This dissertation examines the roles of African American educators in efforts to "re-make the race" between 1919 and 1940. The study focuses on the three exemplary cases of Alice Dunbar-Nelson as teacher and educational theorist, Eva Beatrice Dykes as the first black Ph.D. in English and author of an early black literature anthology, and James Weldon Johnson as the first endowed professor of black literature. It considers how their organizational and institutional work facilitated their advocacy of literature that reflected a "New Negro" consciousness.;Scholarship on the Renaissance often details how black cultural promoters solicited funds, sponsored contests, encouraged artistic development, and helped publish the work of young black writers through their work for organizations such as National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Urban League. Whereas we know more about how promoters utilize these organizations to facilitate their efforts to "uplift the race," we know less about how these figures constituted their educational work in relation to their literary promotion. Therefore, this study makes use of these figures' contemporaneous writings on education and literature, biographical material, and documents from institutional archives to determine how Dunbar-Nelson, Dykes, and Johnson turned celebrations and political promotions of the literature of race into productive, culturally affirming literacy and critical literary study among black people, specifically youth.;The chapters of the dissertation address: Dunbar-Nelson's educational philosophy as articulated in her 1922 essay "Negro Literature for Negro Pupils"; the implications of Dykes and her educator-colleagues' compilation Readings from Negro Authors in anthologizing a black literature; and James Weldon Johnson's role in formalizing black literary study through "English 123" at Fisk University. Through a comparative analysis of the above historical data, this study reveals that these educators made similar interventions into the educational infrastructure that shaped African American life during the Renaissance. In doing so, they taught and had students study the literature of the race during the production of a "new Negro" or a "black" rather than slave literature, which provided more opportunities to demonstrate the presence of and cultivate an appreciation for a collectively-realized, complex, and emerging black subjectivity.
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