For African Americans, storytelling remains an essential tool for recording history and instilling pride in the generations to come. Though this tradition started orally on the African continent with the village griot, it gained significant meaning in the United States, where the enslaved mastered the language of the oppressor and carved out messages of their own.
For centuries, the powers that be depended, in part, on misinformation about African Americans to legitimize chattel slavery and perpetuate an economic system that kept, and continues to keep, a large segment of the African American population at the bottom of the totem pole.
In taking pen to paper, African Americans of the colonial period and beyond raised the consciousness of the masses, color notwithstanding, while providing a perspective that helped organizers secure the rights many enjoy today.
Two African American storytellers, Phyllis Wheatley and Frederick Douglass, personified this tradition. Indeed, their contributions took African American storytelling to the next level, much to the benefit of the collective.
Phyllis Wheatley: Black America’s First Published Poet
By the time she died in 1784, Phyllis Wheatley achieved acclaim as the first African American woman to publish a book of poetry and accumulate earnings from her writing. Her accolades set the foundation for the genre of African American literature.
Wheatley’s poetry, as explained by prominent Wheatley scholar John C. Shields, was influenced by her personal beliefs and the literature she read under the tutelage of her enslavers. She incorporated classic Latin literature, Christianity, and African spirituality in her works.
The first two elements cemented her appeal to educated white men as she advocated for her freedom and that of other enslaved Africans.
Scholars say Wheatley published as many as 145 poems in her 31 years of life. Her works, initially published in London then the United States, include “To the King’s Most Excellent Majesty,” which she addressed to King George III. Another poem, titled “On being brought from Africa to America,” chronicled Wheatley’s enslavement and transport from modern-day Senegambia to the American colonies.
During the American Revolution, Wheatley wrote poetry in solidarity with the American colonists. Later, she successfully defended her poetic prowess during court proceedings that brought her before, among several figures, Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson and Lieutenant Governor Andrew Oliver.
She included a court-issued attestation of that victory in the preface of her book, “Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral.”
Throughout her life, and well after her death, Wheatley gained several admirers. Jupiter Hammon, another African American poet, wrote an ode to her. In 1838, Isaac Knapp, an abolitionist printer, published “Memoir and Poems of Phillis Wheatley, A Native African and a Slave. Also, Poems by a Slave,” which was an anthology of Wheatley’s poetry and that of George Moses Horton, an enslaved poet from North Carolina.
Even with Wheatley’s widespread recognition by presidents such as George Washington and other prominent figures, Wheatley had a strong detractor in Thomas Jefferson, who declined to acknowledge her poetic works and that of other Black poets. That of course didn’t stop Wheatley from achieving acclaim as the “most famous African on the face of the earth,” as French Enlightenment writer Voltaire expressed in a letter to a friend.
Frederick Douglass: The Lion of Literacy
Frederick Douglass wore several hats as an author, abolitionist and statesman. In 1845, he published his first autobiography, “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave,” after white Northerners expressed skepticism that a man with his oratory skills could have once been enslaved.
That book, which became a bestseller, fanned the flames of abolition and further solidified Douglass’ legacy as a 19th-century figure of great significance.
Douglass, born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey in the early 19th century, spent his early years on a plantation on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. After moving to Baltimore at the age of 12, Douglass learned how to read while living with Thomas and Sophia Auld.
As Sophia Auld taught Douglass how to read against her husband’s (the master) wishes, Douglass came to embrace literacy as the pathway to freedom. Soon after she ceased lessons and hid all literary material from Douglass, but he continued his education in secret. He learned to read from white neighborhood children and while watching the men he worked with as they wrote.
An anthology titled “The Columbian Observer” shaped Douglass’ views about freedom and human rights. Those ideals followed him as he charted his path to freedom, of course with the help of Anna Murray, a free Black woman whom he would later marry.
After escaping from slavery, Douglass emerged as a national abolitionist leader in Maryland and New York. The more he indicted chattel slavery, orally and through the written word, the more he challenged the false notion that African Americans couldn’t function independently.
In 1852, Douglass delivered a speech titled, “ What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?,” which historian William S. McFeely considered one of history’s best antislavery orations.
In his later years, Douglass published The North Star, an abolitionist newspaper. The author and abolitionist, who lived in Washington, D.C., during his life, also wrote two other autobiographies titled “My Bondage and My Freedom” and “Life and Times of Frederick Douglass.” The former delved more deeply into Douglass’ transition from enslavement to freedom while the latter explored Douglass’ life during and after the Civil War.
Today, Douglass’ legacy lives on in the untold number of schools and landmarks named in his honor, as well as living descendants who continue to preserve his memory. Of course, no one can forget the volumes of speeches, articles and books that Douglass wrote in support of a noble cause