Make-up for Week 6

Paul Laurence Dunbar was an African-American poet active around the turn of the 20^th century. His parents were former slaves, his father being a veteran of the American Civil War. Significantly, he was a standout student in college in Dayton, Ohio, working as both class president and editor of the student newspaper, both achievements almost unheard of for a black man at that time.

An interesting aspect of Dunbar’s work is his use of both traditional American English, and African-American dialects. He later grew skeptical of the novelty of his slangy, phonetic, dialect poems, and became weary of being pigeonholed. His work outside of these novel poems encompassed a graceful use of language in giving a voice to slavery.

For an essay in my English 373 class, I examined one of his poems in particular, “We Wear the Mask.” It is a fantastic example of Du Bois’s notion of double consciousness, although Du Bois would not write of the idea until almost ten years later in The Souls of Black Folk. Dunbar’s poem describes the “mask” that blacks wear to hide the suffering they experience. White society perceives blacks as characters in a minstrel show, dancing and referring to whites as “massa.” The poem beautifully gives us insight into how false this is.

Sadly, Dunbar was diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1900, shortly after taking a job at the Library of Congress. He moved to Colorado with his wife to reduce his stress during his final years. He died at the woefully young age of 33 in 1906. He is interred in his hometown of Dayton, Ohio.