Black Literature Programs—Special Problems of the Rocky Mountain Schools

Abstract

Instituting a black literature program at any school can be a difficult process, but in the Rocky Mountain colleges and universities there are certain problems peculiar to the region, problems which may also exist in any school with similarly limited resources. In general, the difficulties faced by schools across the nation concern the areas of materials, staff and students. Materials may not seem a potential difficulty when one recalls the continuing barrage of publishers' brochures advertising new black studies books, but many of these books are aimed at the lucrative freshman composition market rather than at higher level literature courses. Books such as The Black Seventies, Racism: A Casebook, Another View: To Be Black in America, or Justice Denied: The Black Man in White America may be useful in introducing students to another frame of reference, as, for example, in a composition course or a beginning sociology course. However, they are of little use to the teacher who intends to survey the development of black literature or to study a particular genre. Even the anthologies devoted strictly to literature are usually unsatisfactory because they emphasize the contemporary at the expense of earlier works; for example, Dark Symphony, a basically good collection edited by James Emanuel and Theodore Gross, contains only sixty pages of "Early Literature," that published before 1920. Novels published before 1960 are frequently out of print or unavailable in paperback unless they are the work of the very best writers such as Wright, Ellison, or Baldwin. Criticism too is often inadequate or non-existent except in the case of the best-known black writers. In addition to the difficulties of finding paperback texts, teachers in these schools will probably find that the library holdings are quite inadequate. In 1968 I found that Wright and James Weldon Johnson were well represented in the University of New Mexico library, but many black writers were not. In addition to the expected deficiencies in nineteenth century works, such twentieth century writers as Jean Toomer, Ama Bontemps, Zora Neale Hurston, Chester Himes, and most novelists of the 1950's and 1960's were poorly represented or completely absent. The library had subscribed to Phylon for decades, but had only a few old copies of Negro Digest dating back to the 1940's. Loggins's The Negro Author (1931) was in the collection, but Sterling Brown's The Negro in American Fiction (1937) was not.