ABSTRACT
THANK GOD, HE’S BLACK!”1 EXCLAIMED DR. HENRY A.TOBEY UPON READING Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poems written in “negro” dialect. Tobey understood the value and the significance of the intersection between Dunbar’s race and his writing. And, although the negro dialect verses included in Oak and Ivy (1893), the poet’s first self-published collection, were few, they became crucial to his professional success. These “negro” poems would supply the literary and cultural demand for black racial “authenticity.” Moreover, they would provide tangible “proof “of the difference between black and white. Tobey and Charles A.Thatcher helped to arrange public readings and to secure critical endorsements for Dunbar; they also financed the publication of his second volume, Majors and Minors (1895). This new book, a private publication of Dunbar and his sponsors, was devised to include an unusual frontispiece portrait of the author which, as an unmistakable authenticator, visually declared to the reader the fact of the poet’s race. Tobey encouraged Dunbar to deliver a copy of Majors and Minors to a well-known actor who, after enthusiastically reading this book by a black man, sent it to William Dean Howells. It was Howells’s review of Majors and Minors in the June 27, 1896, issue of Harper’s Weekly that introduced Dunbar’s poetry to readers across the nation. Howells believed Dunbar’s version of negro dialect was more than literature, and the portrait was the salient evidence. Dunbar’s, writes Howells, “was the face of a young negro, with the race traits strangely accented: the black skin, the woolly hair, the thick outrolling lips, and the mild, soft eyes of the pure African type.”2
