 | |
| Author | Arna Bontemps |
|---|---|
| Illustrator | Raymond Lufkin |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Nonfiction |
| Published | April 26, 1948 |
| Publisher | Knopf |
| Publication place | United States |
| Pages | 240 |
| Awards | Newbery Honor, Jane Addams Children's Book Award |
| ISBN | 978-0-394-91690-3 |
| OCLC | 233402 |
| 326 | |
Story of the Negro by Arna Bontemps is a children's history book published by Knopf in 1948. [1] It was the first African-American authored book to receive a Newbery Honor.
The non-fiction book starts with a history dating back to 1700 BC, [2] beginning with African civilizations such as the Ghana and Mandingo Empires. The horrors of the Atlantic slave trade are described, together with the causes and conditions of slavery in America, the Haitian Slave Revolt, and the Underground Railroad. [1] [2] Influential black leaders are examined, including Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and W. E. B. Du Bois. Bontemps said that the book, "consists mainly of things I learned after I left school that I wish I had known much earlier." [3] The book includes a "theme poem" "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" by Langston Hughes.
The book is split into five different sections, The Ship Introduction, Men of the lakes How African civilizations worked, The Crossing The Columbian trade sent Africans to the New World under poor conditions. Slavery was outlawed in 1863, and people were allowed to move freely, often to New York, The bondage About the twentieth century and the struggle to win rights and Making a new world After the Civil rights act was approved, there was still plenty to do to make the world an equal place.
The first edition was illustrated by Raymond Lufkin and published in 1948 by Knopf. [4] Of the first edition Bontemps related "I would have given my eye teeth to know when I was a high school boy in California—the story that my history books barely mentioned(...)I tried to make clear how American slavery came about and what causes lay behind the present attitudes toward Negroes on the part of some people." Bontemps received his second Guggenheim Fellowship, which enabled him to revise and publish the second edition, [5] an enlarged edition, in 1955. Knopf published three more editions, in 1958, 1964, and 1969. [6] Revised editions of the book extend the history through the late 1960s, with the fifth edition including a new chapter on Black Power. [7] [8]
Bontemps was the first African American author to be recognized with the Newbery Award, [lower-alpha 1] receiving a Newbery honor for Story of the Negro. [10] [11] [12] Bontemps had corresponded with his friend Langston Hughes about his desire to win a Newbery Medal saying, "near misses don't make me happy. I'd like a jackpot, a bull's-eye, or something—sometime". [13] This book fit in the trend at the time of the Newbery going to books which were about America. [13] If not for this topic, a book about African Americans by African Americans might have struggled to receive recognition from the Newbery committee. [13]
Arthur Spingarn, the president of the NAACP gave a positive response to the book: ""In the past thirty years I think I have owned and read every published history of the Negro. This is by all odds the best written, the most interesting, accurate, and concise work for the general reader. [15]
The John Newbery Medal, frequently shortened to the Newbery, is a literary award given by the Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC), a division of the American Library Association (ALA), to the author of "the most distinguished contributions to American literature for children". The Newbery and the Caldecott Medal are considered the two most prestigious awards for children's literature in the United States. Books selected are widely carried by bookstores and libraries, the authors are interviewed on television, and master's theses and doctoral dissertations are written on them. Named for John Newbery, an 18th-century English publisher of juvenile books, the winner of the Newbery is selected at the ALA's Midwinter Conference by a fifteen-person committee. The Newbery was proposed by Frederic G. Melcher in 1921, making it the first children's book award in the world. The physical bronze medal was designed by Rene Paul Chambellan and is given to the winning author at the next ALA annual conference. Since its founding there have been several changes to the composition of the selection committee, while the physical medal remains the same.
The Randolph Caldecott Medal, frequently shortened to just the Caldecott, annually recognizes the preceding year's "most distinguished American picture book for children". It is awarded to the illustrator by the Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC), a division of the American Library Association (ALA). The Caldecott and Newbery Medals are considered the most prestigious American children's book awards. Besides the Caldecott Medal, the committee awards a variable number of citations to runners-up they deem worthy, called the Caldecott Honor or Caldecott Honor Books.
Arna Wendell Bontemps was an American poet, novelist and librarian, and a noted member of the Harlem Renaissance.
Milton Meltzer was an American historian and author best known for his nonfiction books on Jewish, African-American, and American history. Since the 1950s, he was a prolific author of history books in the children's literature and young adult literature genres, having written nearly 100 books. Meltzer was an advocate for human rights, as well as an adjunct professor for the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He won the biennial Laura Ingalls Wilder Award for his career contribution to American children's literature in 2001. Meltzer died of esophageal cancer in 2009.
Naomi Long Madgett was an American poet and publisher. Originally a teacher, she later found fame with her award-winning poems and was also the founder and senior editor of Lotus Press, established in 1972, a publisher of poetry books by black poets. Known as "the godmother of African-American poetry", she was the Detroit poet laureate since 2001.
