African American Studies
Kennedy's Blues
Kennedy's Blues: African American Blues and Gospel Songs on JFK collects in a single volume the blues and gospel songs written by African Americans about the presidency of John F. Kennedy and offers a ...
Conversations with Yusef Komunyakaa
Conversations with Yusef Komunyakaabrings together over two decades of interviews and profiles with one of America's most prolific and acclaimed contemporary poets. Yusef Komunyakaa (b. 1947) describes ...
Shadowing Ralph Ellison
In 1952, Ralph Ellison (1914-1994) published his novel Invisible Man, which transformed the dynamics of American literature. The novel won the National Book Award, extended the themes of his early short ...
The Mulatta and the Politics of Race
From abolition through the years just before the civil rights struggle began, African American women recognized that a mixed-race woman made for a powerful and, at times, very useful figure in the battle ...
Cross the Water Blues
Contributions from Christopher G. Bakriges, Sean Creighton, Jeffrey Green, Leighton Grist, Bob Groom, Rainer E. Lotz, Paul Oliver, Catherine Parsonage, Iris Schmeisser, Roberta Freund Schwartz, Robert ...
James K. Humphrey and the Sabbath-Day Adventists
In James K. Humphrey and the Sabbath-Day Adventists, R. Clifford Jones tells the story of this important black religious figure and his attempt to bring about self-determination for twentieth-century ...
Black Writers, White Publishers
Jean Toomer's Cane was advertised as “a book about Negroes by a Negro,” despite his request not to promote the book along such racial lines. Nella Larsen switched the title of her second novel from ...
Making a Way out of No Way
The Second Great Migration, the movement of African Americans between the South and the North that began in the early 1940s and tapered off in the late 1960s, transformed America. This migration of approximately ...
Claiming the Heritage
Nearly all black female novelists of twentieth-century America have found the essential substance of their art in one source---the history of black women in America.
With great range and in many voices ...
Jennie Carter
In June 1867, the San Francisco Elevator-one of the nation's premier black weekly newspapers during Reconstruction-began publishing articles by a Californian calling herself "Ann J. Trask" and later "Semper ...