King Arthur and Black American Popular Culture

Summary

The extent to which the Arthurian legends have permeated American literature and popular culture is nothing short of astonishing. From the youth groups like the Knights of King Arthur and the Knighthood of Youth, which were run through public schools and local churches and included more than three quarters of a million young people among their members, to the remarkable examples of Arthurian art, both public (the Edwin Austin Abbey murals in the Delivery Room of the Boston Public Library) and private (the stained glass Malory windows in the Milbank Choir of the Chapel at Princeton University); from feature films, television shows, and cartoons to the numerous Arthurian toys, games, and comic books; from advertising and merchandizing to the broad scope of popular literature - the compatability of the Arthurian and American traditions seems clear. Even some of America’s most iconic figures have been influenced by the Arthurian legends: architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who after reading Richard Hovey’s masque, named his own homes after Taliesin the singer ; aviator Charles Lindbergh, who believed his fellow knights of the air to be twentieth-century counterparts to the heroic knights of King Arthur; Elvis Presley, who wrote love notes under the pseudonym of the most renowned of lovers, Lancelot. Yet, considering how pervasive the incorporation and democratization of the legends in American life has been, their absence in black American culture seems especially curious.

There is, however, evidence that the Arthurian stories - and more impor- tantly, the heroic ideals inherent in those stories - have in fact had an impact on blacks. Donald L. Hoffman has demonstrated that there are Arthurian allusions to be found in the works of writers such as West Indian author Sam Selvon (in The Lonely Londoners [1956], Moses Ascending [1975], and Moses Migrating [1983] ) and novelist Ishmael Reed (in Mumbo Jumbo [1972] and Flight to Canada [1976] ). But there are also other, more direct correspondences in black American literature beginning in the late nineteenth century. The influence of Tennyson - especially of Tennyson’s Galahad - is apparent, for example, in various popular but otherwise undistinguished works of black poetry and prose.