, including religious retellings as well as occasional poetry tied to holidays and the changing of the seasons.