Cultural Heroes [2003]

In 1968, in the aftermath of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., John Oliver Killens wrote an essay, partly in tribute to the civil rights martyr, titled “The Black Writer and the Revolution.” He urged African American writers to remain up to the task of political and cultural transformation. “Make the revolution,” he exhorted. “You can be rebels with a cause. A rebel-with-a-cause plus a program equals a revolutionary” (p. 397). He issued his familiar call for a literature of Black legends, myths, and heroes, works that would incorporate historical reconstruction and visionary insight. The collective African American literary project, in other words, should celebrate African American people and promote resistance against oppression, and this artistic outpouring should be presented, according to the Killens prescription, in the African American vernacular:

Western man has used language, words, as a powerful weapon to enslave the rest of mankind, and now we black writers must use our language, Afro-Americanese, to redefine ourselves. We black folk are a colony on the mainland. I have heard colored musicians themselves say, “I don't play jazz, spirituals, rhythm and blues and that kind of stuff. I play serious music.” I'm saying, these brothers have been had. The language has enslaved them just as it has enslaved, on one level or another, every black brother and sister in this nation. One of the black writer's tasks is to decolonize the language. “Good hair” and “high yaller” and “a nigger ain't shit” will have no place in Afro-Americanese one of these days, and soon, if the black writer does his job. (p. 397)