After the U.S. Civil War, beginning near the end of Reconstruction, white writers of the South felt called to break what several of them referred to as the region’s “silence” in the aftermath of war and emancipation. What could the South, briefly a nation, now a devastated and transformed section, say for itself? Answering this question became the principal vocation of the region’s white literary establishment in the period between Reconstruction and World War I. Speaking for the South was not a new enterprise; antebellum white Southerners had done so volubly in poetry, fiction, and polemical prose. But the present task, making the South articulate in the aftermath of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, imposed novel burdens on the region’s imaginative writers. Postbellum Southerners such as Irwin Russell, George Washington Cable, Thomas Nelson Page, and Thomas Dixon discovered that the South now needed two voices, represented as black and white, engaged in some kind of dialogue with one another over the South’s defining question, that of racial relations. This essay considers how these writers – though sometimes fiercely disagreeing with one another – summoned fictional black and white voices to engage their historical moment.

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.

If the Civil War had changed policy makers’ attitudes to black resettlement, it was to divide them into supporters of inclusionary and exclusionary forms of the idea. By 1865, the Blairs had come out for the latter – and for the Democratic Party that embodied it. But the Republicans struggled to break from old ways of thinking. When President Ulysses Grant proposed annexing the Dominican Republic as a potential destination for African Americans, but as a fully fledged state of the American Union, his colleagues divided over whether his proposal was radical or reactionary. Meanwhile, in the southern United States, waves of white oppression in the 1870s and 1890s drove African Americans toward the offer of an ACS that, lacking the financial support of times past, struggled to meet demand. As the United States filled with settlers of European descent, and as the great imperialist land-grab left ever fewer foreign locations for African American resettlement, the proto-segregation represented by black colonization morphed into the local segregation with which modern Americans are more familiar.

Two texts bookend the major phase of literary activity by Creoles of color in New Orleans, the first book of poetry by US citizens of African descent, Les cenelles (1845) and Nos Hommes et Notres Histoires (1911). The first – a collection of poems – evokes sexual and romantic relationships between people of different races, a notion that runs radically counter to the racial politics of the rest of the US South. The second emerged as polemic as the Jim Crow Era gained full ascendance and marginalized nonwhite people in ways that ran counter to long-standing cultural patterns in New Orleans regarding the elite Creoles of color.