Books by John Oliver Killens

Youngblood  /  And Then We Heard the Thunder  /  The Cotillion  /  The Great Black Russian

A Man-Aint-Nothin But A Man Adventures of John Henry  /  Slaves  / Sippi A Novel /  Black-SouthernVoices: An Anthology 

Great-Gittin-Up-Morning: A Biography of Denmark Vesey /  The Black Man's Burden

Keith Gilyard, Liberation Memories: The Rhetoric and Poetics of John Oliver Killens (2003)

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Bio Sketch

John Oliver Killens (January 14,1916–October 27, 1987), born in Macon, Georgia, to Charles Myles, Sr., and Willie Lee (Coleman) Killens. John Killens credits his relatives with fostering in him cultural pride and literary values. His father Charles encouraged him to read a weekly column by Langston Hughes; his mother Willie Lee, president of the Dunbar Literary Club, introduced him to poetry; and his great-grandmother filled his boyhood with the hardships and tales of slavery. More Bio

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The Cotillion, Alexs Pate writes in his introduction to the new Coffee House Press edition of the novel, “was written for the black reader of the Black Power era” (Pate, The Cotillion, XI). As such, the material herein might seem dated, relegated to the year, 1968, in which it was written. Pate goes on to write that Killens “was at the forefront of delineating the details of what it meant to be a black writer in the Black Arts Movement” (XIII). Coal Charcoal and Chocolate Comedy

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Now, lest the wrong impression be given, there were always some Southern Negroes who had no need to be defensive, had no good white folks to speak of, and always spoke their minds and told it like it was. One of them told me a fantastic (true) story about a young man who had come back from the second World-Wide Madness, and built up a promising vegetable trucking business. He was married and had a couple of children, and through industry and faith in free enterprise had built up a fairly successful business. DownSouth, UpSouth

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I have to stop and thank Louis too for his insight and support. He sort of inspired me to write Liberation Memories.  Louis knew and was vocal about the fact that John had been underappreciated in critical circles.  Only a few people—like Addison Gayle and William Wiggins, Jr.—tried to do him justice in the scholarly literature. But even they missed articulating some of the richness of John's writings. And Arthur Flowers is a good friend of mine—and present-day underappreciated novelist and Killens protégé. Interview with Keith Gilyard

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Table

posted 22 September 2007

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But just before noon the school ground swarmed with police. They strode into classrooms without even a 'good morning' to the teachers and dragged out scared kids, many of them crying. They even dragged them out of the outhouses and snatched them as they tried to flee the school ground. They took some who had been in the 'riot' and a number who'd never even heard about it. Somehow they missed yours truly. I felt left out and rejected, insulted even, especially since I was the bosom buddy of the kid who had started it.

Then frightened black mothers were brought down to the jailhouse to whip their children in front of the policemen to teach them not to fight white children. The alternative was the reformatory, though not a single white child was rounded up. Thus they drove the lesson home, the lesson that every black American must learn one way or another: that he has no inalienable right to defend himself from attack by Mister Charlie; that even though he can expect his own black person to be violated at any moment, he must remember better than anything else in this world that the white man's person is inviolable so far as he is concerned. The cruelest aspect of this story is how they used black mothers to drive this lesson home.  Killens and the Black Man's Burden

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The ghettoes of the North are as firmly entrenched in the urban centers as they are in any Southern city. They are citadels of black despair, a despair that expresses itself in dope addiction, alcoholism, the numbers racket, school drop-outs, juvenile delinquency, teen-age gang warfare, crime and prostitution, and more positively in occasional riots. It is a curious thing the way most Northern newspapers designated the Harlem rioters as hoodlums, while the rioters on the beaches of New Hampshire and Oregon were merely pranksters, students, high-spirited youngsters. Psychologists were quoted in The New York Times as saying that the young people who ran amuck on the fancy beaches of America last Labor day were in “quest of their identity.” Well, is there a youth who has been more deprived of his identity than the youth of Harlem? I honestly believe, though I say this with all kinds of trepidation, that the Harlem riot was a healthy thing for the country and for Harlem. The wonder is that it took so long for our patience to wear thin. DownSouth, UpSouth

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updated 4 November 2007 /