Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies

College Literature, Winter 2005 by Jacobs, Heidi L M

McHenry, Elizabeth. 2002. Forgotten Headers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies. Durham and London: Duke University Press. $59.95 hc. $18.95 sc. 423 pp.

Elizabeth McHenry's Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies does exactly what literary and historical scholarship should do: it draws upon foundational scholarship, redresses limitations of current scholarship, explores vital new questions within the field, and opens up fascinating new terrain for scholarly inquiry. In this compelling work, McHenry seeks out the "certain absences" within discussions of African American literacy and deftly makes visible the heretofore historically marginalized black readers of 1830-1940 (4).

While there has been considerable attention to the legacy of legally enforced illiteracy of enslaved African Americans, McHenry examines the literate practices and literary activities of free blacks in the antebellum North and black Americans after the Civil War. The recurrent scholarly focus upon black illiteracy, she writes, has "prevented us from seeing what is also undeniable- [African Americans'] literate practices" (4). Her carefully researched and meticulously crafted study shows the range, complexity, and diversity of African Americans' literacy and literary practices.

The impulse behind McHenry's five chapters is, in part, to make visible the multiple forms and sites of African American literacy and literary practices: she has chapters on the origins and rise of African American literary societies, the cultural work of the black press, literary coalitions in the age of BookerT.Washington, literary activities in the women's era, Georgia Douglas Johnson and the Saturday Nighters, and the building of community in contemporary reading groups. Each of these chapters is informed by McHenry's belief that scholars need to "dispense with the idea of a monolithic black community and replace it with a more accurate and historically informed understanding of a complex and differentiated black population" (14). Moreover, each chapter contributes to redressing what she regards as another scholarly limitation: "What is called for at this critical juncture in the development of African American historical, cultural, and literary studies is a greater understanding of the common forms of oppression faced by black Americans, as well as a more complex vision of what constitutes resistance" (17). African American literary societies, she argues, were formed "not only as places of refuge for the self-improvement of their members but as acts of resistance to the hostile racial climate" of the United States (17). While McHenry ostensibly sets out to examine African American literacy and literary practices between 1830 and 1940, she also chronicles a compelling history of resistance; in so doing, she reclaims a vital part of American history.

What is perhaps most incisive about McHenry's study is her attention to the multiple and nuanced ways in which literacy and literary practices were used as multi-layered forms of resistance. Many African American literary societies worked under the assumption that African Americans' future in the United States depended upon "creating for themselves the educational and cultural opportunities that would prepare them to understand the demands of democracy" (19). Because "literacy was closely linked with the ideals of 'citizenry,'" many literary societies attempted to help members develop skills that were "essential to fulfilling the responsibilities of citizenship and achieving the promise of American democracy" (19). In McHenry's treatment, African American literacy and literary practices are "technologies of power and political agency" (20) and the literary societies were potential sites wherein those technologies of power and agency could be nurtured and then taken into the community.

While McHenry celebrates the successes of literary societies, she also acknowledges their limitations. In discussing the goals of antebellum literary societies, she writes, "even as they worked optimistically . . . free blacks struggled with the realization that their organized literary activities did little to temper white racial prejudice or alter the negative image of black Americans in the white imagination" (83). Similarly, she notes that leaders of the black women's club movement must have been disheartened "by the prospect of measuring 'progress' that was slow in coming and often difficult to see at all" (248). Contemporary readers may also be dismayed to see that Mary Church Tyrell's lament is regrettably still applicable: African American children, she said, know much about the United States' white heroes yet "comparatively little about the creditable things which their African forebears have done" (241).

Although historical, McHenry's book is certainly not anachronistic: literacy, as numerous literacy scholars argue, is still a vital form of resistance and social change. Arguing against a "continuity in organized reading groups from the early nineteenth to the beginning of the twenty-first century," McHenry nevertheless notes, "these contemporary literary societies are generally involved in the same particular set of issues, especially those issues involving the relationship between literary work and political activism, between collective study and a sense of community, between the practice of reading and the formation of literary history" (297-98). In her epilogue, readers will see connections between Kathryn Johnson, an itinerant bookseller in the 1920s, and Terry McMillan's grassroots publishing and publicity tours. Readers may also see connections between the women's club movement and the wildly successful Go On Girl! Book Clubs. One may also hope that readers see the connections between the processes by which African American literacy and literary activities have been "lost" and marginalized over the years and the contemporary dismissal of ventures such as Oprah's Book Club. McHenry challenges the recurrent and often elitist critique of Oprah's Book Club with aplomb: noting that it is undeniable that "the literary discussions that take place in the classrooms of the nation's top colleges and universities are different from discussions of literature conducted by Winfrey," she argues "one is not necessarily better or even more sophisticated than the other, as some academics have insisted" (313). Her careful scholarship on early African American literary societies underscore her closing statement that "scholars of early-twenty-first century literacy and reading practices must bring to their research a recognition, of and respect for what has always been true: there are many ways to know a book" (313).