Breaking Language: The Legacy of the Civil Rights Movement in Literature

Pre-Civil Rights Era Uses of Language: Epistemic Violence and Legal Restrictions

What was it about the language in the United States that needed to be "broken" by Civil Rights activists, novelists, poets, and other artists? In most of the twentieth century, language encoded oppression--with racist slurs, inequitable laws, rumor, and journalistic propaganda--but language was also a medium for liberation. Oppression, physical violence, and epistemic violence--including thought control and mind games--were part of the everyday American experience for communities of color, reaching their height in the Jim Crow laws that wrote racial segregation into law. We can see what Jim Crow laws looked like and can imagine the debilitating effects this language and legal impediments had on non-white citizens in the US. 

Since the 1930s, African American attorneys and the NAACP used their legal expertise to fight successfully existing Jim Crow laws that deployed language to oppress and to restrict the freedom and agency of people of color. In the 1960s and 1970s, these legal efforts, as well as literary and artistic efforts, were intensified as great segments of the American collective consciousness was raised.

Let's take a look at some examples of how artists of the written word--novelists, poets, and activists--used their skills and imaginations to "break" the language of oppression.

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