African American Contributions to Composition Studies [1999]

The African American contribution to composition studies — an enormous one — flows from various confluences inside African American intellectual and rhetorical traditions. Free Black churches, culturally specific jeremiads, slave narratives, secret schools, Black women's clubs, and Black colleges all represent an enriching merger of African American intellectual and activist concerns with writing instruction initiatives. I do not have space here to catalog the entire effort, though I do hope to spur some impassioned archival activity. Nor do I suggest that African American composition activity has been uniform in its import. Undoubtedly, as has been the case in the field at large, there has been contestation, even personal contradictions, concerning purposes and goals. There have been, for example, numerous African American scholars and educators with “back-to-basics,” “skill-and-drill,” and “eradicationist” tendencies. I reference those outlooks to some degree in the following pages, but my bias lies elsewhere. My primary intention is to trace a line of thought from early rhetors and scholars to contemporary researchers, thinkers, and practitioners that both emphasizes critical pedagogy and values Black culture, especially its vernacular language. This is the strand of thinking that I find most attractive and persuasive because I view it, as I have argued in more detail elsewhere, to be the thinking most consistent with the need to produce critical and astute African American students. So of course I am slipping in the argument that the best and most informed African American intellects of the past two centuries, whether or not they were directly or exclusively connected to writing courses — and usually they were not — are on my side.