2. Anna Julia HaywoodCooper Cooper was born in 1858 in North Carolina to a slave. She was selected to become trained as a teacher for former slave at nine years old She is the 4th African American woman to earn a doctorate. Cooper’s interests were social justice and the rights of women, especially African American women
3. Cooper… Cooper was especially concerned with the “race problem” and although she agreed that there was racism, she was quoted as saying "The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class - it is the cause of humankind, the very birthright of humanity." Creative Commons, Google Images
4. Charles Waddell Chesnutt Chesnutt was said to be 7/8 white but due to the “one drop rule” was classified as African American He was born to two “free persons of color” in 1858, just as the tension of the Civil War were about to get started Creative Commons, Google Images
5. Chesnutt… The Conjure Woman which was published in 1899 was a literary success and is the collection from which our excerpt was taken After the Civil War there was a lot of interest in Black “Folk” tales Although Chesnutt’s work certainly can be qualified as a “folk” tale, it is also a social commentary on the state of the African American population AFTER the Civil War
6. Chesnutt… Chesnutt’s uses the frame tale structure that we saw in some of Twain’s story. The dual narrators serve an important purpose Unlike Twain, Chesnutt moved away from writing in dialect in his later writings because he was concerned it allowed white people to laugh at the black characters.
7. Joel Chandler Harris Unlike our other authors for this week, Harris was a poor, young Irish American man of illegitimate birth growing up in Georgia Born in 1845, his exposure to plantation life came from serving an apprenticeship on a plantation Creative Commons, Google Images
8. Harris… Harris is most famous for his Uncle Remus stories (one of our excerpts) and if you have ever been to Disney World and visited Splash Mountain, the theme is based on the Uncle Remus tales that Disney adapted Songs of the South Disney’s version of Harris’ work is no longer sold in the United States because of its positive spin on the Master/Slave relationship Harris received a lot of critique for his writing, especially his use of dialect, but a closer examination of his work demonstrates the race struggles and the trouble of reconstruction facing the South after the Civil War Creative Commons, Google Images
9. How this fits with Realism: The issue of race impacted all the writers during the realist tradition. I feel that the realist tradition can still be seen today in ethnic memoir and modern ethnic/racial novels (authors such as Jamaica Kinkaid, Alice Walker, and more have used the technique of dialect in their writing) These authors had a responsibility of demonstrating the racial tensions in the South and do so using the realist tradition in an effort to gain readership and, by extension, understanding of what was happening in the Southern United States
