Black Folklorists in Pursuit of Equality: African American Identity and Cultural Politics, 1893–1943

Black Folklorists in Pursuit of Equality provides important contributions to the history of United States and African American folklore studies. Dr. Ronald Sharps illuminates African American leaders’ use of folklore in African American intellectual thought and expands the scope of scholarship on some of the earliest folklore research by African Americans. The book also highlights complexities of collecting, studying, and interpreting African American folklore during segregation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Beginning with folklore research at Hampton Institute and the Hampton Folklore Society shortly after Reconstruction, Sharps explores the history of several generations of African American leaders who assigned at least eight different interpretations to African American folklore in the Black community's efforts to achieve citizenship and social, political, and economic equality. These leaders embraced diverse ideologies in which folklore demonstrated African American achievement within the contexts of systems of white supremacy, racial violence, and racial segregation. This book reveals how racial oppression and social hierarchies sometimes shaped and warped interpretations of African American cultural practices and beliefs, making community-based interpretations dangerous for African American leaders to fully uncover.In his introduction, Sharps contends that an important impetus for African Americans to begin to collect folklore was the quest to claim an African American racial identity that illustrated how freed African Americans could be viewed as a civilized people worthy of equality—that African Americans, as a people were “not to be an anomaly” among peoples of the world viewed as civilized (p. 1). With this premise, Sharps relies on two key questions as the foundation for his book, which focus on the use of folklore: “What is the character (inner and everyday life) of the race as revealed in the collective indigenous folklore and what path to civilization and full equality did this characterization legitimize?” (p. 1).Sharps’ scrupulous research has unearthed important information from archives, journals, and literature to highlight the role of folklore in African American intellectual thought. Sharps identifies eight conflicting and often overlapping equality discourses around folklore and racial identity, each as the basis of a chapter.This descriptive volume has excellent notes, a rich bibliography, and a well-conceptualized index. Among the riches scattered within it are the names of little-known African American folklorists whose life stories and contributions were buried in African American archives. In addition, Sharps explores Booker T. Washington's extensive influence on folklore study and a long history of transnational relationships between historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and communities within African countries—areas of research that deserve further examination for a deeper understanding of the early ethnographic research and missionary work conducted by African Americans.One of the strongest chapters, “Folklore in Pursuit of Full Equality and Self-Determination,” illuminates the quest of several folklorists to find equity for African Americans by exploring and interpreting African American folklore through Marxist ideology in the 1930s. Chronicling these efforts with ample examples and sensitivity, Sharps documents this era with one of the most concise, inclusive, and detailed histories available to date on the period.That being said, this book has several shortcomings that should concern readers. First, because this work does not primarily foreground the scholarship or thought of Black folklorists working for equality, it appears to be mistitled. Instead, this book seems to offer an important intellectual history of the ways African American leaders—including some folklorists—interpreted African American folklore. This book also fails to distinguish between those who collected and studied folklore and those who found ideological uses for folklore. This distinction is important. Including folklorists in this story, rather than merely featuring their contributions and perspectives, shows them working toward one of the interpretative discourses that Sharps has identified. For example, although the book features folklore research based at Hampton Institute, it gives short shrift to Roscoe E. Lewis, one of the most significant folklorists at Hampton with the Federal Writers’ Project in the late 1930s. Examining Lewis’ orientation and contributions, in relation to Hampton's ideologies, would offer significant insights.Second, while showing connections between folklore studies about Blacks and folklore studies by Blacks, the book does not distinguish between these standpoints as clearly as would be useful for understanding the perspectives Blacks brought to folklore scholarship. The scholarship by Blacks emerging out of the contexts of segregation came from different stances than the scholarship written about Blacks by whites. However, Sharps does not consistently delineate the differences in viewpoints nor does he clarify how many African American leaders attempted to counter white scholarship and stereotypes about Blacks.Third, more consistent explanatory analyses could have strengthened the eight discourses, which are never clearly identified nor summarized. Framing the interpretative discourses are various concepts of equality—economic, social, political, and full—but these concepts lack definitions. While each chapter offers extensive data in support of a discourse, the defining characteristics of a specific discourse need greater delineation in each chapter. Moreover, the book needs a concluding chapter to examine the implications of these varied discourses in relation to folklore. Readers would benefit from a concise understanding of the differences between each construction of equality and how African American folklore operates within each discourse.Finally, this book would benefit from stronger editing for clarity. In most of the chapters, the dense detail obscures main ideas and guiding structures. Furthermore, the book contains errors that should have been caught in review: The title of Charles Chesnutt's book is The Marrow of Tradition—not “Morrow” (p. 118).Acclaimed modern dance choreographer Martha Graham was not Black (p. 232). From an upper-crust white family in New York, she built one of the first professional integrated dance troupes during segregation.Despite these concerns, Black Folklorists in Pursuit of Equality is an encyclopedic compendium providing data about the beginnings of and early interpretations of Black folklore scholarship by African American leaders, which has not been easily accessible. Although I cannot recommend it as a text for graduate classrooms, this book offers substantial insights into the history of folklore scholarship by African Americans and makes significant contributions as a reference book on African American folklore history.