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Transcription: [00:06:36]
..style, it gave us form, it gave us verve, in short soul

[00:06:42]
but on the other hand of course you have the literacy tradition. Now they merged later on but between the years of 1834 roughly and 1861,

[00:06:54]
these were the peak years for anti-slavery activity, very stressful years for Blacks and Whites who joined them in the abolitionist effort.

[00:07:03]
There was a lot of literary activity, mostly what we would call protest poetry in both the oral and the written, sometimes what we call the library forms.

[00:07:16]
These poets formed pretty much the background, the spine, the foundation, for the literary tradition that we have in Afro-America today.

[00:07:28]
I think one of the things we have to keep in mind when we talk about development of Afro-American poetry

[00:07:34]
whether we are talking about the oral or literary, is that the act of creation

[00:07:40]
and the act of liberation have always been connected and that and those two forks have formed the basis of the Black aesthetic, kind of an ideological aesthetic.

[00:07:50]
{SPEAKER name="Brooks B. Robinson"}
Okay. What about writers in the 1800s or the 19th Century?

[00:07:57]
{SPEAKER name="Eugene B. Redmond"}
Ok, in the 1800s of course we had the end of slavery writers, the abolitionist writers

[00:08:02]
{SPEAKER name="Brooks B. Robinson"}
Right.

[00:08:03]
{SPEAKER name="Eugene B. Redmond"}
but then after the Emancipation Proclamation, after the Civil War,

[00:08:08]
we had a maturation of Afro-American poetry, a very, development, highly-stylized poetry and the epics of someone like a Whitman, who I've already mentioned or the fine poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar, the excellent folk-based, Black-based work of James Weldon Johnson.

[00:08:31]
But yes. The poetry of the latter quarter of the...