Kenneth Warren's "What Was African American Literature?" argues that black American writing, as a literature, began with the institution of Jim Crow legislation and ended with desegregation. In order to substantiate this claim, he cites both the societal pressures to create a distinctly black American literature for uplift and the lack of a well formulated essential notion of literary blackness. For this scholar, the late 19th and early 20th centuries de jure racism crystallized the canon of African-American literature as black writers conscripted literature as a means to counter notions of inferiority. During this period, “whether African American writers acquiesced in or kicked against the label, they knew what was at stake in accepting or contesting their identification as Negro writers.” He writes that “white suspicion of, or commitment to imposing, black inferiority, African American literature would not have existed as a literature” Warren bases part of his argument on the distinction between "the mere existence of literary texts" and the formation of texts into a coherent body of literature. For Warren, it is the coherence of responding to racist narratives in the struggle for civil rights that establishes the body of African-American literature, and the scholar suggests that continuing to refer to the texts produced after the civil rights era as such is a symptom of nostalgia or a belief that the struggle for civil rights has not yet ended.