This course examines the relationship between working-class and/or grassroots activism and the development of African American literature from the 1930s to the present. Introduces students to key African American political and literary movements of the 20th and 21st centuries including the Black Left and urban realism, Civil Rights Movement and Black modernism, Black Power and the Black Arts Movement, the Black Feminist Movement and Black Women’s literature, and The Movement for Black Lives and Afrofuturism. Students will read relevant authors and engage associated theories from each period.