“I’ve seen this movie before” is what I thought after learning the outcome of this year’s presidential election. Almost immediately I realized that my thinking was too reactive. Just like eight years ago, when I wrote the journal entries that eventually became the essay below, I did not know what was going to come next. American life and politics don’t exist as scenes from a film that replay in a feedback loop across this country’s diverse landscape.
Yet I knew something had changed. The culture wars have certainly heated up since Donald Trump’s rise in 2016, with books being banned across the country, even with a Democrat in the White House. Professors in the humanities like me who teach works of literature that confront issues of race today might even be thought of as “the enemy within.” Similarly, the universities where we teach are seen by some as factories of indoctrination against what is broadly defined as “American ideals.” No, this time things are different.
Although the social climate might be different, on the morning after the 2024 election I resolved to teach the ideas about literature that I have always presented in the classroom, just as I did after Donald Trump’s first election. Nothing changes this second time around. In teaching about place, space, and southern literature, I will continue to implore students to see how works by African American writers in the South pursue the question, “How does one move through the world without having one’s existence undermined?” The question remains relevant.
While some may think certain works of literature take an activist stance, I will remind them that literature simply holds the power to force us to confront difficult topics and perhaps change the way we look at the world. Books and stories can be a light that leads toward the pursuit of truth in what might be dark times.
–W. Ralph Eubanks, November 2024
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This essay originally appeared in Southwest Review.
On the morning after the 2016 presidential election, I began to question the long-accepted notion that it is easy to see the beginning of things and harder to see the end. What was actually beginning with the election of Donald Trump, and what was ending? I could not see either of them clearly. Yet as someone who grew up amid the racial turmoil of the civil rights movement, all I could think was, “Good morning America, welcome to Mississippi.” The slight chill in that fall Mississippi morning kept sending me back to images imprinted upon me by a childhood shaped by a closed society and the civil rights past: protests, struggle, and violence.
“Here we go again,” I mumbled to myself.
Yet these historical flashbacks were not going to help me teach literature in the present. So, I entered my undergraduate seminar on the African American memoir with a steely resolve to keep my students focused. As I ambled down the hall, filled with dread, I could see a cluster of students gathered together in shocked silence in the Eudora Welty Room of the Millsaps College library. Earlier in the semester, as we discussed the concept of otherness, I reminded them of how Zora Neale Hurston famously proclaimed, “I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.” If there was ever a time when I understood what Hurston meant, it was the day after Donald Trump’s election.
Each time our class met, I asked my students to explore how the books we read revealed the ways the very idea of Blackness collides with American and regional cultural identity. For African Americans, the memoir serves as a means of bearing witness, a way of saying that as a people we are more than what has happened to us. From slave narratives to contemporary writing, memoirs by Black writers ponder what it means to live with difference, particularly a difference placed on a people through this country’s original sin of slavery. Throughout this seminar, I stressed that the silences and gaps Black writers leave in their meditations on race and identity demand just as much attention as those filled spaces in the narrative. Now I was being asked to fill a shocked silence that hung over the classroom.
That morning we were finishing our discussion of Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped. In a rushed moment of teaching inspiration, I opened the class with these words from the book’s concluding chapter: “Life is a hurricane, and we board up to save what we can and bow low to the earth to crouch in that small space above the dirt where the wind will not reach.” As we pondered the result of an election that felt like a storm—given the conspicuous psychic damage I saw reflected on my students’ faces—we began to discuss Ward’s grief alongside the sense of loss we felt at that moment.
I don’t remember much else about that morning, but I do remember reminding my students of the heavy weight of grief Ward worked through by confronting the most difficult elements of her loss. “Ward did something about her grief so that she did not feel completely powerless and wrenched by the tragedies of those she lost. We all have to do something about what we are feeling right now. I don’t expect any of you to know what you can do. But I think there are signs of how to navigate the future in the lives of the people we have been reading this semester.”
Fast forward to Inauguration Day in January 2017. At my home in Washington, DC, my wife and I hosted our son and a group of his friends, who had all traveled from Chicago for the Women’s March. I stayed behind that day to cook for the marchers so they would have a warm dinner waiting for them after a day of walking and protesting in Washington’s winter cold. Since I did not march, my daughter asked me in a tone laced with youthful arrogance, “So what are you going to be doing the next four years to create change in this country?” It didn’t take me long to answer: “I’ll do what I am already doing: teach. Teaching literature is my tool of activism.”
