Voice from The Past
Written By: Ebony Bailey On May 25th, 1894, Anna Julia Cooper, an African American activist, educator, and writer, spoke at a Hampton Normal School (now Hampton University). Invited to speak at a Folklore Conference, Cooper delivered a speech in a large assembly hall, addressing an audience of teachers, trustees, Hampton graduates, and folklore society members. What did she discuss that Friday evening? African American folklore.
In her speech, Cooper argued for the importance of Black folklore; for her, it embodied power, a strategy of creative expression. It was a secret weapon that allowed African Americans to challenge Eurocentric aesthetics, cultural traditions, and perspectives. In a time when European traditions were held as historical and societal standards, Cooper viewed Black folklore as “emancipation from the [Eurocentric] model” (813-14). Looking out onto a hall of Black graduates, Cooper said that Black Americans must turn to African American folk traditions, their “homely inheritance” (813-14). She insisted that these “songs, superstitions, customs, tales” embody a “legacy left from the imagery of the past” (814-15). In other words, for Cooper, African American folklore represented a cultural and creative past for Black Americans, a history that could be harnessed for the future.
Cooper’s view of folklore foreshadows the Harlem Renaissance, a twentieth-century flourishing of Black creative expression. The Harlem Renaissance often joined folklore with racial politics. About 30 years after Cooper’s speech, we can hear echoes of her words in treatises by Alain Locke, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston. In The New Negro, like Cooper, Locke labels folklore as “artistic endowments and cultural contributions” (6). But, like W.E.B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk, Locke positions folklore as a “conscious contributor” to American culture and life (6). Hughes, similar to Cooper, describes folklore as a “distinctive” material that stands against “American standardization,” and, if the artist embraces folklore, it leads them closer to realizing the beauty in blackness (41). Hurston also builds on Cooper, viewing folklore as a source of study, life, and art. Yet she extends folklore into the present, stating that it is “not a thing of the past” but something “still in the making” (65). In Hurston’s, Hughes’s, and Locke’s pieces you can see the threads of Cooper’s speech.
Cooper’s work not only aligned with future generations of Harlem Renaissance artists; her remarks also directly influenced her contemporaries. Cooper was actively involved in the Hampton Folklore Society, and she served as the founder and corresponding secretary for the Washington Negro Folklore Society (Gines). Additionally, in her most well-known work, A Voice from the South, she calls on Black writers to use the “folk-lore and folk songs of native growth” in their writing in order to challenge racial stereotypes (224). Cooper suggests that Black writers and folklorists, by investing in African American folklore, can create truer and more nuanced depictions of African Americans. In fact, she points out how white folklorists and writers have misrepresented African Americans and profited from Black folklore:
Joel Chandler Harris made himself rich and famous by simply standing around among the black railroad hands and cotton pickers of the South and compiling the simple and dramatic dialogues which fall from their lips. What I hope to see before I die is a black man honestly and appreciatively portraying both the Negro as he is, and the white man, occasionally, as seen from the Negro's standpoint. (225-226)
With this poignant observation, Cooper highlights the exploitation of Black creativity and a system that allows it. Several American folklorists did not acknowledge their part in such exploitation. At the same time, many African Americans were not able to document, share, and speak on their own narratives.
Interestingly, in 1894, Cooper spoke alongside a white American folklorist, William Wells Newell. Newell, who founded the American Folklore Society, was a prominent figure in American folklore studies (Bell 7). Yet, I often wonder how Newell conversed and collaborated with his Black contemporaries. Perhaps, unsurprisingly, Cooper and Newell had two different perspectives on folklore. In his speech, Newell, like Cooper, associated race with folklore: “Lore means learning; folk, as I shall here use the word, means race” (807-8). However, while Cooper discussed race and racism, Newell, in his discussion of race and folklore, upheld a “Eurocentric model” and avoided turning a critical eye on himself. In fact, he pondered what race he belonged to and concluded that he was simply part of the “human race,” (809) thereby denying “whiteness” itself as a construct. By contrast, Cooper pinpointed folklore as key to revealing processes of racial identification, colonialism, and internalized racism. Significantly, Cooper contributed to a nineteenth-century dialogue about American folklore studies and race.
Bell, Michael J. “William Wells Newell and the Foundation of American Folklore Scholarship.” Journal of the Folklore Institute, vol. 10, no. 1/2, 1973, pp. 7–21. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3813877. Accessed 7 July 2021.
Cooper, Anna Julia. 1892. “A Voice from the South.” Documenting the South. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2000, https://docsouth.unc.edu/church/cooper/cooper.html#coope175. Accessed 6 July 2021.
Cooper, Anna J. “Paper.” The Annotated African American Folktales, edited by Maria Tatar and Henry Louis Gates Jr., W.W. Norton, 2017, pp. 814-15. E-book.
“Folk-lore and Ethnology.” The Southern Workman, vol. 22, no. 7, July 1894, pp. 131-3. Haithitrust, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.hngblm&view=1up&seq=524. Accessed 6 July 2021.
Gines, Kathryn T. “Anna Julia Cooper.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 31 Mar. 2015, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/anna-julia-cooper/. Accessed 6 July 2021.
Hughes, Langston. “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” Double-Take: A Revisionist Harlem Renaissance Anthology, edited by Venetria K. Patton and Maureen Honey, Rutgers University Press, 2001, pp. 40 – 44.
Hurston, Zora Neale. “Characteristics of Negro Expression.” Double-Take: A Revisionist Harlem Renaissance Anthology, edited by Venetria K. Patton and Maureen Honey, Rutgers University Press, 2001, pp. 61-74.
Locke, Alain. “The New Negro.” Double-Take: A Revisionist Harlem Renaissance Anthology, edited by Venetria K. Patton and Maureen Honey, Rutgers University Press, 2001, pp. 3-6.
Moody-Turner, Shirley. “Recovering Folklore as a Site of Resistance.” Black Folklore and the Politics of Racial Representation. The University Press of Mississippi, 2013, pp. 72-100.
Newell, William Wells. “The Importance and Utility of the Collection of Negro Folk-Lore.” The Annotated African American Folktales, edited by Maria Tatar and Henry Louis Gates Jr., W.W. Norton, 2017, pp. 806-813. E-book.
