In more ways than one, Clarice T. Campbell was a friend of the civil rights movement. An indefatigable campaigner for desegregation, Campbell was also an inveterate letter-writer; the fact that many of ...

When his first novel House Made of Dawn was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1969, N. Scott Momaday was virtually unknown. Today he is the most acclaimed Native American writer, working at the ...

Ironically, Winnifred Eaton published most of her works under a Japanese-sounding name, Onoto Watanna, but she was of Chinese ancestry. In Me: Book of Rembrance her narrator is called Nora Ascouth, but ...

Mardi Gras remains one of the most distinctive features of New Orleans. Although the city has celebrated Carnival since its days as a French and Spanish colonial outpost, the rituals familiar today were ...

Creoles of Color are rightfully among the first families of southwestern Louisiana. Yet in both antebellum and postbellum periods they remained a people considered apart from the rest of the population. ...

From slave times to the present the proverb has been a mainstay in African-American communication. Such sayings as “Hard times make a monkey eat red pepper when he don't care for black,” “The blacker ...

The novels of Toni Morrison depict a disjointed culture striving to coalesce in a racialized society. No other contemporary writer conveys this “double consciousness” of African American life so faithfully. ...

In 1967, when this brave book was first published, Myrlie Evers said, “Somewhere in Mississippi lives the man who murdered my husband. ”

Medgar Evers died in a horrifying act of political violence. ...

As a fiercely independent thinker, Ishmael Reed, author of Mumbo Jumbo, Flight to Canada, Reckless Eyeballing, and other works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, is often in conflict with the culture ...