I admit I had not thought of my work as a teacher and writer as a tool for social change before my daughter’s question. But her question, combined with my experience with my students on Election Day, made me realize that I needed to begin to teach literature in a different way, to begin to teach beyond the text itself and into how a work of literature from the American past can help us understand the American present and future. When in the fall I began teaching at the University of Mississippi, my alma mater, I started the semester focusing my teaching not only on the nature of narrative but also on how narratives from the literary past help us see the present more clearly.
“The South is not just a place of frontier,” the writer and critic Edouard Glissant wrote. “It is also this enclosed place.” As a Mississippi native, I know the boundaries of this space intimately, since it is both my home and the canvas for much of my work as a writer. As a professor at the university known by the loaded moniker “Ole Miss,” I am constantly reminded that I teach in a state and a region that has long distanced itself from the world outside its borders, if only to maintain the languid ardor of a land that has led many to view it as emblematic of the Old South. Activism and Ole Miss seem to be two terms that don’t go together, but since the arrival of James Meredith on this campus in 1962, Black students have carved out a place of social comfort at this university through their activism, whether it was focused on Confederate imagery and statues or about the lack of people of color on the faculty.
In the 1970s, when a group of Black students decided to lead a protest during an Up with People concert, they were arrested just minutes after raising their fists in a Black Power salute. In true Faulknerian fashion, the demands the students stood up for during the 1970s have endured and prevailed, in the end making the university a place where a class like mine might be welcomed by the student body.
From the start of my teaching at Ole Miss, I wondered if I was wrong about change there. During my first semester, I had only six students sign up for the civil rights and literature class, and only one of them was not Black. The immediate aftermath of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville served as the backdrop for my first day of classes, so I had current events to juxtapose with the past. A Confederate statue as well as several buildings were also being “contextualized” on campus, leading my students to connect passages from C. Vann Woodward’s The Strange Career of Jim Crow to both the literature we were reading and to Charlottesville. As Woodward notes, the South’s adoption of extreme racism in the 1890s was not so much a conversion as it was “a relaxation of the opposition” to racism. In our small group, we often pondered how much our current moment was the result of a similar easing of opposition and how the texts we were studying held the message that we must never lose sight of how the vestiges of the past exist in our midst.
Small classes with a solitary white student remained the pattern for my class until my fourth year at the university, in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests of the summer of 2020. When I began teaching in August 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, I had thirteen students eager to study Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Ann Petry, Natasha Trethewey, and Claudia Rankine, as well as short stories by Eudora Welty and Lewis Nordan’s reimagining of the Emmett Till murder, Wolf Whistle. What was different was that this time I had only two students of color.
On the first day of class, when I asked students to tell me why they took the class, I was not surprised: a majority felt a need to understand this particular cultural moment filled with protests, uprisings, and dissent. As I looked out at the youthful faces gathered in my classroom, I caught a glimpse of the illusion of a post-racial America and South that these students had once been promised. The books we would be studying were connected by the major themes of Black invisibility and erasure, directly in parallel with the news they were encountering every day. The larger question I told them we would be exploring through literature was “How does one move through the world without having one’s existence undermined?”
From the very first day, everyone was eager to get started.
The title of my Special Topics in English class is “Must the Novelist Crusade? Civil Rights and Activism in Literature.” This class has two foundational texts: Eudora Welty’s essay “Must the Novelist Crusade?” and C. Vann Woodward’s The Strange Career of Jim Crow. While some might think it odd to begin a literature class by delving into a work of American history, in my experience students know little of exactly what life under Jim Crow was like, much less how the system came to be woven into the very fabric of American life. What surprises them all is that Jim Crow had its origins in the North, as well as how Woodward makes it clear that racism “in regimented form” was spread across the whole country in the 1920s, following the initial Great Migration of the South’s children to the North.
Welty’s essay serves as a guide to exploring a writer’s social and literary responsibilities. If I were to describe the essay, I would say it is the definitive explanation of how “writing fiction places the novelist and the crusader on opposite sides.” Although Welty’s answer to the question she poses is largely negative, she leaves room for the writer to wrestle with political issues within the realm of human experience. For the purposes of my class, this essay provides a question to explore in each piece of literature we read, from Ellison’s Invisible Man to Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric.
