It’s more than likely that every American student from at least the third grade onward has been taught about the Black experience.

Classroom curricula cover subtopics from slavery and the Civil War to segregation and Martin Luther King’s assassination. Some classrooms go further than others, initiating students into highly detailed accounts, covering the beginnings of the slave trade, the Abolition movement, the Underground Railroad, Reconstruction, the Jim Crow era, the Civil Rights Movement, and beyond.

And yet, Aristotle claimed that poetry—by which he really meant literature in the broad sense—held a value that history did not. Although history tells us what happened, literature tells us what “might happen” by revealing “the sort of things that a type of man will do or say either probably or necessarily.”

In other words, literature provides greater insights into human nature than mere dates, names, and actions. Presuming Aristotle was right, students could benefit from an exploration of Black literature, especially perhaps, that which addresses the past experiences of Black Americans through those epochs so often covered in classrooms. Without disregarding the importance of the sociological data contained in a study of the history of the Black experience, what special benefit might there be from learning about the “sorts of things” that “a type of man will do or say” through the course of such experiences?

At least one important benefit of studying literature—at least good literature—pertaining to the historical black experience, would be the ability of literature to give a window into the humanity of the black Americans themselves, so that they are not reduced in the eyes of students to simply the abstract victims of history, but are seen and experienced as fully realized individuals who had their own dreams, aspirations, foibles, and flaws.

Repetitively chronicling past injustices against Black Americans year after year may be counterproductive. A certain exhaustion may set in with students when these topics are presented merely through a historical lens. One can only hear of the sufferings of strangers from bygone eras so many times until the constant inundation of the struggles of Black Americans becomes like a sort of classroom ritual, where sympathy and understanding might be given an obligatory performative lip service only.

Perhaps more important, by capturing the humanity of the participants in the Black experience, literature can also give students a window into the way people of past cultures dealt with racial issues, granting them an invaluable critical filter through which to view contemporary responses by identifying the wisdom and mistakes of past cultures for a contemporary audience.

Students also might discover differences, even striking and dramatic ones, between individual attitudes, behaviors and cultural institutions of different eras in the Black experience. Armed with such knowledge, students might be less likely to view contemporary Black culture and contemporary Black voices as the sum of the Black experience and, in some cases, realize the true variety and complexity present among Black Americans. It might also unveil cultural and social complexities untouched by historical surveys, even those more detailed. One example of this can be found in the plays of writer Sandra Seaton, who taps into her upbringing in the South to capture areas of the Black American experience little known to many outside it: that of the Black middle class during the era of segregation.

Childhood

As a child, Seaton recalls, “I was surrounded by a close-knit community in the South. When I moved to the North, I was bewildered and lost. I didn’t see any of that world around me.”

Seaton’s work reveals a community of middle class, Southern Blacks where “everyone knew everyone else in the town.” Within the Columbia, Tenn., of Seaton’s youth, there was “respect for the senior citizens and matriarchs of the community. It wasn’t about pleasing just your own family. It was about respecting the ethics of the community. Young people were beholden to the community.”

This sort of direct experience and the ability to convey it tends to escape the grasp of historical instruction, even as it transmits something crucial to readers; the importance and impact of cultural institutions and impacts to certain blacks of a certain time. Just as important is realizing that Seaton’s experience is not universal among blacks even of her own era, which reminds students that are studying groups that  people cannot be reduced to monolithic generalities or sociological formulas.

“When I began my life as a writer,” Seaton recalled, “I was fired with the ambition to write a play that would dramatize this world of ‘unrecorded history,’  the world of my family in the South, including my grandmother, mother, aunts, and their friend whose life stories challenge the stereotypes held about African Americans and their families,” she said.

Seaton says some Black Studies programs reinforce stereotypes sometimes perhaps unintentionally because of the focus solely on the inequities experienced by Blacks, or, more specifically, economically disadvantaged Blacks.

Countering Black stereotypes

Seaton sought to counter Black stereotypes impression in her play “The Bridge Party.” 

“Because racism was then legally entrenched and publicly justified, it was a significant accomplishment to build a life with ceremonies and rituals affirming the integrity and importance of our friendships and families, of our own lives,” Seaton explained on her website.

“In “the era of ‘The Bridge Party,’ most people did not come into contact with African Americans who were professionals: teachers, doctors and businesspeople,” she told American Classroom. “They only knew them as servants.”

Women such as those featured in ‘The Bridge Party’ as well as in Seaton’s other works are often middle class, professional women.

“These women actually existed and were a part of the Black experience; for the people of their communities they were often an invaluable part of it,” she said.

Perhaps the most important lesson of all to be found in Seaton’s plays is the manner in which Blacks of the segregated South, middle class and otherwise, were able to find stability and survival not in the deliverance of government programs or reforms, but in their own communities and in the institutions of the church and of the family.

“African Americans survived by relying on family,” Seaton noted. “Turning to their church and their strong spiritual beliefs. Christianity was a strong foundation for the community. The story of the survival of the Black community in the South is a model for our whole country. It should be seen as a role model for the fractured and demoralized society we live in today.”

It is a lesson that can only truly be located in literary works where the human experience is depicted and encountered, where the necessities of community, family and religion can be fully illustrated to readers through the situations and feelings of the characters.

[Editor’s note: The author Jeremy Seaton is one of Sandra Seaton’s two sons.]