African-American literature has undergone a revolutionary change from Phillies Wheatley,

the first African-American poet to publish her works, to Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, Walter
Mosley, Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, and Paule Marshall, the contemporary top Black writers. Phillies
Wheatley, who was sold as a slave child to America, and her works give an impetus to the beginning
of Afro-American Literature. Other Afro-American early writers also helped the Afro-American Black
writing move forward. Fredrick Douglass, American reformer, social orator, writer and statesman, is
one of them. He escaped from slavery, and became the leader of the abolitionist movement, gaining
note for his dazzling oratory and incisive antislavery writing. The issue of slavery and the subjects
related to slaves such as adaptation to the new situation, slaves’ objections, and breaking free from
captivity have been a dominant theme at the time of slavery. Most of the writings at the time of
slavery were autobiographical. Consequently, these autobiographical works written by slaves were
named slave narratives. The slave narratives were the outcome of the conflicts between the
southern Whites who supported slavery and the northern slaves who were seeking freedom from
the oppression of slavery in the middle of the nineteenth century. A review of Afro-American
literature from slave narratives to the writings of the present modern Black writers will help us to
examine the logical links and connections in Afro-American literature.

African-American literature emerged within and against the epoch of state-sanctioned racial
segregation. It began with Lucy Terry who holds the distinction of being the first Black American
poet. Her poem was inspired by an event when sixty Indians trapped two families in the Southwest
corner of Deerfield, a section called the Bars. The bloody massacre moved her to write ballad on the
tragedy, entitled Bars Fight, as poetry was believed the highest form of human expression in the
early African-American literature. However, the Black Africans were not considered proficient for
such artistic achievement. However, Phillis Wheatley, the second woman writer published a volume
of poetry and also a book in the United States. Wheatley was gifted with creativity and showed her
early talent for writing verse. She has been one of the most controversial and mysterious figures in
the history of African-American literature. Phillis Wheatley’s On the Death of Rev. Mr. George
Whitefield (1770) marks the beginning of the black verse in America. The Antislavery supporter
Benjamin Rush quoted her poetry as a symbol of Black humanity, sexual and racial equality in his
antislavery tract An Address to the Inhabitants of the British settlements in America, upon slave-
keeping.
African-American literature confronted the dominant culture’s attempt to isolate the
religious from the political in regard with racial affairs. In To the University of Cambridge (1767),
Wheatley focuses on the benefits of her captivity. Wheatley has been degraded by some black
contemporaries as she did not make strong protests against slavery in her poetry. However, her
sensibility to enslavement was expressed subtly. Her second poem On the Death of Rev. Dr. Sewall
(1769) focused upon the births and deaths among Boston’s gentry. Phillis’s To the Right Honourable
William, Earl of Darmouth, His Majesty’s Secretary of State for North America etc. attempted to
highlight her utter revolt against slavery. She strived for freedom with black patriotism through her
works. Wheatley’s literary recognition rests on her thirty-eight poems in Poems on Various Subjects,
Religious and Morals (1773). Her Poems on Various Subjects proves that her writing was not only an
intellectual quest but also is to gain access to humanity and to free herself from the dehumanizing
institution of slavery.
After Phillis Wheatley and her fellow pioneers, the most aggressive voice among the early
African- American protest writers belonged to David Walker. He was an outspoken African-American
abolitionist and anti-slavery activist. His violent resistance against slavery shocked the authorities in
the South. His Appeal (1829) startled many white readers for his insistence on white racism as a
national problem. An Appeal intended for the Black people of the World for black unity against
oppression and injustice in the black community. The purpose of the document was to encourage
readers to take an active role in fighting against their oppression. Historians and liberation activists
believe that the Appeal is a prominent political and social document of the 19th century.
 The tales of African-American literature are full of floggings by overseers and masters,
betrayals, broken promises, frustrated attempts to acquire education, religious and secular. The
pretension and the hypocrisy are objected to as much as the cruelty and the shabby and poor
treatment. Frederick Douglass fashioned these elements in his Narrative of the Life of Frederick
Douglass (1845). In his Narrative, blackness becomes closely associated with slavery, a condition
found intolerable. Douglass in his speech on the 24th anniversary of Emancipation, Washington,
expresses an intolerable existence of the Blacks in an oppressive society
