In the popular imagination the picture of slavery, frozen in time, is one of huge cotton plantations and opulent mansions. However, in over a hundred years of history detailed in this book, the hard reality ...

Long considered lost, these photographs from one of Memphis's leading African American newspapers, the Memphis World, published from 1931 to 1973, chronicle the complexity and variety of its readers' ...

In the United States, Ishmael Reed, Leslie Marmon Silko, Ralph Ellison, N. Scott Momaday, Toni Morrison, Rudolfo Anaya, Sandra Cisneros, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Jessica Hagedorn are among the notable ...

Richard Wright, the Mississippi-born black writer, saw himself as "an outsider between two cultures," a man searching.

In these twelve essays written over the last two decades Michel Fabre, Wright's biographer, ...

In the early twentieth century, two wealthy white sisters, cousins to a North Carolina governor, wrote identical wills that left their substantial homeplace to a black man and his daughter.

Maggie Ross, ...

This book, the first to focus on the integration of the Gulf Coast, is Dr. Gilbert R. Mason's eyewitness account of harrowing episodes that occurred there during the civil rights movement. Newly opened ...

For southern newspapers and southern readers, the social upheaval in the years following Brown v. Board of Education (1954) was, as Time put it in 1956, “the region's biggest running story since slavery.” ...

Musicians and music scholars rightly focus on the sounds of the blues and the colorful life stories of blues performers. Equally important and, until now, inadequately studied are the lyrics. The international ...

During and after the Harlem Renaissance, two intellectual forces—nationalism and Marxism—clashed and changed the future of African American writing. Current literary thinking says that writers with ...

Here in a facsimile of the 1930 edition is Willis Richardson's collection of twelve plays and pageants that playwrights of the era wrote expressly for black audiences, mainly students and other young ...