This introductory chapter provides historical context for situating key developments in African American literature and culture at the turn into the twentieth century. In particular, this chapter examines the major shifts that happened in the immediate decade following the Plessy v. Ferguson decision to legalize racial segregation, showing how African American writers, artists, athletes, and intellectuals advocated for civil and political rights, even as they turned inward to strengthen and fortify the infrastructures of their own communities. Illuminating reasons why this decade still remains largely underappreciated in African American literary history, this chapter argues for attention to geography, genre, and publication circumstance, as inflected through questions of gender, sexuality, class, and the politics of race and representation, to bring to light new ways of reading these critical years at the beginning of the twentieth century.

This chapter revisits one of the most recognized African American artists of the period, Henry Ossawa Tanner, and reveals not only that Tanner was an exemplar of African American education, art, and cultural achievement but that he was also part of a cadre of artists who were engaged in the professionalization and internationalization of African American art at the turn of the century. They were not, as Alain Locke had asserted, merely a transitional generation whose main contribution was to quell public skepticism about Black technical competencies in the visual arts. Rather, as shown in this chapter, this cohort of Black artists, including William A. Harper and William Edouard Scott, opened new imaginative spaces through their international travels and cosmopolitanism.