Black Americans/African American autobiographies have brought to fore the racial discrimination. Autobiographies of Booker T. Washington, Du Bois, Richard Wright and Gordon parks have highlighted this discrimination and the racial consciousness. These autobiographies are protest documents and express an intense urge for emancipation.

1. Racial Discrimination, Protest
and Emancipation: Testimony of
African
American Autobiographies
Vandana Pathak
Dept. of English,
L.A.D.& Smt.R.P. College for Women,
Nagpur-10.

2. Autobiography
• Autobiography is the most democratic genre
in American literature &the oldest, offering
the best opportunity “for examining a variety
of particular confrontations of culture by
particular people in particular settings.”
• Written by people in all walks of life,
• These Black American writers were far
removed from the fringes of life and literacy.

3. Black American
Autobiographies
• Black writers chose a variety of genres,
forms, & themes to document & record
their struggle.
• Slave narrative or autobiography was a
mode of expression widely accepted.
• These autobiographies converted the
physical &psychological aspects of the
past into a living part and, in a way,
recreated, revisited, and analyzed the
past as the setting so as to search for
the identity and define the self.

4. Voice of the Community
• Black American Autobiographies
expose the oppressive condition of
the Blacks &the repressive tactics
adopted by the whites against
them.
• An autobiography is necessarily
the story of an individual,
• The racist structures have made it
necessary for the Black American
autobiographer to act as the voice
of the community or to speak for
the collective.

5. Three Periods
• Butterfield has divided Black autobiographies
into three periods : Slave narratives (1831-
1895) -narrator comes to accept his place
through religion,
• the period of search (1901-1961) – narrator
turns inward &tries to come to grip with his
identity and
• the period of rebirth (since 1961) -relates the
problem to larger issues.

6. Slave Narratives
• The slave narratives deal with the
experiences, thoughts, and feelings of human
beings held in chattel slavery and reveal the
impact of slavery on black men, women and
children, individually and collectively. The
main objective was to awaken the conscience
of the nation. Sterling Brown calls these early
autobiographies as “literary weapons.”

7. Key Concepts
• Race relations is that “behavior which
develops among people who are aware of
each other’s actual or perceived physical
differences.
• The term ‘racism’ (as used in literature)
seems to refer to a philosophy of racial
antipathy.
• “Black is a term used for those Americans who
were of African extraction, defines the ethnic
traits of the erstwhile slaves”. Black has
replaced Negro and Negro has taken over the
place of Nigger.

8. Key Concepts contd….
• "Consciousness is a state of awareness of
one’s own existence, position and
surroundings. So, racial consciousness means
the awareness among a group of people of
their own racial identity, inheritance, heredity
and so on”.
• Racial consciousness is also known as “Black
consciousness.”

9. Racial Discrimination
• Black American autobiographies draw upon
the experiences of Black American writers.
• “…the problem of the color line is insoluble,
that the idea of an equalitarian America
belongs to baskets of history and that the
concept of an America melting pot is one to
which sane men no longer adhere.”
• Bibb, Douglass, Washington, Du Bois, Brown,
Wright ,Hughes, Malcolm X, Parks, etc have
narrated experiences of discrimination.

10. Booker T. Washington’s Experience
• On his way to Hampton from Malden,
Washington’s coach stopped for a night at a
common, unpainted hotel. All other passengers
were shown to their rooms & were getting ready
for supper. He had no money in his pocket and it
was a cold night. Washington confides, “Without
asking as to whether I had any money, the man
at the desk firmly refused to even consider the
matter of providing me with food or lodging. This
was my first experience in finding out what the
color of my skin meant’’ (Washington,Ch.III,11).

11. Discrimination in Darkwater Voices
from within the Veil
“ I arise at seven. The milkman has neglected
me. He pays little attention to colored
districts. My white neighbor glares
elaborately. I walk softly lest I disturb him. The
children jeer as I pass to work. The women in
the street car withdraw their skirts or prefer
to stand. The police is truculent. The elevator
man hates to serve Negroes. My job is
insecure because the white union wants it &
does not want me. I try to lunch, but no place
near will serve me. I go forty blocks to
Marshall’s, but the committee

12. Darkwater…contd.
of Fourteen loses Marshall’s; they say white women
frequent it. ‘‘Do all eating places discriminate?’’ No, but
how shall I know which do not -except - I hurry home
through crowds. They mutter or get angry. I go to a mass-
meeting. They stare. I go to a church. ‘‘We don’t admit
niggers!’’ …I seek new work. ‘‘Our employees would not
work with you; our customers would object.’’ I ask to help
in social uplift.
• ‘‘Why-er-we will write you.’’
• I enter the free field of science. Every laboratory door is
closed and no endowments are available. I seek the
universal mistress, Art; the studio door is locked. I write
literature. ‘‘We cannot publish stories of colored folks of
that type.’’ It’s the only type I know.
• This is my life. It makes me idiotic. It gives me artificial
problems. I hesitate, I rush, I waver.
• In fine, I am sensitive! (Du Bois, Darkwater, Ch. IX)

