Born in a Mighty Bad Land: The Violent Man in African American Folklore and Fiction

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The figure of the violent man in the African American imagination has a long history. He can be found in 19th-century bad man ballads like Stagolee and John Hardy , as well as in the black convict recitations that influence gangsta rap. This book connects this figure with similar characters in African American fiction. Many writers - McKay and Hurston in the Harlem Renaissance; Wright, Baldwin and Ellison in the 1940s and 1950s; Himes in the 1950s and 1960s saw the bad nigger as an archetypal figure in the black imagination and psyche. Blaxploitation novels in the 1970s made him a virtually mythical character. More recently, Mosley, Wideman and Morrison have presented him as ghetto philosopher and cultural adventurer. Behind the folklore and fiction, many theories have been proposed to explain the source of the bad man’s intra-racial violence. Jerry H. Bryant explores all of these elements in a wide-ranging look at one of the most misunderstood figures in African American culture.