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 ...

The late African American novelist Chester Himes (1909-1984) is well known both in America and Europe for his moving depictions of black men destroyed by a pervasive racism and for darkly humorous stories ...

Featured in this anthology of Native American literature are works by twenty-eight writers from five tribes or nations including Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee (Creek), and Yuchi. Ranging widely ...

The problem of “the color line,” W. E. B. Du Bois’s ever-present polemical theme, is at the core of this novel of sensual love, radical politics, and the quest for racial justice. Originally published ...