And while I agree with Welty that the novelist must not crusade, I do use literature to explore historical and political questions the texts bring to light, with an eye toward helping my students recognize the ways literature makes us think about contemporary issues, whether those are the criminal justice system, the Black Lives Matter movement, or our current cultural divide over politics, memory, and monuments. All narrative is inherently political since it derives from a writer’s particular point of view, which is why I position the texts for my class as both literary and political. My unspoken goal for my students is that they leave my class understanding how storytelling holds the power to change the way we look at the world. I could see the impact of the power of storytelling from the very first book we read: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.
My students did all the work recognizing how both Jim Crow and what I refer to as “Jane Crow” existed, leaving Black women trapped by the forces of race and masculinity.Ellison’s Invisible Man led one of my students to see how Black invisibility is a surrendering of power, and even to recognize the Battle Royal scene as a metaphor for the way the Civil War’s legacy hangs over African Americans—the men fight “beneath a cloud of blue-gray smoke”—as well as a symbol of how racism takes power from Black Americans. With some prodding, students began to put together the symbolic puzzle Ellison lays out for them on the page and see how the narrator’s continuing series of reversals and mental breakdowns mirrors the cultural narrative of African Americans, a connection they made from reading Woodward. Ann Petry’s The Street launched a discussion of how racism and sexism are intertwined as well as how easily environment can change the course of a person’s life. The theme of surveillance that hangs over the novel reminded them—unprompted—not only of the ways African Americans are under surveillance but of the fact that we all now live in a culture where much of what we do can be tracked or followed.
But it was the novel James Baldwin labeled “Everybody’s Protest Novel” that launched the most active discussion of the criminal justice system, the racial geography of American cities, and the value of Black female life. At first, students were repulsed by the lust, fury, and fear inside Richard Wright’s character Bigger Thomas in Native Son. Like Baldwin, they felt that Bigger had been stereotyped into the embodiment of Black as evil, with the robe of the saved in American society available only to those who are white. By the time they finished the novel, they came to see how poverty, fear, and the racial boundaries of Chicago determined the fate of Bigger Thomas.
Even the epigraph of Native Son sends a message to the reader that rage and defiance are part of the story. Wright begins with these words from the Book of Job:
Even today is my complaint rebellious,
My stroke is heavier than my groaning.
Bigger Thomas, like Job in the Old Testament, is under pressure from forces that he can neither understand nor control. Like Job, he rages against them. By framing our initial discussion of Native Son with an exploration of the meaning of the epigraph paired with W.E.B. DuBois’s idea of dual consciousness, I helped my students recognize what I like to think Wright wanted his readers to see: how Bigger Thomas’s duality had damaged him at the very center of his being and had left him fearful and emotionally stunted. And rather than seeing Bigger as simply the embodiment of the young Black thug, several of my students, after understanding the breadth of his story, openly interrogated their own whiteness in the classroom and examined how they were the beneficiaries of the very forces that led Bigger to murder Mary Dalton out of fear.
When Bigger is on the run after Mary’s murder, the way Wright describes the racial boundaries of Chicago revealed to my students how even before Bigger commits murder twice—including raping and murdering his girlfriend, Bessie Mears—the intense segregation of the city defines where Bigger can exist but can never be fully human. In Native Son, Wright describes in symbolic and realistic detail how Chicago was divided into Black spaces, white spaces, and a dangerous no-man’s-land for its Black residents. It was the section of the book entitled “Flight” that launched a discussion of how redlining and racism in housing policy continue to cast a long shadow in America well beyond the pages of Wright’s novel.
What also affected my students was seeing that while white society convicts Bigger for the rape and murder of Mary Dalton, the court uses the violated Black body of Bessie Mears simply as evidence. “It’s just like the case of Breonna Taylor,” one of my students pointed out, which led to a discussion of the ways Black life is devalued in our society, particularly the lives of Black women. This was one of the rare moments during the semester when all I had to do was facilitate a discussion and make sure it was connected with the text itself. My students did all the work recognizing how both Jim Crow and what I refer to as “Jane Crow” existed, leaving Black women trapped by the forces of race and masculinity.
In all of his work, Richard Wright saw a connection between Black writing and Black resistance. Over the course of the past few years, I have come to share that linkage. What I have learned from my activist teaching perspective is that I don’t have to enter the classroom and wear my activism on my sleeve. The professor must not crusade. All I have to do is let a group of great writers do the work.
Most important of all, I don’t enter the classroom expecting to change hearts and minds. That is an impossible task. But I do ask everyone who enters the doors of my classroom to think for themselves and recognize the ways the past lives on in the present. Teaching this way has allowed me once again to see clearly the beginning of something, rather than something that feels like a bad ending.