13. Richard Wright : The Black Boy
• “... I was amazed, when I asked passers-by, to
learn that there were practically no hotels for
Negroes in Harlem. I kept walking. Finally I saw a
tall, clean hotel; black people were passing the
doors and no white people were in sight.
Confidently I entered and was surprised to see a
white clerk behind the desk. I hesitated.
• ‘‘I’d like a room,’ I said.
• ‘‘Not here’’, he said.
• ‘‘But isn’t this Harlem?’’ I asked.
• ‘‘Yes, but this hotel is for white only’’, he said
(Wright, 349-50).

14. Claude Brown
• The only exception was that of colored
barbershops. Claude’s friend says, “They’ve
got colored barbershops. That’s all they let us
have, Sonny. The only reason they let us have
a colored barbershop is because those white
devils don’t know nothing’ about cutting no
colored hair. They don’t really know nothin’,
man” (Brown,327).

15. Discrimination-Effect
• Social discrimination existing at all levels of class Life
style discrimination based on unique demeanor,
speech, clothing and food is reflected.
• Skin color discrimination, economic discrimination, and
criminal justice discrimination is also highlighted.
• Discrimination has direct effect on physical and mental
health, economic and social resources and coping
strategies. When people are ripped away from their
own natural identity (i.e. their native culture), they
suffer from an inferiority complex.
• Fanon believes that the Black must adopt a white mask
in order to become a real human being to the
oppressive culture by adopting the language of the
oppressive culture (Fanon).

16. Protest Literature
• The literature of the Black Americans is known as
protest literature.
• Its main aim is to sensitize, to awaken people and
make them aware of injustices at the local as well
as global level.
• Leaders like Du Bois, Frederick Douglass,
Washington and Martin Luther King, etc had
raised voices against it. Many Slave narratives,
some amanuensis documents, provided voices to
the voiceless slave community. This protest of
the Black Americans against marginalization,
discrimination, exploitation, slavery, violence and
torture, etc. is reflected in the Slave Narratives
and later in Black American autobiographies.

17. Henry Bibb: Protest
• Bibb says, “It was at Kentucky that I first
entered my protest against the bloody
institution of slavery, by running away from it,
and declared that I would no longer work for
any man as I had done, without wages” (Bibb,
170).

18. W.E.B. Du Bois
• W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903) is
renowned as a protest document.
• Protesting against the plight of Negros in the South
and their votes, he writes,
“Daily the Negro is coming more and more to look
upon law and justice, not as protecting safeguards, but
as sources of humiliation and oppression. The laws are
made by men who have little interest in him; they are
executed by men who have absolutely no motive for
treating the black people with courtesy, or
consideration; and finally, the accused law-breaker is
tried, not by his peers, but too often by men who
would rather punish ten innocent Negroes than let one
guilty one escape” (TSBF, Chapter Nine ).

19. Langston Hughes: The Big Sea
• “It was like throwing a million bricks out of my heart-
for it wasn’t only the books that I wanted to throw
away, but everything unpleasant and miserable out of
my past : the memory of my father, the poverty and
uncertainties of my mother’s life, the stupidities of
color - prejudice, black in a white world, the fear of not
finding a job, the bewilderment of no one to talk to
about things that trouble you, the feeling of always
being controlled by others - by parents, by employers,
by some other necessity not your own. All these things
I wanted to throw away. To be free of. To escape from.
I wanted to be a man on my own, control my own life,
and go my own way. I was twenty-one. So I threw the
books in the sea”(Hughes, 98).

20. Richard Wright: The Black Boy
• Richard Wright had long ago emotionally rejected the
world in which he lived. He realized that “Big Bill”
Thompson used the Negro vote to control the City Hall.
Wright says,
• “... he was engaged in vast political deals of which the
Negro voters, political innocents, had no notion. With
my pencil I wrote in a determined scrawl across the
face of the ballots:
I Protest This Fraud
• I knew my gesture was futile. But I wanted somebody
to know that out of that vast sea of ignorance in the
Black Belt there was at least one person who knew the
game for what it was” (TBB, 238).

