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The Civil Rights Movement and the American Short Story
CONTEXTUALIZATION
The Civil Rights Movement refers to the reform movements in the United States aimed at abolishing racial discrimination
of African Americans. The Civil Rights Movement marks a period of heroics, bravery and pride in the African-American experience.
Although the starting point of the Civil Rights Movement is not exact, historically the Civil Rights Movement is believed
to have begun with the Supreme Court decision on the Brown vs. Board of Education case on May 17, 1954 and ended with the
March on Washington in 1963.
Predating the 1950s, there was a long history of black resistance and denial of black civil rights and liberties. In
the 1940s, labor and civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph organized a mass movement forcing President Roosevelt to take
steps against racial discrimination in defense industries. In 1947, Jackie Robinson played for the Brooklyn Dodgers and broke
the color barrier in major league baseball. Additionally, the NAACP's legal campaign against segregation won significant
victories in voting rights, education, and interstate transportation cases. The victories for African Americans did not lack
consequences. In the 1940s, leading up to the years of the Civil Rights Movement, Southern whites responded with fear, hatred,
and extreme violence.
In the aforementioned Brown vs. Board of Education case of 1955, the Supreme Court ruled public school segregation violated
the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, and was a milestone in the Civil Rights Movement. An additional crucial
event in the Civil Rights Movement was in December 1955, when the Montgomery Bus Boycott began with Rosa Parks as Rosa boarded
a bus in downtown Montgomery and refused to get out of the seat to accommodate white people. The eventual success of the
Montgomery Bus Boycott showed nonviolent mass action had potential for making change and brought Reverend Martin Luther King
Jr. to national attention. Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested during the Montgomery Bus Boycott campaign. The Bus Boycott
campaign ended with a United States Supreme Court decision outlawing racial segregation on public transportation. King was
also instrumental in the founding of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957, and in 1959, King wrote The Measure
of A Man. King continued to organize and lead marches for blacks' right to vote, desegregation, labor rights, and other basic
civil rights.
In the struggle for African American equality in the 1960s, people were participating in lunch counter sit-ins, followed
in 1961 by "Freedom Rides" challenging segregation at bus stations. In 1962, James Meredith became the first black
student to attend the University of Mississippi, resulting in a bloody confrontation between federal marshals and a segregationist
mob. In the mid-1960s, Martin Luther King Jr.'s notability in the Civil Rights Movement continued to grow as King helped organize
a protest campaign in Birmingham in 1963, and subsequently led the March on Washington political rally where Martin Luther
King Jr. delivered the famous I Have a Dream speech at the Lincoln Memorial.
Altogether, the Civil Rights Movement had a great effect on American culture. As a result of the bravery of the above
stated and countless additional individuals, segregation was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court and enforced by the
Federal Government. More importantly, however, the black community learned the future was controllable regardless of oppression
and segregation, and despite attempts by racist white society, blacks could be free.
SALIENT POINTS
Since the beginnings of American literature, writers and artists have been concerned with creating and defining American
identity. During and after the Civil Rights Movement, numerous writers defined American identity in relation to specific ethnic
identities by writing about the existance of multiple cultural identities within American culture.
Throughout the decade following World War II, professional African American dramatists and playwrights such as William
Blackwell Branch, Loften Mitchell, and James Baldwin found greater access to the white American theatre than previous generations
of black playwrights had known. Female authors such as Toni Morrison, and Lorraine Hansberry began to write about race, sexuality,
class, nationality, and motherhood. By writing about race and gender, women of color like Gwendolyn Brooks and Maya Angelou
helped create new insights on feminism as feminism developed in America.
No one in African American theatre could have predicted the huge critical and popular success of Chicagoan Lorraine Hansberry
after Hansberry's first play, A Raisin in the Sun, opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on Broadway in March 1959. A portrayal
of an African American family confronting the problems of upward mobility and integration, A Raisin in the Sun introduced
not only a brilliant playwright produced by a black American but also an extraordinarily talented cast of African American
Actors. In A Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry writes about dreams, and focuses on the main character's struggle to deal with
the oppressive circumstances ruling the characters' lives. In the following excerpt from the play, A Raisin in the Sun, the
characters, Walter and Mama speak of the changes brought about by the Civil Rights Movement
Mama: Oh So now it's life. Money is life. Once upon a time freedom used to be life;now it's money. I guess the world really
do change . . .
