Common Knowledge^™
The Newsletter of the Core Knowledge Foundation

Grace Abounding

The Core Knowledge Educational Materials Department is pleased to announce the release of Grace Abounding: The Core Knowledge Anthology of African-American Literature, Art, and Music. The book is designed for use in classrooms from grade 3-10, so preorder a class set for your school now. Copies will be available for shipment in late summer. The following text is taken from the book’s editor’s note and will give some sense of the wonderful and exciting material that Grace Abounding will deliver to classrooms around the nation.

Grace Abounding: The Core Knowledge Anthology of African-American Literature, Art, and Music presents a story that spans hundreds of generations, crisscrossing continents and oceans, from roots in ageless proverbial wisdom and ancient rhythms to the expansive universe of modern poetry and the unbounded, glorious craziness of “free jazz”. In short, Grace Abounding surveys the astonishing contributions that African Americans have made to American and world culture. Within these pages you will find history, literature, art, music, and dance — products of unconquerable creativity, faith, wisdom, and kinship. For hundreds of years, from the songs and stories that helped to maintain hope and dignity in the dark days of slavery to the most fruitful and vibrant arts and socio-political movements of the twentieth century, works by African Americans have contributed immeasurably to the development of American culture, though the creators of these works have often labored without thanks or even token recognition and were often subject to (but never resigned to) appalling oppression and abuse.

African-American literature and arts cannot and will not be lumped together under a single, definable aesthetic and treat no single theme or set of themes. As artists whose expressions are born, first and foremost, out of personal experience, African Americans must, of course, tell their personal stories, but many have also felt compelled to tell the story of a people who endured oppression and injustice of a kind no one should have to endure, of a people who suffered but triumphed. The aim of this book is not to assert a definitive definition of what African-American art is; nor do the editors and authors of this text seek to set forth a fixed, conclusive body of works to be separated as an “other” art, to be viewed or interpreted apart from the works from other cultural traditions. Rather, this book simply presents, in a tantalizing, inviting manner, scores of American artists whose works are already recognized as truly great. This book presents masterpiece after masterpiece, and its primary aim is to introduce these works to students and to point students toward those other masterpieces that do not appear in this book but are waiting to be explored (and created) by their eager minds.

This book is filled with what one might call “household names,” ones that should be familiar to people all over the world. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., would perhaps be first among those names. Langston Hughes and Maya Angelou, Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman — these names have been fixed in textbooks for at least forty years, and so they will remain. These are some of the most talented and courageous Americans who ever lived, and so it is right that they be remembered and celebrated. Others are familiar, as well—bold social movers and great thinkers like W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, and Malcolm X. Their names continue to stir both controversy and adoration. Their underlying philosophies differed, yet  each had the same basic goal, which was to obtain no more and no less than what was pursued and promised by America’s Founders. And there are many others whose works have already made a profound and permanent impact on American culture. They are not new “discoveries” — their names are known, but not known well enough by those of us living today in the world they helped to form. Frances Harper, James Whitfield, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Fannie Coppin, Countee Cullen, Paul Laurence Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Helene Johnson, Sterling Brown, Arna Bontemps, Richard Wright, Margaret Walker, Robert Hayden, Derek Walcott — these are but a few at the great African Americans whom every American needs to know.

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