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James Weldon Johnson. James Weldon Johnson was born on June 17, 1871 in
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James Weldon Johnson. ... The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man by James Weldon Johnson
and The Souls of Black Folk by WEB DuBois use both of these two art forms. ...
james weldon johnson. James Weldon Johnson?s ?The Creation? is very
interesting as it gives some interesting interpretations ...
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McKay, Jean (Eugene) Toomer, Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Robert ...
Submitted by iwanttoapaper on May 1, 2008
Category: English
Words: 2158 | Pages: 9
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Since the end of the Civil War, African Americans have been involved in an attempt to strategically present their race in way that would foster equality. In class, we have seen this done through many art forms, two of which are manuscript and song. The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man by James Weldon Johnson and The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. DuBois use both of these two art forms. Each author uses their stories and the music that goes along with them in very different ways. While DuBois makes frequent use of the Sorrow Songs, which are serious and straightforward pieces, James Weldon Johnson utilizes ragtime music, a lighter and more secularized form of the Sorrow Songs themselves. The actual text of the two works differs much in the same way as the accompanying music does. While Souls uses dramatic, poetic, and heroic characters to tell its story, James Weldon Johnson constructs a more complex and imperfect protagonist through which he transmit his message to the reader. I think the differences between the authors’ methods and their resulting themes may be a function of the time at which the books were written.
In The Souls of Black Folk, DuBois offers the reader a simple and romantic version of the struggle of black people in the United States at the outset of the 20th century. In 1903 when this book was first published, DuBois would have had a mostly white readership, since black people were only just starting to recover from the hardships they bore as a result of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. Henry Louis Gates proposed that at this time black people were involved in trying to construct the “New Negro.” DuBois work fell at the beginning of this “negro image construction” period which Gates says lasted from 1895 to 1925 (131). Therefore, DuBois had a monumental task of establishing in the white reader an ideal view of a black person in America. He did this by presenting simple and highly emotional material...
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