The first African-American novel published in the United States was Harriet Wilson's Our Nig
(1859). Our Nig speaks about the difficult life of free blacks in the North who were indentured
servants. In the early decades of the 19th century, African-Americans in the North joined with fair-
minded whites to bring additional social and political advances. In the South, racism provided the
corn-stone of the social, economic and political order. Antislavery supporters in the upper south
were able to liberalize laws that made it easier to free slaves. The Fugitive slave narratives
dominated the literary landscape of antebellum black America from 1830 to the end of the slavery
era. African American writers before 1865 such as Frederick Douglass, Olaudah Equiano, William
Wells Brown, Harriet Jacobs and others began their writing through narratives of their experience as
slaves. Douglass was the foremost man of color of his time. He is a shining example of the
phenomenon of reputation sprung from the deepest and direst obscurity. Douglass emerged from
slavery to become one of the great Americans of the 19th century who wrote most artful and
engaging slave narratives. Douglass’s works and speeches are expressive and effective records of
slavery and the attempts to stop it. Douglass’ life in slavery as liberated man and leader are
documented in his autobiographies. In 1845, the slave narrative make a record in the history with
the publication of the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass an American Slave, Written by
Himself. Douglass resolved to write his own story in his own way. He decided to remain witness to
the self-awareness, intellectual freedom, and literary authority of the slave. His second
autobiography My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) conducted a fresh inquiry into the meaning of
slavery and freedom. He composed Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) and An
American Slave to stun these skeptics. The Narrative ranks as a classic of African-American literature.
William Lloyd Garrison wrote a preface for it that praises Douglass as both a speaker and a writer.
W.E.B. Du Bois, Scholar and activist, was born on February 23, 1868, in Great Barrington,
Massachusetts. In 1895, he became the first African American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard
University. Racism was the main target of Du Bois's polemics, and he strongly protested against
lynching, and discrimination in education and employment. His cause included people of color
everywhere, particularly Africans and Asians in colonies In 1903, Du Bois published his seminal work,
The Souls of Black Folk, a collection of 14 essays This book is a work of sociology rather than fiction
He gives a description of the consciousness of black people who struggle to be both American and
Negros. He wrote three novels of his Black Flame which has a relationship with the study of America.
In his Dusk of Dawn (1903), Du Bois affirms that he was born with a flood of Negro blood, a strain of
French, a bit Dutch. He believed that the race problem was a result of ignorance and he was
determined to get as much knowledge as he could. He believed that the race problem was a result of
ignorance and he was determined to get as much knowledge as he could.
Gwendolyn Brooks was a postwar poet best known as the first African American to win a
Pulitzer Prize, for her 1949 book Annie Allen, Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas, on June 7, 1917.
She published her first poem in a children's magazine at age 13. She began submitting her work to
the Chicago Defender, a leading African-American newspaper. Her work included ballads, sonnets
and free verse, drawing on musical rhythms and the content of inner-city Chicago. Brooks published
her first book of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville, in 1945. The book was an instant success, leading to
a Guggenheim Fellowship and other honors. Her second book, Annie Allen, appeared in 1949. Brooks
won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for Annie Allen, making her the first African American to win the
coveted Pulitzer. Contemporary African American writers began to redefine and change literature
using models not only from European and American tradition, but also from their own distinctive
oral forms. The poems, short stories and novels of the contemporary period represent creative
writing Brook’s poems serve as a touchstone of African American history throughout the twentieth
century; she witnessed some of the most important social and cultural changes in black people’s life
in the United States.

The twentieth century Black women writers like Zora Neale Hurston, Margaret
Walker, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Gayl Jones have since taken pride in having
been handed down a Black creative tradition by their slave ancestors that equipped
them with the courage and creativity to fight oppression. This legacy not only paved
the way for them to honour and celebrate the Black tradition but also to evolve it. The
most compelling themes of contemporary literature like sustaining one's identity
against a racist and sexist society, the outburst after years of repressed anger, the need
16
to assert a creative life, were the gifts of slave, maternal ancestors like Linda Brent,
Elizabeth Keckley, Phillis Wheatly and even Sojourner Truth.