Walter: No, it was always money, Mama. We just didn't know about it.
Mama: No . . . something has changed. You something new, boy. In my time we was worried about not being lynched . . .
You ain't satisfied or proud of nothing we done. I mean that you had a home; that we kept you out of trouble till you was
grown; that you don't have to ride to work on the back of nobody's streetcar. You my children—but how different
we done become.
While the Civil Rights Movement was beginning in the United States, numerous American authors like James Baldwin were
traveling around, living, and writng in Europe. When Baldwin returned to the United States, Baldwin became actively involved
in the Civil Rights Movement, and Baldwin wrote the lengthy essay Down at the Cross (later called The Fire Next Time once
published). The Fire Next Time portrayed Baldwin's discontent at the state of the country in the 1960s. In The Fire Next
Time, Baldwin writes:
I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be accepted by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks,
simply don't wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on this planet. White people
will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this
which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.
Poems spurred from the Civil Rights Movement also emerged during the movement and additional writings came later with
reflective pieces inviting people of color to remember the period during when people fought for equality. In the 1960s, The
Black Arts Movement was one of the most important times in the Civil Rights literature. The Black Arts Movement was during
the 1960s when blacks were inspired to establish publishing houses, magazines, journals, and art institutions. The movement
was triggered by the assassination of Malcolm X.
The Black Arts Movement influenced the world of literature and portrayed different ethnic voices. Before the movement,
there was a small amount of diversity and minority point of view in literature. One of the more notable figures of the Black
Arts Movement is Amiri Baraka. Baraka points out the integral relationship between black artists and black communities in
a poem called "Black Art" as Baraka writes:
We want poems
like fists beating niggers out of Jocks
or dagger poems in the slimy bellies
of the owner-jews.
Black poems to
smear on girdlemamma mulatto bitches
whose brains are red jelly stuck
between 'lizabeth taylor's toes. Stinking
Whores! We want poems that kill.
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot guns.
The poem goes on to say:
Let Black people understand
that they are the lovers and the sons
of lovers and warriors and sons
of warriors Are poems & poets &
all the loveliness here in the world.
INFLUENCES ON THE SHORT STORY
In the 1950s and 1960s, with the rise of the Civil Rights Movement, fiction developed as African Americans rejected earlier
hopes for an integrated society and began to call for a separate black culture. Milestone events during the Civil Rights
Movement led various authors to start writing new, more socially awakening, contemporary African-American narratives. For
example, the murder of Emmett Till, a black teenager visiting Mississippi in 1955, led Gwendolyn Brooks to compose The Last
Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till and is an example of the tendency toward a more explicitly socially critical verse.
Authors such as Hansberry, Baldwin, and Walker were not only writing about Civil Rights and blacks but also actively playing
a part in the Civil Rights Movement. During the Civil Rights Movement, authors seemed braver. As blacks gained legal and
social victories, so did black authors, even female authors, like Lorraine Hansberry. Hansberry's play, A Raisin in the Sun
was a revolutionary work for the time. Hansberry advanced fiction by creating in the Younger family: an original honest depiction
of a black family on an American stage, in an age when predominantly black audiences simply did not exist. A Raisin in the
Sun was a true success.
Once the Black Arts Movement was well under way, authors such as Baraka had not only gained bravery but also felt the
responsibility to go beyond writing about a separate black culture and to write for the black people, thus using new forms
of fiction to create a new history. Baraka, by helping start The Black Arts Movement, aided in reforming and rejecting the
literary forms and values of white America, and instead magazines and institutions were founded to support writing reflecting
the black experience. In addition, fiction and literature were not only read in story form; Writers like Baraka brought the
artist smack into the streets of his community. Operating on street corners, bringing poetry, plays, painting and music to
the people and streets of Harlem, Baraka accomplished the feat of making art accessible to the people and making artists responsible
to their community.
