African American literature of the nadir: the mission of the intelligentsia and ‘going to the people

The period in the African American literary history after the Civil War and Reconstruction and up to the Harlem Renaissance (1870s-1910s) remains understudied both in Russia and in the USA. It was called ‘the nadir of American race relations’ by Rayford W. Logan, an African American historian and Pan-African activist. The ‘nadir’ (which means the ‘lowest point’) was, at the same time, the turning point in African American social and literary history that led to the new epoch, the 20th century. The educated Black elite - ‘Negro middle class’, being the creative community that pushed forward ‘cultural production’, was then a tiny group of intellectuals (priests, doctors, teachers, engineers, lawyers, etc.) who often combined their professional work with creative writing. The main conflict of the epoch was the opposition between the gentility code along with assimilationist aspirations, typical of the Black intellectual elite, and the color line - racist prejudices and segregation, typical of the American post-Reconstruction society with its fear of miscegenation. Under these circumstances, the Black intellectual elite, feeling its double alienation (racial - from the middle class whites, and social - from the Blacks of the lower class), comes to an understanding of racial solidarity and racial uplift as the mission of African American intelligentsia. Their ‘going to the people’ included criticism of their own class as hypocritical, passive, and indifferent to the sufferings of their 'Black brothers’ as well as praising of the Negro rural folk character, its best moral qualities. Besides referring to the best-known writers of the period (Albery A. Whitman, Paul Dunbar, Charles W. Chesnutt), the paper covers some of the less known literary works - short stories by V. Earle Matthews, poems by Solomon G. Brown, and novels by James H. W. Howard, Walter H. Stowers and W. Anderson.