Living Our Stories, Telling Our Truths : The Autobiography and the Making of the African-American Intellectual Tradition

by Franklin, V. P.

• ISBN13: 9780689121920
• ISBN10: 068912192X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1995-02-01
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Summary

In Living Our Stories, Telling Our Truths V. P. Franklin reinterprets the lives and thought of twelve major black American writers and political leaders - including Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, W. E. B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Adam Clayton Powell, as well as now lesser known but equally crucial figures, among them Alexander Crummell, who declared black Americans a "chosen people" of the Lord; James Weldon Johnson, a key member of the Harlem Renaissance; Harry Haywood, a Communist Party member who forced the party to recognize the revolutionary potential of the black working class; and reformer, journalist, and women's rights advocate Ida B. Wells-Barnett, the most famous black American woman of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.
V. P. Franklin shows that autobiography occupies the central position in the African-American literary and intellectual tradition because "oftentimes personal truth was stranger than fiction." Whether they believed that African Americans were destined to "redeem the soul of America," in the words of James Baldwin, or that black people in the United States must be liberated "by any means necessary," the men and women whose life stories V. P. Franklin retells all spoke out for self-determination and independent black leadership.
The struggle for freedom has been at the core of the collective experience of African Americans in the United States, and autobiographies have provided personal accounts of what freedom meant and how it could be achieved. In the century-and-a-half between the publication of the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, in 1845, and that of Lorene Cary's Black Ice and Brent Staples's Parallel Time: Growing Up in Black and White in this decade, African Americans have used their personal experiences as a mirror to reflect the larger social and political context of black America. In bearing witness to the injustices they endured, the twelve writers examined in Living Our Stories, Telling Our Truths challenged American society's perceptions about itself and undermined its prejudices.

Author Biography

V. P. Franklin is professor of history and political science at Drexel University in Philadelphia.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. 9
Introduction	p. 11
Alexander Crummell: Defining Matters of Principle	p. 21
Ida Wells-Barnett: To Tell the Truth Freely	p. 59
James-Weldon Johnson: The Creative Genius of the Negro	p. 95
Harry Haywood: In Defense of the Black Working Class	p. 139
Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston: Conflicting Blueprints for Black Writing	p. 185
The Autobiographical Legacy of W. E. B. Du Bois	p. 223
The Confessions of James Baldwin	p. 275
Malcolm X and the Resurrection of the Dead	p. 319
Gwendolyn Brooks and Amiri Baraka: The Creation of a Black Literary Aesthetic	p. 347
Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.: The Need for Independent Black Leadership	p. 391
Notes	p. 418
Index	p. 455
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