why were black authors so important in america?

Question

i know it has something to do with the civil war and civil wrights movement but i'm not really sure what. Please can someone help me????

Answer 1

You need to elaborate on that question. For what period are referring? Any one period in particular?
The Harlem Renaissance was a period of time (1919 - 1929)when the descendants of slaves sought to define themselves and their culture. Writers, poets, artists and musicians looked back to their African roots and folk history in an effort to move forward with dignity and equality in an unfriendly land of white privilege.
One of the concepts of The Harlem Renaissance was that of the “new Negro.” As slaves, “Negroes” had been degraded and disenfranchised, treated as the property of men, and were considered to be the same as animals. By the 1920’s, even though they were supposed to be free, most “Negroes” were still a long way from enjoying the fruits of that freedom. In response to this disparity, Alain Locke, a Howard University philosophy professor wrote an essay describing the “spiritual coming of age” of the “new Negro,” wherein “… there are constructive channels opening out into which the balked social feelings of the American Negro can flow freely” (49 - 51). In 1925, Locke culminated these concepts in an anthology of writings entitled “The New Negro” (The Digital Scriptorium 1995).
W.E.B. DuBois, writer, co-founder of the N.A.A.C.P. and a figure at the forefront of The Harlem Renaissance wrote of the “Negro problem.” DuBois observed that “being a problem is a strange experience…” and recalled when “it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap in heart and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil” (6). This concept was also reflected in the poetry of Langston Hughes, another important writer of this period. In his succinct, “American Heartbreak,” Hughes echoed DuBois’ sentiments:

I am the American heartbreak-
Rock on which Freedom
Stumps its toe-
The great mistake
That Jamestown
Made long ago.
(5)

Answer 2

Wrong, and wrong.

The civil war and civil rights movement were 90 years seperated in time.

The important Black writers were part of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. They voiced a previously unvoiced diversity.

Answer 3

If what Martino has said is correct, then I would guess that the importance of black people in literature at that time was mirroring the importance of black people in jazz music at the time too- other cultures were a source of fascination in all the arts particularly from the 1920s onwards-.

Answer 4

Because there hadn't been any previously.