Authors during the Civil Rights Movement measured the effectiveness of fiction by how much change the authors writing
brought to the world. Because authors during he 1950s and 1960s were so personally involved in the Civil Rights movement,
short stories and even other forms of art reflected a new socially and imaginatively energized sound from the freedom struggles
of the time. The authors contributing to the advancement of literature during the Civil Rights movement were the fighters,
the artists, the intellectuals & people discontent with the world the way the world was. Authors represented a developed
and advanced way of living in a new society, and short stories reflected the new society formed by the Civil Rights Movement.
CONNECTIONS TO OUR CLASS
Important literary works spawned by the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s encompass various themes and philosophies
associated with the achievements of the Civil Rights Movement. During the Civil Rights Movement much literature exposed the
bleak conditions of black life and condemned discrimination. Richard Wright's Native Son, written in 1940 and Ralph Ellison's
Invisible Man, written in 1952, describe a black man's quest for identity in a hostile world. James Baldwin explored the same
theme in novels, essays, and dramas set primarily in the urban North.
Although the nature of the Civil Rights Movement brought about changes in the short story, common literary elements in
literature from the 1950s and 1960s transcend time. Examples of transcended literary elements are realism, irony, and the
narrative. Numerous short stories and other forms of literary works, written during the Civil Rights movement, focus on one
main character (additional characters are often not as dynamic) refusing to further accept the situation of the main character.
Throughout A Raisin in the Sun, characters reference the political and social changes happening at the time. Walter speaks
of the Civil Rights Movement and says freedom is not enough and while the movement is a large step for blacks, in the real
world Walter and Walter’s black peers are still treated differently and more harshly than whites.
Tille Olsen's Tell Me A Riddle describes a conflict between two characters, Eva and David, and centers around the couple's
long marriage and social and economic hardships. The story focuses on a wife's refusal to accept, after thirty-seven years,
her husband's insensitivity to her needs. (Snyder 453) Similar themes of the main character's resistance to injustice are
found throughout Civil Rights literature and reflect American society and blacks' resistance to segregation in the 1950s and
1960s.
Due to the nature of the Civil Rights Movement, much of the literature produced at the time contained realism. Authors
wrote about familiar, ordinary aspects of life and depicted life in a straightforward, realistic manner. Short stories written
in the 1950s and 1960s often contained descriptions of everyday, usually lower class life. Just as the way Ambrose Bierce's
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, has a realistic plot and demonstrates the realistic thoughts of the narrator, so did the
writings of the Civil Rights period. Baraka viewed social realism as a means for inspiring a revolutionary fervor among society.
As well, additional authors were highly affected by the current status of segregation issues in America and tended to use
realism as a tool to spread the truth of the Civil Rights time to readers.
Similar to the irony in Edgar Allan Poe's Ligeia and The Cask of Amontillado, in A Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry uses dramatic
irony as well. Poe uses irony in Ligeia, surrounding the narrator and Ligeia: Ligeia loves life, yet Ligeia is dying and
the narrator is attracted to Ligeia but instead marries Rowena, a completely different type of woman. Similarly, in A Raisin
in the Sun, there is irony when Walter believes the majority business activities are corrupt, and even before Walter is asked
to do so, Walter prepares to pay the graft. Ironically, however, when Walter gives the money to a friend and Walter's friend
runs off with the money, Walter's friend ruins Walter's dreams not the collector Walter suspected.
Additionally, A Raisin in the Sun contains dramatic irony similar to Poe's irony in Ligeia. In A Raisin in the Sun, when
audience sees Bobo, the audience knows Walter's plan has been foiled. While Walter is asking Bobo to "tell him how things
went in Springfield," the audience immediately guesses the outcome. The other characters also seem to become aware of
impending doom long before Walter does. Walter asks Bobo 'There ain't nothin' wrong, is there?" Of course, the reader
knows something is wrong, but the characters continue the dialogue until Bobo "hits him over the head" with the
truth.
Lastly, authors during the Civil Rights Movement continued the narrative form. For instance, Baldwin frequently used
first-person narration and the personal essay when writing. Baldwins fiction followed the tradition of slave narratives, and
presents a theme of liberation and a freeing of subjectivity being expressed in writing.
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