ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights the African-American investment in strategic language and suggests that Africans Americans generally have understood rhetorical and/or literate practices to be competitive arenas. The authors point to some of the major achievements of African-American rhetors over the course of American history, including the creation of the slave narrative, the verbal constitution of a group known as “African Americans,” and the formation of a musical tradition rooted in the spirituals and the blues. The authors explain that all of these rhetorical forms remain stirring articulations of Black yearnings and eloquent arguments for Black humanity. Individuals discussed in this chapter include Olaudah Equiano, David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and Malcolm X.
