There are two parts to the final assignment. For part A, please write a four page essay on one of the topic suggestions given below. Cite at least three of the readings. For part B, please write a two page report on one of the figures listed below.
Part A
Topic Suggestions
• After the Civil War, and especially after the end of Reconstruction, black Americans were thrown upon their own resources in their struggle to create their own identity as Americans, almost always in the face of open hostility, and often in the face of organized violence. Booker T. Washington emerged as the most prominent African American leader after Reconstruction. He developed a practical approach to the situation facing black Americans, especially in the South. That approach never enjoyed universal acceptance, and by the early 1900s younger black leaders began to criticize him. The leading critic was probably W.E.B. Du Bois. Fully and fairly discuss Washington’s approach to the situation facing blacks. Fully and fairly discuss Du Bois’s critique of Washington’s approach. What do you think of their thinking?
The Harlem Renaissance was one of history’s incredible occurrence, something no one could have predicted. It was a time, as Langston Hughes put it, when “the Negro was in vogue.” Despite its limitations, its failing, and its brevity, the Harlem Renaissance was an important time when black Americans, especially “gifted” black Americans, began to explore what it means to be black in America in ways that had never been possible to blacks before, when “race consciousness” was heightened and many publicly explored both an individual and a collective black identity: black heritage (especially black folk heritage), black culture, black consciousness, the problems blacks faced both outside and within their communities, the lives of ordinary blacks, relating to whites in a racist America, and the sexual tensions between blacks and whites.
• Using Langston Hughes’s “Racial Mountain” and his poems and short stories discuss how he discovered and portrayed a black identity in America.
• Using the selections from Larsen’s Passing (and perhaps some of Hughes’s poems), discuss the variable and contradictory notion of race in America.
• Du Bois wrote about the “Sorrow Songs” through which “the slave spoke to the world.” Using Du Bois’s insights, discuss the poems of Sterling Brown and Langston Hughes.
• Discuss Elise Johnson McDougald’s “Task of Black Womanhood” and Hughes’s poem “The Negro Mother.” If you have time, compare what they urge to the situation described by Nella Larsen in the selections from Quicksand.
Part B
For Part B write a two page report on pone of the figures below.
Ida B. Wells
Marcus Garvey
Jazz
Blues
Florence Mills
Paul Robeson
Josephine Baker
Cab Calloway
Fats Waller
Bessie Smith
Ma Rainey
Carl Van Vechten
Walter White
Richard Wright
Louis Armstrong
Duke Ellington
Fletcher Henderson
Willie “The Lion” Smith
W.C. Handy
A. Philip Randolph
Charles W. Chesnutt
Mary Church Terrell
1921 Tulsa race riot
Mary McCloud Bethune
1873 Colfax, LA riot
1898 Wilmington, NC riot
1919 race riots
1923 Rosewood, FL massacre
1917 East St. Louis, IL riots
Sources: “The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader” by David Levering Lewis, “The Negro Mother” by Langston Hughes, “The Souls of Black Folk” by W.E.B Dubois, “Up From Slavery” by Booker T. Washington, “We Wear the Mask” “Sympathy” “An Ante-Bellum Sermon” by Paul Laurence Dunbar.
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