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Washington wrote his autobiography in part to show the great benefit that such institutional training [the industrial school at Tuskegee Institute] could be to African Americans making the transition from slavery to freedom. The best-selling African American autobiography of the early twentieth century, Up from Slavery, combined the classic formula of the individual success story with a shrewd though oblique and politic plea for racial solidarity through affiliation with African American-controlled institutions. (Oxford Companion 36)

Indeed, several African American scholars have argued that, in their prioritizing communal concerns over individualistic ones, formerly enslaved African American narrators effectively instituted the tradition of African American literature. Following their publications, most African American writers would insist upon a purpose-driven focus for their imaginative creations. As Richard Barksdale and Keneth Kinnamon point out in their Black Writers of America (1972), African American writers found their commitment to social justice as one of their earliest motivations to creativity. The quest for liberty and equality, Barksdale and Kinnamon assert, was one of the three prongs that shaped African American literature. The other two were the appeal of Christianity and questions of identity in relation to American democracy and the incorporation—or not—of the black body into that democracy. Questions about the purpose of African American literary production have engaged writers from the mid-nineteenth century until contemporary times. For an extended period, notions of being a “Negro writer” or “a Negro who just happened to be a writer” plagued creators of African American literary texts. Theorists from W. E. B. Du Bois to Richard Wright to Amiri Baraka weighed in on the relationship of art to propaganda, of creativity to social justice.