Exploring the literary concept of W. E. B Dubois' double- consciousness from slavery, through Reconstruction and thereafter. African Americans acknowledged their inferiority in American society through literary mediums of oral tradition, narratives, prose and poems. Once viewed as property and a non-citizen cla**, Black authors provided their literary accounts and attitudes of the impactful significance their blackness caused, as well as, including their various appeals at equating the races.
1773-- Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral: “On Being Brought From Africa to America,” Phillis Wheatley
"Some view our sable race with scornful eye.
‘Their colour is a diabolic die.'
Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain,
May be refin'd, and join th' angelic train"
1845-- The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Dougla**, Frederick Dougla**
“By far the larger part of the slaves know as little of their ages as horses know of theirs, and it is the wish of most masters within my knowledge to keep their slaves thus ignorant.”
1851-- Sojourner Truth delivers her infamous “Ain't I a Woman?” speech at the Ohio Women's Convention
“That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain't I a woman?”
1861-- The Civil War begins; Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs
“When he told me that I was made for his use, made to obey his command in every thing; that I was nothing but a slave, whose will must and should surrender to his…”
1865-- Civil War ends; Congress pa**es the 13th Amendment; Reconstruction begins
“Section I: Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
1877-- Reconstruction ends; Institution of Jim Crow Laws; Not a Man, and Yet a Man, Albery Allson Whitman
“Now let the nation fling him from her arms, Forget the part he bore, when war's alarms were rumbling hoarsely in her troubled ear, and direful overthrow was plainly near; Forget the hands that caught her falling stars, And tore loud triumph from the flaunting bars of treason…”
1896--Major and Minors: “We Wear the Mask,” Paul Laurence Dunbar
"Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay let them only see us, while
We wear the mask."
1900--Up from Slavery, Booker T. Washington
“…I had the feeling that it was cruelly wrong in the central government, at the beginning of our freedom, to fail to make some provision for the general education of our people…I felt that the Reconstruction policy…as it relates to my race…was artificial and forced.”