ivory carvings of the vast forgotten African Empires of Ife and Benin, although so wistful in their
tranquility, are tranquil in the possession of the
qualities of all classic and great art, so these
poems, the purest of them, move with a sovereignty that is never new to the lovers of the high
music of human utterance.”[1]
The later writers like Jean Toomer, Claud McKay, Jessie Fauset and others have come on the stage when the stream of Negro literature has grown to be of such importance and gained so much of technique and merit that it tends to merge into the broad flood of American literature and any notable Negro writer became ipso facto a national writer.
One must not forget the Negro orator. While in the white world the human voice as a vehicle of information and persuasion has waned in importance until the average man is somewhat suspicious of “eloquence,” in the Negro world the spoken word is still dominant and Negro orators have wielded great influence upon both white and black from the time of Frederick Douglass and Samuel Ward down to the day of J. C. Price and Booker T. Washington. There is here, undoubtedly, something of unusual gift and personal magnetism.
- ↑ Preface to Claud McKay’s Harlem Shadows.
