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. ...

Best known for The Black Jacobins (1938), C. L. R. James was a pan-African historian and thinker who, upon arriving in the United States for a lecture tour in 1938, was warmly received by audiences, Black ...

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 b ...

Winner of the 1996 Eudora Welty Prize

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

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. Among ...

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 ...

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 by Ha ...

Without apology Nobel Prize author Toni Morrison describes herself as an African American woman writer. These collected interviews reveal her to be much more. She has shared space in her creative life ...

Exploring the scope, diversity, and vitality of black culture, here is a fascinating collection of more than sixty articles from some of the most perceptive and authoritative commentators upon the black ...