21. Richard Wright contd…
• Richard Wright too felt that words could be weapons
against injustice. Hence, he was at the forefront of the
“School for Social Protest” in Chicago, a literary
movement which resulted in a wealth of progressive
literature.
• Mencken’s book made him realize the power of words.
He pictured “the man as a raging demon, slashing with
his pen, consumed with hate, denouncing everything
American...” and understood,
• “... Yes, this man was fighting, fighting with words. He
was using words as a weapon, using them as one
would use a club. Could words be weapons? Well, yes,
for here they were. Then, may be, perhaps, I could use
them as a weapon?” (TBB, 248)

22. Richard Wright
• Sartre, in his essay, “For whom does one write” shows what
is exceptional in Richard Wright’s work. He says,
• “[E]each work of Wright contains what Baudelaire would
have called a double, simultaneous postulation” – that is,
Wright is addressing himself to two different audiences
when he writes. He is addressing both blacks and whites,
and for each he needs to supply different information.
Blacks will understand readily what he is talking about.
Whites, on the other hand, cannot possibly understand the
point of view of Wright’s black background. Nor can Wright
hope to have them fully see the world through his eyes. So,
for white readers, he must supply information that will
have an effect entirely different from that of his own
people. He must, by his tale, induce in whites a feeling of
indignation that will lead them to act. This dual purpose,
Sartre says, is what creates the tension in Wright’s work”.

23. A soldier in a march against
oppression
• Stephen Butterfield calls the “self” of the Black
autobiography "a soldier in a long and historical
march” against oppression. He comments,
• “The self of Black autobiography, on the whole, taking
into account the effect of western culture on the Afro-
American is not an individual with a private career, but
a soldier in a long, historic march toward canon. The
self is conceived as a member of an oppressed social
group; with ties and responsibilities to other members.
It is a conscious political identity, drawing sustenance
from the past experience of the group... The
autobiographical form is one of the ways that Black
Americans have asserted their right to live and grow. It
is a bid for freedom, a beak of hope cracking the shell
of slavery and exploitation” (Bande).

24. Gordon Parks
• On one occasion, Parks with his friends took
seats in a bus behind the driver. The driver
demanded that they go to back of the bus and
refused to move the bus if they did not go
back. They refused to do so. An aged Black
woman told them not to move in a voice
trembling with rage. Parks’ two friends were
outranked by their superior in the bus. Parks
had no such restriction. He too pointed out his
position. The white officer told the driver to
make a move. The Black woman became very
happy due to this protest.

25. Gordon Parks contd….
• Park narrates,
• “Toni came home from school one Wednesday in
a snit saying she wasn’t going back because of a
book that a teacher assigned her class to read.
When I read the passage that offended her I
agreed. Published in England, it referred to
American blacks as “darkies” and “pickaninnies.”
I confronted the headmaster and explained why
David nor Toni was at school. He expressed shock
and immediately banned the book from class. It
had never occurred to me that Toni would
express such rage; and I was proud of her
reaction when bigotry touched her small
universe” (VIM, 144).

26. Baldwin: Protest
• Protest is an integral part of life. It manifests
itself in various hues and colors like negation,
rejection, anger, thefts, drugs, violence, and
crime, etc. Baldwin very frankly admits,
“There is not a Negro alive who does not have
this rage in his blood - one has the choice,
merely, of living with it consciously or
surrendering to it. As for me, this fever has
recurred in me, and does, and will until the
day I die” (Baldwin, 1957,94).

27. Theme of Emancipation
• Black American autobiographies offer an
insight into the lives of the Blacks and these
documents reflect on the intensity of racial
problem. According to Baldwin, ‘‘the problem
is rooted in the question how one treats one’s
flesh and blood, especially one’s children’’
(Baldwin, 185). The lives of the children
reveal that they were and are caught,
trapped, and forced to lead suspended lives. A
yearning for change, for liberation is felt in
almost all writers of this genre.

28. Meaning & Significance
• The term emancipation has a great fascination and
significance for all marginalized, oppressed communities in
the world. It means freedom from physical bondage and
breaking of shackles meant to impose physical restraint. It
is a dynamic, ever evolving concept. In the case of Black
American autobiographers, emancipation indicates
yearning to be free associated with a growth in
consciousness resulting in protests, revolts, and
movements. It is a yearning for equality and justice. It is a
demand for just human rights, civil, political, and social. It is
a demand by the oppressed, exploited, and subjugated to
be treated exactly like their oppressors and exploiters. A
subtle yearning for emancipation is noticeable in all slave
narratives. It is related with their self awareness, self-
assertion, consciousness (individual as well as collective)
and identity.

29. Olaudah Equiano
• The very mention of freedom excited Equiano,
“This gave me new life and spirits; and my
heart burned within me, while I thought the
time long till I obtained freedom. For though
my master had not promised it to me, yet,
besides the assurances I had received that he
had no right to detain me, he always treated
me with the greatest kindness, and responded
to me in an unbounded confidence”
(Edwards,173).

