This chapter focuses on constitutional disharmony as central to forging constitutional identity by looking at the place of Black citizenship prior to the Civil War. While there are powerful arguments that the Constitution could be seen as antislavery, even while it allowed for slavery to persist where it already existed, those who were antislavery did not give much thought to the place of Blacks within the constitutional order—particularly not to the question of Black citizenship. It was, rather, events such as the second Missouri Crisis of 1821 that forced the issue of Black citizenship onto the polity. Events forced constitutional actors to wrestle with questions that were not clear, or easily answered, by way of constitutional text. This chapter offers an important contrast to more prevalent approaches – to either originalism or moral readings – that too often try to dissolve constitutional disharmony.

This chapter details the literary history of short fiction written in English by African Americans from 1853 through 1934. Beginning in the antebellum era during the age of reform and continuing through the Postbellum–Pre-Harlem era before concluding with the Harlem Renaissance or New Negro Movement, this article traces the aims and goals of activists, artists, and reformers such as Frederick Douglass, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Charles Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, Nella Larsen, Rudolph Fisher, Zora Neale Hurston, and Langston Hughes, contextualizing and contrasting their efforts to revise and critique the reductive depictions of African American life perceived within the dominant literary trends of their respective times.