Communication is important. Some of us write for fun, others solely for educational purposes, but often, I write to make an impact. I’ve succeeded if one thing I say means something to someone else. Writing has impacted lives, but being a Black writer with our country’s given history was not only hard, but doing it successfully was monumental. Black art is important. It shows us examples of people who have succeeded, represents a shared culture, and helps people not only relate to our stories and learn about new ones. In honor of Black History Month, there are a few writers I would like to highlight for contributing to our history.
Maya Angelou
Angelou’s story is one for the books. Known as a civil rights activist, poet, singer, writer and dancer, Angelou spoke at former President Clinton’s inauguration, once again making history. She was the first woman and Black woman and the second poet to read a poem at an inauguration. She suffered early on from selective muteness but commonly said that this allowed her to listen closer, which she then used to write. Her poetry, words and story have impacted thousands of lives, and even though she has passed away, her influence will live on for lifetimes to come.
Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison was the first African-American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her writing revolutionized the way a Black woman can be portrayed in a story. Her novels have layers, and how she represents life will stay with you forever. Her most popular books include Beloved, the story of a female African American slave, and The Bluest Eye, a striking novel about America’s dark history of racism and the dangers of internalized racism on the individual and those around.
Nevertheless, her book Jazz has also had a long-lasting effect. Assistant professor in the College of Education at Towson University, Chantal Francois finds Morrison’s work inspiring, she says “Toni Morrison helped me to appreciate the power of an individual sentence and how much meaning it can make for the whole section, chapter, story and my reading of the book.” In the book Jazz, a character says, “I didn’t fall in love, I rose in it,” and for Chantal, that meant keeping this quote by her side from the moment she read it. Chantal says, “I love the way she just took a phrase that we take for granted, that we sing songs about, that we’ve unquestioningly ascribed so much meaning to, and she just turned it on its head.” Life in the perspective of love not being something we lose when we have, but something that nourishes us and gives us strength is beautifully sad. The woman that made this happen didn’t just affect Chantal or me, but so many people out there who had one line written by her that changed their lives.
Tyler Perry
Widely known for his popular comedic relief character Madea, Perry uses comedy to talk about the things that are hard to. His brilliance is in his screenwriting and how he can get a character on screen to teach us and hear us. His style may be a bit different from conventional writing, but comedy has a special way of bringing us together for enough moments to talk about something important, and Perry does this well.
James Baldwin
Born in 1924, Baldwin was one of the first Black writers to produce works that openly discussed sexuality in a time that was not nearly as accepting as ours is today. Baldwin used his personal experiences to write, putting feelings and experiences into words. Being a Black man during the American civil rights era, Baldwin wrote Nobody Knows My Name along with Giovanni’s Room in 1954, a novel detailing an American man in Paris’s deeply intimate story of falling in love with another man. Further, a literature enthusiast who is rarely seen without a book in her hand, and also the person I am lucky to call my “mom,” is a huge fan of Baldwin’s work. As a forever fan of Baldwin, she calls his work innovative; she finds that even though his writings are almost 50 years old, “so many of his observations still hold true regarding the Black experience seen today.” His fifth book, If Beale Street Could Talk, was adapted into a movie allowing the dark history of African American treatment in this country, but also one couple’s ability to find love and attempt to overcome a shared struggle to be brought to the big screen.
Jordan Peele
In Hollywood, receiving any type of representation as a Black artist has been hard, and while things have progressed as time goes on, being a Black screenwriter in the twenty-first century is a difficult job, but one Jordan Peele does well. Peele takes a distinct position on racism’s portrayal on screen in his groundbreaking film, Get Out. Peele took the opportunity to write a horror-thriller story from the perspective of Black people. What makes Peele’s screenwriting revolutionary is his ability to put into emotions and one-liners a lifetime of fear, happiness, and lessons that the Black community faces together. Get Out has won four Academy Awards, and for a movie with this message and content, allowing the Black perspective to become a relatable and recognizable film, Peele is already making history. And if there is one thing he can teach you, it’s don’t drink the tea.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Brooks made history by becoming the first African American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Brooks’ artistry stemmed from her ability to use the political circumstances of the 1940s and 1950s to create poetry that became its own form of knowledge. Her poems educate and expose the struggles that come with being Black in America, from societal treatment to problems within; Brooks is regarded as someone who wrote about and for the people.
Langston Hughes
While his name is commonly associated with Jazz, his poetry influenced Black culture. Using the message behind Jazz music and the influence of the Harlem Renaissance, what makes Hughes’ poems different is his appeal to people. His writing does not have a single message, not one single narrative, but instead, he writes about the everyday people whose stories are overlooked, the people who feel the effects of racism, who fought for quality, and who deserve equality. He wrote for the people with perspectives that mattered and those who maybe didn’t say anything but needed recognition. An infamous phrase from the poet himself’s, I Wonder as I Wander: An Autobiographical Journey, “books -where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas.”
Alice Walker
For Walker, writing about Black women is to write a story that’s personal. Her characters are complex, and victorious even when they sometimes lose, and their stories matter. Her famous book The Color Purple is a novel about a Black woman’s life expressed in her letters to God. The book is an intersection between gender, race and a woman ‘coming into’ her own life. Walker also made history through her own actions. In 1967, she and her then-husband became the first legally married interracial couple in Mississippi.
Thank you for making it through this article as I express my admiration for some of the writers that I have personally connected with and who have influenced Black culture and what it means to be Black. These are only a few writers and authors that have made history, and I recommend the Stacker article listing 50 Black writers to discover the stories of other influential figures.
I hope you take the month of February as an opportunity. Engage in conversation, read to learn, watch movies to enjoy, and celebrate Black History. At the same time, take moments to remember a past full of pain and conquering, along with the figures who pushed for our history to be remembered and our voices to be heard. It is our future that we have because of our past. Embrace it, change it and do everything you want and more in this life.
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