Protest is perhaps as old as the human race itself. Right from the time when Adam and Eve defiantly turned their back on the authority of God and walked out of heaven, hand in hand, protest has come to man more naturally than accommodation

As literature is basically the product of social forces, a writer cannot help projecting his experience into his writing. The history of the Negroes in America has been a history of slavery, cruelty, oppression, lynching, racial discrimination and Jim Crowism, meted out to them by the whites. These hurts are deep-rooted in the Negro psyche. So the "black writer, partly because of his own hurt consciousness and partly because he is in some way supposed to be the spokesman of his race, has often tried to raise the voice of protest in his writing. The urge to protest has been basic to the Negro novel since its inception.


But the Negro novelist, or that matter, the Negro writer, is often branded as a propagandist by white critics or sometimes by the black critics also. It is true that the confusion between the realms of arts and propaganda plagued the early black literature. Yet there have been two streams of protest tradition among the black writers.

Those who follow the first stream refuse find any difference between art and propaganda. Most of the writers of the Harlem Renaissance and before that come in this category. W.E.B.DuBois believed that art has a primary political function. He said, "All art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists, I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda, for gaining the right of the black folk to love and enjoy." (1)

For DuBois and his contemporaries, the race against Social Darwinism and the psychological remnants of slavery meant that each piece of creative writing became a political statement. Each particular manifestation served as a polemic. Each piece of writing became, to use the words of the editor of a black magazine of that time, "another bombshell fired into the heart of the bourgeois culture." (2)

Commenting on the position of the black writer of that time, Richard Bright said that the "black writer approached the critical community dressed in knee pants of servility, curtseying to show that the Negro was not inferior, that he was human." (3)

In 1921, DuBois wrote in an issue of the Black magazine Crisis, “Negro art is today plowing a difficult row. We want everything that is said about us to tell of the best and highest and noblest in us. We insist that our art and propaganda be one. We fear that evil in us will be called racial, while in others, it is viewed as individual....” (4)

By the apex of the Harlem Renaissance, then, certain latent assumptions about the relationship between "art" and life had become prescriptive cannon. Some writers outlined what they called "the social compulsion of black literature, built as it was on the sorrow and strain inherent in .American slavery, on the difficulties that sprang from emancipation, on the feelings of revenge, despair, aspiration and hatred which arose as the Negro struggled and fought his way upward." (6)

The other stream of protest literature came into being with the publication of Richard Wright’s novel, Native Son. But whereas DuBois considered art to be propaganda and did not mind being branded a propagandist of the black cause, Richard Wright and the others of his school believe that their work should not be called propaganda as it was only the expression to the feelings of the blacks and their position in the white society.