ABSTRACT
Just as music had been represented in the pioneering fictional efforts of William Wells Brown and Martin R. Delany as a expression of protest against slavery and a means of both physically and spiritually transcending this bondage, post-Civil War African American authors, such as Pauline E. Hopkins and Paul Laurence Dunbar, incorporated music into fiction dedicated to the “uplifting of the race”. In Contending Forces, Hopkins attacks American racism at the close of the nineteenth century by linking the lives of her contemporary characters to the mob rule violence and miscegenation their ancestors endured in slavery times. The emergence of music as a professional pursuit for black men and women at the turn-of-the-century is depicted in Paul Laurence Dunbar’s The Sport of the Gods. The novel is concerned with the migration of African Americans to the North and the life they discover there.
