Attaway, William | Edward Margolies (essay date 1968)
Edward Margolies (essay date 1968)
SOURCE: "Migration: William Attaway and Blood on the Forge," in Native Sons: A Critical Study of Twentieth-Century Negro American Authors, J. B. Lippincott Company, 1968, pp. 47-64.
[Margolies is an American educator and critic who specializes in African-American literature. In the excerpt below, he provides a thematic and stylistic analysis of Blood on the Forge.]
There persists to this day a widely held belief that the deep South, with its brutal casts system and its savage history of racial atrocities, represents for Negroes an image of steaming hell. Such a view is constantly reinforced by spokesmen for civil rights organizations and activists of various liberal persuasions. It serves their political convenience and humanitarian goals, which is all to the good, but unfortunately it muddles their thinking. For it is grounded on the assumption that people are political and economic entities...
[The entire page is 6076 words long]
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