INTRODUCTION

       In the spring of 1971, I began compiling what was to become A Comprehensive Annotated Bibliography of American Black English, dubbed Acababe for short. It was a project that would last three years, with publication in the summer of 1974. Acababe, unlike some scholarly bibliographies, does not focus entirely upon scholarly research. As its name suggests it is a comprehensive bibliography, and as such, it represents the integration of both academic scholarship and popular studies or reports, many of which appeared in the mass media. The 2,300-item bibliography, which was long overdue in the rapidly expanding field of American Black English studies, served as a basis of this book, for without the bibliography, this as well as many other studies of Black English and its relationships within society--both historical and contemporary--could never have been accomplished or brought to completion. In August 1973, Dr. Gilbert D. Schneider and I presented joint professional papers to the Midwest regional meeting of the American Dialect Society. Dr. Schneider focused upon the use of the nineteenth-century mass media--everything from advertising postcards to general circulation magazines--as sources of primary research into ethno linguistic studies of American Black English. He concluded that many of the structures--syntactic, phonological, ideophonic, nonverbal, and paralinguistic--which were present in nineteenth-century Black Americana, are also present in a number of West African languages, notably Wes-Kos, the West African Pidgin English
      For my paper, which became the skeleton for this book, I reviewed the historical development of Black English literature from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries. It was while preparing this paper that I became acutely aware, like Dr. Schneider, that the mass media serve as a basis of research into American Black English. Historically, the mass media provided a forum for debate about validity and theoretical interpretations of Black English, and served to popularize, occasionally quite erroneously, studies about the language. And equally important, the mass media served as the vehicles for presenting both fiction and nonfiction stories, poems, articles, and novels that included Black English in either narration or dialogue.
      While reading and rereading, evaluating and analyzing many of the items from the mass media which became entries in Acababe, and from an extensive analysis of Acababe itself, a startling, though yet embryonic pattern, began to emerge. It appeared that there were periods in which American Black English in the mass media peaked, and periods in which there was almost a dearth of activity. Due to lack of time, I could only present these observations as a tentative hypothesis to the 1973 meeting of the American Dialect Society. Yet the idea of a cyclical theory so intrigued me that a few weeks after the professional meeting, I began to develop a formal methodology to explore the possibility further. As in the preliminary study, I established the hypothesis that the only strong evidence available as to the existence of Black English historically in America is what appeared in the mass media, for until recently relatively few academic publications included discussions of American Black English.
      The second major hypothesis is that the mass media reflect the state of knowledge, concern, and awareness of Black English. Extensive analysis of the mass media from a historical perspective justifies the validity of the "five-cycle"theory of American Black English which is presented here, formally, for the first time. It has been determined that Black English concern historically has fallen within separate and distinct cycles, that each cycle lasted between twenty-five and forty years, and that each cycle was followed by an intercycle lasting between ten and twenty years. The lone exception was the Civil War intercycle of about seven years, the explanation being that war, at any moment in history, changes and accelerates the process of society.
      The cycles and their approximate dates are: the Colonial-Revolutionary Cycle (about 1765-about 1800); the Antebellum Cycle (about 182~about 1860); the Reconstruction Cycle (about 1867-about 1902); the Negro Renaissance Cycle (about 1915-about 1940); and the Civil Rights Cycle (about 1958-the present). Each cycle is characterized by a peak at least ten years before the end of the cycle, and by the fact that in quantity of materials available, it is larger and more substantive than the cycle that preceded it. And, most important, each cycle can be distinguished not only by volume (or quantity) and chronology, but by genre. Further, the nature of American society and of its mass media indicates that there will continue to be cycles; that each future cycle will not only have the same time frame as the preceding cycles, but that each future cycle will be represented by its own distinctive genre; that this is true whether it is American Black English being discussed and analyzed, or any field integrated within mass communications.
      Chapter 1 discusses the Colonial-Revolutionary Cycle of American Black English, which did not begin until about 1765 , and was preceded by a precycle of about eighty-five to one hundred years. During this precycle, several items in the mass media reflected the colonists' concern for Black English, but these items were so few and so chronologically distant that it could neither be considered a separate cycle nor part of the first cycle.
The Colonial-Revolutionary Cycle is distinguished by certain "feelers"into the nature of Black English. A number of "travelers' comments"by the English who visited the colonies were published, and several of these comments reflected on the nonstandard English in the colonies. Many of these observations resulted from perceptions which themselves were based on error. On another level, classified advertisements in newspapers provided a primary source for determining English language proficiency of runaway slaves. Drama also formed a major part of the cycle. During the country's early years, drama was part of the mass media, and served not only to entertain, but to persuade as well. As with newspapers, drama was often written to exploit political beliefs. Most drama was not written to be produced, but to be read--to be distributed and sold like books or newspapers. The circulation of drama was often far greater than that of local newspapers. The first cycle reached its peak about 1785-90, and was drawn to its natural conclusions about 1800.
