Joshua Zou / National History Day

NHD Process Paper

I found inspiration to create my project within the modern day. After watching the movie

Selma, I began to become extremely curious about civil-rights activists who were not

preachers or movement leaders, people who broke barriers and who subtly changed the social

status of America behind the curtain. Thus, I began to delve into Civil-rights-movement

tangential literature, reading about movements such as the Black Panthers and the Black

Literature-and-arts movement. While I found the former bold and distinct, the impacts of it have

not yet have time to totally unfurl, and thus I gravitated towards the latter, which, I soon found,

was, just as powerful, if not more so, than the black power movement, as it was made up of

talented black writers who resisted assimilation and stood up for the Black Aesthetic and the

Black Identity.

As my project focused mainly on writers, the majority of my research was reading the

books, plays, and essays that the activists had written. This was done to get a strong grasp of

their motivations and perspectives, as many of the works were not only persuasive in nature, but

also partly autobiographical. The rest of my research was split between biographies, college and

professional sites on the movement and participating writers, and interviews. Luckily for me,

many resources were available for me online, as the works of the writers I researched are widely

known and have been uploaded many times in free, downloadable forms. This, in addition to the

use of JSTOR, an online academic archive, allowed me to limit the times I had to make book

runs to the library.

I chose the Website category because, while I do have experience in making websites,

especially with Weebly, I believed that a website would most accurately match my vision, a

blend of diagrams, videos, and pictures, grafted together with relatively few words. I also
 Joshua Zou / National History Day

favored the website format because, while other categories are usually restricted to one form of

media, the website category is usually much more flexible. With this freedom, I decided to create

a black and white themed project to match the black-and-white photos of the time, as well as the

contrast of skin colors that was at the core of the civil rights movement.

The Black Literature Movement is the paradigm for individuals and groups taking a stand

in history, as extremely talented authors, poets, and playwrights were able to stand up for the

Black Identity of African Americans, overcoming opposition in publishing and public opinion, in

order to increase political and social equality for blacks. In the end, the Black Literature

movement not only changed the social view of blacks, it also created a model for later art

revolutions, and was a powerful factor in bringing together the black community and fighting

assimilation.