What is Literary Activism?

We humans have a long history of literary activism—crafted narratives with purposeful calls to action.

Literary activism changes hearts and minds.

The Harriet Beecher Stowe Center celebrates the 10^th Stowe Prize for Literary Activism, awarded to Dr. Bettina Love for Punished for Dreaming: How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal.

The Stowe Center encourages social justice and literary activism by exploring the legacy of Stowe and the constellation of Black voices who influenced and inspired her.

Annually we award the Stowe Prize for Literary Activism to celebrate and promote an author whose book demonstrates a clear call to action through prose written purposefully to change hearts and minds, just as Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin did in 1852.

Stowe’s call to action was to end slavery. Because white people were in power, she had to strategize how to capture their hearts. She crafted a story filled with evocative descriptions that invited readers to feel connected to her characters, especially to Tom, who was noble, kind, and quietly defiant—murdered rather than revealing the location of two run-away, enslaved women.

Stowe’s book declared Black people are people—which absolutely exposed, confronted, and shamed a centuries-old understanding by white dominant culture that Black people were less than white people, and therefore subject to enslavement.

Literary activism is any form of narrative—fiction (novel, poetry, play), non-fiction (book, essay, article), visual art, performance art, spoken or sung words, dance—intentionally created to change current culture for the better. A literary activist is someone who considers the impact of their own words, and who thinks critically about—and is willing to speak out about—the words that others choose.

When asked in a radio interview why Stowe had such a strong impact, 19^th century literature scholar Hollis Robbins said: “What Stowe’s comparative expertise is, is creating these characters that live and jump out of the page. [Tom’s] stalwart forthrightness, his devotion, his clarity of thought about what is right and what is wrong guide and ground the novel.”

With Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe said she wanted to “say what is true and only that.” And when people questioned that truth, she produced evidence by way of her Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which chronicled thousands of true stories of enslaved and formerly enslaved people told in their own words.

For centuries, Black abolitionists had themselves written or narrated memoirs, essays, opinion pieces, speeches, songs, asserting their humanity and calling for an end to slavery. They achieved their goal by sharing their own stories of subjugation and violence and asserting their personal agency and resilience. These works of literary activism help to prompt Stowe’s literary activism.

One of the powerful stories cited in the Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin belongs to Harriet Jacobs. Jacobs was the first Black woman to write her own emancipation narrative versus narrating it to a white writer. In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Jacobs states:

“I have not written my experiences in order to draw attention to myself. Neither do I care to excite sympathy for my own sufferings. But I do earnestly desire to arouse women of the North to a realizing sense of the condition of two millions of women at the South, still in bondage, suffering what I suffered, and most of them far worse.”

Jacobs’ call to action is for white women to work to end slavery—and so much more. As Tia Miles says in a presentation about Jacobs, “she crafted an incredibly thought-provoking narrative,” using “ingenious manipulation of the written word.” Miles also credits Jacobs for naming what would become an important feminist theory of intersectionality, when Jacobs asserts that as an enslaved Black woman, her circumstances were distinct and different from other women’s and other enslaved people. Miles also asserts that Jacob’s “literary expose,” led to further literary activism by prompting archival research by Jean Fagin Yellin to prove that Jacob’s narrative was not fiction, but fact.

Our Stowe Prize for Literary Activism celebrates the ongoing American legacy of Literary Activism as a means to expose unjust truths and offer a positive path forward.

Our 2024 Stowe Prize for Literary Activism winner Dr. Bettina Love writes in Punished for Dreaming: How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal:

White rage is not just angry White parents shoving and spitting on Black children attempting to enter an all-White school. White rage is what has built America’s institutions, working to cunningly craft laws, policies, covenants, and approaches that undercut democracy, halt Black advancements, and cage Black bodies while leaving White supremacy intact and often even stronger.

With exhaustive research plus compelling and relatable personal stories, Dr. Love exposes intentional systemic racism in the very heart of what we like to think of as the training ground of American democracy—our schools. Her call to action is not educational reform; it is educational reparations.

Punished for Dreaming: How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal is the tenth Stowe Prize for Literary Activism. Publisher St. Martin’s promotional materials refer to Dr. Love’s book as a prequel to our second Stowe Prize for Literary Activism winner The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander. By drawing that reference, we are all confronted with the school to prison pipeline as a racist system that could be dismantled if we take action.

In the Preface of her book, Alexander explained why she wrote The New Jim Crow:

It is my hope and prayer that this book empowers you and allows you to speak your truth with greater conviction, credibility, and courage.

Alexander’s call to action is to mobilize the civil rights community to stop the systemic racism of the punitive carceral system that disproportionately targets Black and Brown people; “a stunningly comprehensive and well-disguised system of racialized social control that functions in a manner strikingly similar to Jim Crow.” Alexander writes: “We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.”

Dr. Love’s call to action is

Ending reform and fighting for educational reparations—this, I believe is what can deliver genuine freedom for all children. But we need other influential sectors—banking, housing, health care, and tech, to name a few—to do the same, guided by justice.

Dr. Love asserts: “I want to live in a world where Black children do not have to be twice as good to get half of what White people have.”

Dr. Love has a vision of a world that is just.

The Stowe Prize for Literary Activism winners invite their readers into the lived experiences of people negatively impacted by unjust systems. These literary activists compel us to walk in someone else’s shoes by writing with the deepest respect for the inherent worth of the people whose stories they are sharing. As we read these stories, the authors help us feel the injustice in our hearts and in our minds. Empathy—recognizing and understanding the feelings and thoughts of another person—helps us recognize (and feel) the injustice and compels us to work for change.

We humans have a long history of literary activism—crafted narratives with purposeful calls to action. We have witnessed that literary activism does change hearts and minds and does inspire people to work for positive change. The extremely hard work of change begins with exposing, confronting, and shaming current practice—which is a painful process of reckoning.

James Baldwin once wrote: “I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain. Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

Please join the Stowe Center in exploring the change literary activism can compel us to undertake.

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