      Chapter 2 focuses on the Antebellum Cycle. In drama, the presence of Black English became almost nonexistent. Drama itself had changed, becoming less political and more superficially entertaining. The minstrelsy, with its black-faced Whites using stereotyped costume and language, was another major development of the cycle-theatrical presentation for the masses.
      The novel began to assume its place in literary history during the Antebellum era, and the Black English of the period reflected this change. The works of both James Fenimore Cooper and William Gilmore Simms included Black English; Cooper and Simms actually pioneered better representations of Black speech. Nevertheless, the Black, with rare exceptions, was but a minor character in the literature. If he appeared, it was only as a filler or to reflect humor. The few studies made about Black speech during this cycle were only minor probes in comparison to what followed.
      Travelers' comments, prevalent during the first cycle, diminished in the Antebellum cycle. When they did appear, they were usually comments by an American who traveled to another part of America, or by persons whose job it was to report on the language and culture around them. Slave narratives, written by escaped or recently freed slaves, were a major literary genre of this cycle. Although many narratives were ghosted by White abolitionists, they provide a major source to document Black speech during the Antebellum cycle.
      The Reconstruction Cycle of American Black English is discussed in Chapter 3. In the mass media, the novel was now becoming secondary to the short story , a change reflected by the media and Black English in the media. Newspapers and magazines became dominant, reflecting the changing tastes of a nation. Within the pages of the most widely circulated magazines--among them Appleton's, Century, Harper's Weekly, Lippincott's, Munsey's, and Scribner's --appeared a literal flood of Black dialect verse, Black ethnic humor, and stories that included Black speech, or added insights into the nature of that speech. During the Reconstruction cycle, the names of William Francis Allen, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Irwin Russell, Thomas Nelson Page, Eugene Zimmerman, Mark Twain, Joel Chandler Harris, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Charles Waddell Chesnutt became known throughout the country.
      Philology, the study of language (it would be many decades before linguistics, the science of language, was developed) began exploring the nature of nonstandard English. Many of the inquiries into and observations of American Black English, whether written by philologists, philosophers, sociologists, or laymen, were published in the newspapers and magazines that dominated the era.
      The Negro Renaissance Cycle of American Black English, which spanned the years between the two world wars, was a continuation of the Reconstruction Cycle. After twenty years of almost nonexistent literature in Black English, the Black was again "in vogue,"and once again the subject of ridicule. The 1920s were an unsettling time for Blacks; the Ku Klux Klan was still strong, and its view of "inferior races"more often than not was reflective of society. The "inferior Black,"the shuffling, happy-go-lucky, mush-mouthed, watermelon-stealing, lustful Black was the stereotype, as it had been for so many decades. But the 1920s also witnessed a reawakening to a new literature that now allowed Blacks to become a part of the American creative arts-a segregated part, perhaps, but a part, nevertheless. From Arna Bontemps, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer and others came a new literature; from W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, and James Weldon Johnson came a new militancy; from Scott Joplin, Blind Lemon Jefferson, W. C. Handy, Eubie Blake, and Huddie Ledbetter came a new music; from Charles Gilpin, Paul Robeson, and Bill Robinson came new interpretations in the theatre.
      America had become enamoured with Blacks, and with Black-oriented themes, as evidenced by the mass media's unprecedented outpouring of Black-oriented short stories and novels. Most literary representations of Blacks were distortions of reality, butchered by incompetent writers.
      However, many writers began to develop Black-oriented themes in order to better understand and explain the nature of society. Eugene O'Neill, who earned four Pulitzer Prizes and the Nobel Prize, wrote several dramas focusing on Blacks; Paul Green, a writer and philosophy professor, earned a Pulitzer Prize for In Abraham's Bosom, a study of a Black trying to gain freedom of the soul by gaining freedom of the mind; and Marc Connelly, adapting the stories of Roark Bradford, earned a Pulitzer Prize for The Green Pastures, an interpretation, in Black English, of Black worldviews of the Bible. In literature, William Faulkner, who earned the Nobel Prize in 1949, created a semifictional county to serve as the background for a series of novels which included in-depth studies of the role of Blacks in the South. Other novels, insightful and deeply moving, came from DuBose Heyward, Julia Mood Peterkin, and Margaret Mitchell. The short story, which had emerged as a dominant art form in the Reconstruction Cycle, achieved its greatest popularity during the Negro Renaissance Cycle, as Octavus Roy Cohen and others began to dominate the media; Cohen, himself, wrote more than 1,000 stories, a large portion of which involved Blacks speaking Black English.
