During the pitched battle over slavery in the United States Black writers-enslaved and
free-allied themselves with the cause of abolition and used their art to advocate for
emancipation and to envision the end of slavery as a world-historical moment of possibility.
These Black writers borrowed from the European tradition of Romanticism-lyric poetry prophetic
visions-to write speak and sing their hopes for what freedom might mean. At the same time
they voiced anxieties about the expansion of global capital and U.S. imperial power in the
aftermath of slavery. They also focused on the ramifications of slavery's sexual violence.
Authors like Frances Ellen Watkins Harper George Moses Horton Albery Allson Whitman and
Joshua McCarter Simpson conceived the Civil War as a revolutionary upheaval on par with
Europe's stormy Age of Revolutions. The Black Romantic Revolution proposes that the Black
Romantics' cultural innovations have shaped Black radical culture to this day from theblues
and hip hop to Black nationalism and Black feminism. Their expressions of love and rage grief
and determination dreams and nightmares still echo into our present.