Christopher Paul Curtis is an American children's book author. His first novel, The Watsons Go to Birmingham – 1963, was published in 1995 and brought him immediate national recognition, receiving the Coretta Scott King Honor Book Award and the Newbery Honor Book Award in addition to numerous other awards. In 2000, he became the first person to win both the Newbery Medal and the Coretta Scott King Award—prizes received for his second novel Bud, Not Buddy—and the first African-American man to win the Newbery Medal. His novel The Watsons Go to Birmingham – 1963 was made into a television film in 2013.
Virginia Esther Hamilton was an American children's books author. She wrote 41 books, including M. C. Higgins, the Great (1974), for which she won the U.S. National Book Award in category Children's Books and the Newbery Medal in 1975. Her works were celebrated for exploring the African-American experience, what she called "Liberation Literature."
Elizabeth Wright Enright Gillham was an American writer of children's books, an illustrator, writer of short stories for adults, literary critic and teacher of creative writing. Perhaps best known as the Newbery Medal-winning author of Thimble Summer (1938) and the Newbery runner-up Gone-Away Lake (1957), she also wrote the popular Melendy quartet. A Newbery Medal laureate and a multiple winner of the O. Henry Award, her short stories and articles for adults appeared in many popular magazines and have been reprinted in anthologies and textbooks.
Patricia C. McKissack was a prolific African American children's writer. She was the author of over 100 books, including Dear America books A Picture of Freedom: The Diary of Clotee, a Slave Girl;Color Me Dark: The Diary of Nellie Lee Love, The Great Migration North; and Look to the Hills: The Diary of Lozette Moreau, a French Slave Girl. She also wrote a novel for The Royal Diaries series: Nzingha: Warrior Queen of Matamba. Notable standalone works include Flossie & the Fox (1986), The Dark-Thirty: Southern Tales of the Supernatural (1992), and Sojourner Truth: Ain't I a Woman? (1992). What is Given from the Heart was published posthumously in 2019.
Jacqueline Woodson is an American writer of books for children and adolescents. She is best known for Miracle's Boys, and her Newbery Honor-winning titles Brown Girl Dreaming, After Tupac and D Foster, Feathers, and Show Way. After serving as the Young People's Poet Laureate from 2015 to 2017, she was named the National Ambassador for Young People's Literature, by the Library of Congress, for 2018 to 2019. Her novel Another Brooklyn was shortlisted for the 2016 National Book Award for Fiction. She won the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award in 2018. She was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2020.
Marcus Bruce Christian, was a New Negro regional poet, writer, historian and folklorist. The author of the collection, I Am New Orleans and Other Poems, Christian also compiled and wrote the still-unpublished manuscript, The History of The Negro in Louisiana during his stint at the Negro Federal Writers Project at Dillard University. After his death, his family bequeathed 256 cubic feet (7.2 m3) of his diaries, criticism, manuscripts, and scholarly papers to the University of New Orleans, where they currently reside.
James Mercer Langston Hughes was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist from Joplin, Missouri. One of the earliest innovators of the literary art form called jazz poetry, Hughes is best known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance. He famously wrote about the period that "the Negro was in vogue", which was later paraphrased as "when Harlem was in vogue."
Fenton Johnson was an American poet, essayist, author of short stories, editor, and educator. Johnson came from a middle-class African-American family in Chicago, where he spent most of his career. His work is often included in anthologies of 20th-century poetry, and he is noted for early prose poetry. Author James Weldon Johnson called Fenton, "one of the first Negro revolutionary poets”. He is also considered a forerunner of the Harlem Renaissance.
Ood-Le-Uk the Wanderer is a children's novel by Alice Alison Lide and Margaret Alison Johansen, illustrated by Raymond Lufkin and published by Little, Brown & Co., in 1930. It tells the story of an Alaskan Eskimo who crosses the Bering Strait, has many adventures and returns to establish trade between his people and the Siberian tribesmen. The novel was first published in 1930 and was a runner-up for the Newbery Medal in 1931.
Jean Edna Karl was an American book editor who specialized in children's and science fiction titles. She founded and led the children's division and young adult and science fiction imprints at Atheneum Books, where she oversaw or edited books that won two Caldecott Medals and five Newbery Medals. One of the Newberys went to the new writer E. L. Konigsburg in 1968 for From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.
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The American Negro Exposition, also known as the Black World's Fair and the Diamond Jubilee Exposition, was a world's fair held in Chicago from July until September in 1940, to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the end of slavery in the United States at the conclusion of the Civil War in 1865.
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Cavalcade of the American Negro is a grouping of related artworks collaboratively created by employees of the WPA-funded Illinois Writers' Project and the Federal Art Project for the 1940 American Negro Exposition, a world's fair-style event celebrating the 75th anniversary of the Emancipation of enslaved people in the United States.
... Illustrated by Raymond Lufkin. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1948. 240 pp. $3. THIS is an unusual book, and one that all one-world-minded people should take under consideration. It is the story ...
