Making the Slave Anew: History and the Archive in New Negro Renaissance Poetry

African American writers, artists, historians, and activists of the interwar period expended substantial energy to refute a widely held idea that United States slavery was relatively benign. Among black American writers, it was poets—for commercial reasons and reasons to do with genre—who took up the topic of enslavement most often. Some wrote poems about the pride they took in the survival of their forebears. Others argued, in poetry, that trauma inflicted by enslavement required them to break free of its enduring spell. A third group, including Langston Hughes, Anne Spencer, and Jessie Fauset, used poetry to call into question the norms of contemporary history writing and of rules of evidence. African American poets in this group used poetry to create a new archive of enslaved people’s experiences and narratives.