25

INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME THREE xxxvii

plary black autobiography of the era was Booker T. Washington's Up from
Slavery (1901). Washington argued the utility of including American blacks
thoroughly in the nation's fabric and saw little value for black Americans in
the search for and assertion of some distinctive African American identity.
Some scholars assert that African Americans would not really resume the
quest to define their identity until the establishment of Marcus Garvey's
United Negro Improvement Association and the rise of the New Negro artis-
tic movement in the 1920s. As Sundquist points out in a review of Dickson
Bruce's Black American Writing from the Nadir: Evolution of a Literary
Tradition, 1877–1915, "the central issue for African-American writers of the
era was the discovery of a voice and a vocabulary for articulating black
identity within, not outside of, the mainstream of genteel culture."⁵² In this
context, Wilson J. Moses contends that, "[w]ith slavery dead, [Douglass]
was unable to construct a public role that spoke adequately to the problems
of Reconstruction.... The enduring popularity of Frederick Douglass derives
far more from the brilliance of his anti-slavery career than from the clarity
of his postbellum vision."⁵³ Henry Louis Gates and Charles Davis write that
the confrontational, resolute black voice was suppressed or altogether aban-
doned in the face of the daunting problems and confusions of postemancipa-
tion freedom: "With the end of slavery... the black seems to have lost his
great, unique theme until Jim Crow racism and segregation recreated it. The
stilling of the black "voice" assumed myriad forms, not the least distressing
of which was the effective destruction of black arts and letters existing
before 1865.... Essentially, the slave narrative proper could no longer exist
after slavery was abolished."⁵⁴ While Gates is undoubtedly aware of the
large number of black autobiographies produced between 1865 and 1900,
the generic expectations of these autobiographies altered drastically, as did,
accordingly, the black autobiographical form itself.⁵⁵ For these scholars,
Douglass's narratives and black autobiography in general had lost their
noble social missions after 1865.

There can be no question that the thrust of these autobiographies shifted
after the Civil War as authors abandoned the theme of the broad pursuit of
freedom as an absolute good and focused instead on a complex interrogation
of the character and limits of the recently secured freedom. William Andrews

^{5252. Review by Eric J. Sundquist in Nineteenth-Century Literature, 45:106 (June 1990).}

^{5353. Review by Wilson J. Moses in African American Review, 30:302 (Summer 1996).}

^{5454. Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds., The Slave's Narrative (New York, 1985),
xviii}

^{5555. Ibid., xxii–xxiii.}