A Study Guide for Arna Bontemps's "A Black Man Talks of Reaping"
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A Study Guide for Arna Bontemps's "A Black Man Talks of Reaping" - Gale
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A Black Man Talks of Reaping
Arna Bontemps
1926
Introduction
When Arna Bontemps wrote A Black Man Talks of Reaping
in 1926, America was a racially divided country. Many of the states that had belonged to the Confederacy during the Civil War sixty years earlier had laws that still reflected the slave-holding culture of the South, keeping races separated under a spurious separate but equal
doctrine that did little to promote, much less enforce, equality. In the North, inequality between blacks and whites was not permitted by law, but social attitudes enabled an unofficial form of segregation to flourish. During the mid-1920s Bontemps lived in Harlem, a section of New York City that was famous worldwide as a center of black American culture. During the 1920s and 1930s it was also known as the meeting place of notable black intellectuals, artists, and writers who started a movement called the Harlem Renaissance. Bontemps and other Harlem artists became characterized as members of this group, also known as the New Negro Movement.
Among his Harlem Renaissance peers, such as Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and Jean Toomer, Bontemps was known for writing about the conditions and attitudes facing black Americans in the South, which is certainly the case in A Black Man Talks of Reaping.
The poem uses a refined, graceful poetic cadence to capture the strong sense of tradition but ultimate sense of futility facing black Americans at a time when the accomplishments of their culture were frequently ignored. A Black Man Talks of Reaping,
one of Bontemps's most famous and frequently anthologized poems, was published along with several of Bontemps's other poems from the 1920s in the 1963 collection Personals. The poem has been anthologized in several books, including the 1995 collection The Columbia Anthology of American Poetry, edited by Jay