30. Frederick Douglass
• Frederick Douglass in his Narrative of the Life of
Frederick Douglass, an American Slave says,
“From my earliest recollection, I date the
entertainment of a deep conviction that slavery
would not always be able to hold me within its
foul embrace; and in the darkest hours of my
career in slavery, this living world of faith and
spirit of hope departed not from me, but
remained like ministering angels to cheer me
through the gloom”(Douglass,34-35). He would
talk to little white boys and say, “You will be free
as soon as you are twenty one, BUT I AM A SLAVE
FOR LIFE ! Have I not as good a right to be free as
you have?”(Douglass, 41)

31. Henry Bibb
• Bibb says, “But more especially, all that I had
heard about liberty and freedom to the slaves,
I never forgot. Among other good trades I
learned the art of running away to perfection.
I made a regular business of it, and never gave
it up, until I had broken the bonds of slavery
and landed myself safely in Canada, where I
was regarded as a man, and not as a thing”
(Bibb, I, 15-16).

32. Rapid Changes
• The Black Americans became free in 1863.
The Reconstruction program taken up to
ameliorate the Black’s lot took a reverse
course. The Fourteenth Amendment of 1868
established the rule of law by its “due process
clause”, promising the Black equal protection.
The right to vote was given to the Blacks by
the Fifteenth Amendment of 1870. The Civil
Rights Bill of 1875 conferred on them full
citizenship with all civil liberties.

33. The Status
• The Black was robed in freedom. But he could not wear the
robe of freedom for a long time; it was torn into rags on his
body itself. The Southern States were not in favour of
giving civil rights to him. The definition of the term “Black”
in the Constitution of most of the Southern States shows
that he was not regarded as a full man. He was a fractional
man. Soon the Black was defranchised and then stripped of
all his civil rights. In 1883 the Supreme Court held the Civil
Rights Bill of 1875 as unconstitutional. Again in 1896...
it upheld the “separate but equal” doctrine. The Black’s
robe of freedom was miserably torn and he stood in rags
only. By the end of nineteenth century, the Black was made
an ubiquitous Jim Crow in America. Then his dream
festered like a sore and tried to run away from him in
shame. But it was stuck into his rags : it could not run away
(Waghmare, 38).

34. 20th
Century Scenario
• In the twentieth century too, there was not much
change in the condition of Black-Americans. A
shift from South to North was seen. Their
marginalization and exploitation continued
unabated and they always remained on the
periphery. In 1954, the Supreme Court declared
“separate but equal” doctrine as
unconstitutional. In 1960’s Civil Rights Movement
gathered momentum and Martin Luther King Jr.’s
speech exploded the myth of the American
progress and exposed reality. In spite of all these
developments, there was not much change in the
plight of Black Americans and their problems
remained the same.

35. Du Bois in 1920
• Du Bois in Credo of the Darkwater writes, “I
believe in liberty for all men: the space to
stretch their arms and their souls, the right to
breathe and the right to vote, the freedom to
choose their friends, enjoy the sunshine, and
ride on the railroads, uncursed by color;
thinking, dreaming, working as they will in a
kingdom of beauty and love” (Du Bois, Credo).

36. James Baldwin Letter to My
Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the
Emancipation
• Sets down the condition of the Blacks .He
points out to his nephew,
• “You were born where you were born and
faced a future that you faced because you
were black and for no other reason. The limits
of your ambition were, thus, expected to be
set forever. You were born into a society,
which spelt out with brutal clarity, in as many
ways as possible, that you were a worthless
human being. You were not expected to
aspire to excellence; you were expected to
make peace with mediocrity”
(Kannabiran,151).

37. No Change till 1990’s
• Even after so many years of struggle, Blacks’
problems still haunt them and their misery,
and agony is unabated, unredressed &hence,
all Black American writers longed/ long for a
just, equal, human and humane society.
Writers like Baldwin, Richard Wright, Claude
Brown, Langston Hughes and Gordon Parks
have written their autobiographies in the later
decades of the twentieth century when plenty
of changes had taken place in the American
society and yet all these writers longed for

38. To Sum Up….
“It is for this reason that freedom is a powerful
concept for them – freedom from physical and
psychological bondage as also freedom to
choose a kind of world that they would like to
live in. In America this quest for freedom
began with slave narratives which became a
powerful form of self expression for them.
These were the first stirrings of their soul and
have undergone innumerable mutations in
other forms. Freedom is still an important
component of their imaginative perception of
reality” (Kapoor, 159).

39. Thank you !!!Thank you !!!