Abstract
“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude […] shall exist within the United States” reads the 1870 thirteen Amendment to the American Constitution. This decision put an official end to the triangular trade, which brought more than fifteen million black slaves to America between the 16th and the 19th century. Such a deportation is the deepest origine of one of the most important social issue in the modern world : the condition of black people in the United States. “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the colour line” said the famous black protest leader W.E.B. Du Bois. And this was particularly true in America. Blacks had to combat the deep-rooted traditionalism of the American society in order to gain recognition gradually. That's why one can wonder what was the evolution of the African Americans'condition throughout the 20th century. If they were no longer slaves, did they become for all that full-fledged citizens, and what were the different faces of this quest ? And, basically, to what extent this situation questionned the old democratic ideal of the United States ?
The corpus set is made up of five texts, which represent a sixty-year period, from the early 1900s to the late 1960s. These sixty years underlines an evolution, the evolution of the black issue in the United States, all the more so as the five authors were all committed in blacks'struggle – and in different ways. But that also means that one musn't let he or she deceive by this partial point of view about the black issue; while reading the texts, one must keep in mind that all their authors were committed. In addition, if violence and discrimination are perceptible in these five texts, never any event is mentionned; that is also what is to complete.
The first document distances itself from the others by its date of publication – 1903 – that makes it a starting point in the reflection. Its author, W.E.B. Du Bois, was one of the most important black leader in the early 1900s, as he took part in the creation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909, and didn't hesitate to denunciate the blacks'oppression in his book The Souls of Black Folk. Even if they were written half a century later, both following documents are in the same vein of a nonviolent exposure of blacks'condition. Ralph Ellison, in his famous fiction Invisible Man, bears witness to blacks'search of identity in the American society. James Baldwin, as famous as writer than as activist in the civil-rights struggle, delivers here an essay, first published as an article on the Black Muslim separatist movement, extracted here from his 1963 best-seller The Fire Next Time.
The last two texts present a more radical aspect of blacks'struggle. The Autobiography of Malcolm X is the book which turned this black militant leader and advocate of black nationalism in the 1960s into an ideological hero, especially among black youth. Eventually, Stokely Carmichael, if he began by supporting nonviolence, became the leader of black nationalism, originator of its rallying slogan “Black Power”, which merged self-defence tactics, self-determination, political and economic power and racial pride, presented here in his book Black Power.