      It was during the Negro Renaissance Cycle that the electronics media began to develop. Hallelujah, directed by King Vidor, and featuring an all-Black cast, was one of the better films from the infancy of "talkies". Other films included Porgy and Bess and Gone With the Wind. At one time it seemed as if most films included a dialect-speaking Black. And on radio-which began as a channel for distress calls-Amos 'n' Andy was the highest-rated program, listened to by more than 40 million people.
      During the Negro Renaissance Cycle, a number of studies were made into the nature of Black English. Most concluded that Black English, including Gullah, was derived from seventeenth-century British English. A few disagreed, citing possible African origins. Melville Herskovits pointed to African cultural origins, and Lorenzo Dow Turner emphasized African linguistic origins. But the world was not yet ready to fully comprehend the scope of their investigations or to accept their findings. And so the cycle ended, sometime around World War II.
      A newer awareness of the Black as a human, with the same needs, feelings, and rights as any person, ushered in the civil rights era, and with it the Civil Rights Cycle of American Black English. A number of writers began using Black English as the language of the narrator, not strictly of the characters. Now, instead of reading the works of Paul Laurence Dunbar and Charles Waddell Chesnutt, or Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen, the American public was reading the stories of Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Claude Brown, and LeRoi Jones, all of whom used Black English in their stories of Black life. Soon, Black English extended into childrens' stories as publishers became aware of a new audience.
      The mass media, especially newspapers, extended their reporting about the nature of Black English. The expansion of specialized media-the academic and specialized journals-served as the forum for extensive linguistic and sociocultural studies of Black English. During this cycle, major studies of the nature of the language were published, attacked, and defended, and numerous educators began flooding the media-popular and specialized-with studies, opinions, essays, and overt vitriolic attacks on Black English.
      Throughout the civil rights era, the significant writings about Black English have appeared in the largely unavailable academic journals, presumably because most of the original research into Black English is currently done by persons associated with higher education, a significant number of whom see the academic journal as the proper forum for such studies. A few researchers have found the doors of the mass media closed to studies of Black English. Some are afraid to test the doors; others are unable. Still others have been unwilling to write for the mass media and have maintained a very elitist or paternalistic attitude about Black English scholarship. This had not been true in the past. During the four previous cycles of Black English interest, the media had been used extensively to discuss and present this variety of speech. Each of these cycles is rich in written evidence of the development and spread of Black English.
      To fully understand the representation of Black English in the mass media, it is necessary to understand some of the distinguishing features which describe Black English as a separate dialect based primarily upon African linguistic influence. The appendix presents many of the distinguishing features that set American Black English apart historically as a separate dialect/language in the written media, and not as a poor or sloppy English, as claimed in the Deficit Theory. The presentation of these features serves four very distinct purposes. First, it serves to explain complex linguistic terminology which appears throughout the book. Second, it serves as an index to distinguish some of the major features of Black English as represented within the mass media. These features comprise a list of those Black English features which regularly appeared in the mass media and, more important, which are consistently observed in a large volume of evidence. The language characteristics represent only features appearing in the written language, and are not fully reflective of the spoken language. Third, the list itself prevents lengthy and often unnecessary elaboration or explanation of distinguishing linguistic characteristics in selected literary passages. And fourth, the list is a "how to"for journalists and other writers. It accurately sets forth Black English features of which the careful journalist or writer must be aware if he or she wishes to write in Black English. Whereas not all features are present, and although there are many Black English dialects rather than just one Standard Black English, the person who refers to the list will have at least a basic working knowledge for accurate representation, rather than distortion based upon incorrect perception.
      The linguistic features described in the appendix are not all-inclusive, but they do represent most of the major features of the dialect as represented historically in the American print media. As such, they differ from the rules described by present-day dialectologists and linguists who are armed with tape recorders and intricate research methodologies. The features are merely simplified general descriptions of the speech in the mass media identified as Black English, and are not meant to identify a "standard"Black English, nor are they meant to imply a thorough descriptive or contrastive analysis of the speech. Further, the list reflects Black English only in comparison to American Standard English. Thus, for descriptive reasons, it becomes necessary to include such words as "loss of"or "deletion of"when comparing Black English. In reality, as the ebonics theorists point out, there is no "loss of"anything and it might be assumed that it is the American language that has rules that could be interpreted as "addition of."
      Many of the rules of Black English have their basis in African Languages, notably Wes-Kos, the West African Pidgin English (WAPE). Therefore, it is theorized that because American mass media writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had virtually no formal knowledge of African languages and were recording the language of the American Black as they heard it, any linguistic similarities of phonological and syntactic rules, as well as lexicon, between American Black English-as represented in the media-and the West African languages-notably WAPE- provide in effect a major source of data to justify the creolist theory.

Hardcover edition originally published by:
- University of Massachusetts Press
Paperback edition published by:
- University Press of America
Reprint edition published by:
- Author's Guild / iuniverse

Selections from Black English
Acknowledgments
Introduction