Most people who have heard of Fannie Lou Hamer (1917-1977) are aware of the impassioned testimony that this Mississippi sharecropper and civil rights activist delivered at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. Far fewer people are familiar with t…
Before the innovative work of Zora Neale Hurston, folklorists from the Hampton Institute collected, studied, and wrote about African American folklore. Like Hurston, these folklorists worked within but also beyond the bounds of white mainstream inst…
Raised Up Down Yonder attempts to shift focus away from why black youth are ""problematic"" to explore what their daily lives actually entail. Howell travels to the small community of Hamilton, Alabama, to investigate what it is like for a young bla…
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 nationalist leanings wrote the most relevant fic…
During most of the twentieth century, Archibald J. Carey, Sr. (1868-1931) and Archibald J. Carey, Jr. (1908-1981), father and son, exemplified a blend of ministry and politics that many African American religious leaders pursued. Their sacred and se…
The Other World of Richard Wright: Perspectives on His Haiku reveals Richard Wright's poetic vision toward the human world. Through the minimal form of haiku, Wright (1908-1960) found his poetic connection to nature. This sensibility displays not on…
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 stories, and dramatized in fictional form the…
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 Fidelis.\"" Her name was Jennie Car…
Although Aaron Henry (1922-1997) was one of the nation's major grassroots fighters in the freedom movement on local, state, and national levels, his name has not yet been accorded its full recognition. This book reveals why Aaron Henry should be ack…
This book reveals why Aaron Henry (1922-1997) should be acknowledged, in the ranks of Fannie Lou Hamer and Medgar Evers, as a truly influential crusader. Long before many of his contemporaries, he was a civil rights activist, but he preferred to sta…
A disproportionate number of male writers, including such figures as Amiri Baraka, Larry Neal, Maulana Karenga, and Haki Madhubuti, continue to be credited for constructing the iconic and ideological foundations for what would be perpetuated as the…
Forrest County, Mississippi, became a focal point of the civil rights movement when, in 1961, the United States Justice Department filed a lawsuit against its voting registrar Theron Lynd. While thirty percent of the county's residents were black, o…
In 1961, Forrest County, Mississippi, became a focal point of the civil rights movement when the United States Justice Department filed a lawsuit against its voting registrar Theron Lynd. While 30 percent of the county's residents were black, only t…
Attracted to remote lands by his interest in the postcolonial struggle, Richard Wright (1908-1960) became one of the few African Americans of his time to engage in travel writing. He went to emerging nations not as a sightseer but as a student of th…
Passing in the Works of Charles W. Chesnutt is a collection that reevaluates Chesnutt's deft manipulation of the ""passing"" theme to expand understanding of the author's fiction and nonfiction. Nine contributors apply a variety of theories---includ…
Passing in the Works of Charles W. Chesnutt is a collection that reevaluates Chesnutt's deft manipulation of the ""passing"" theme to expand understanding of the author's fiction and nonfiction. Nine contributors apply a variety of theories--includi…
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 five million people helped improve th…
The Black Cultural Front describes how the social and political movements that grew out of the Depression facilitated the left turn of several African American artists and writers. The Communist-led John Reed Clubs brought together black and white w…
The Mississippi Freedom Vote in 1963 consisted of an integrated citizens' campaign for civil rights. With candidates Aaron Henry, a black pharmacist from Clarksdale for governor, and Reverend Edwin King, a college chaplain from Vicksburg for lieute…
Lockstep and Dance: Images of Black Men in Popular Culture examines popular culture's reliance on long-standing stereotypes of black men as animalistic, hypersexual, dangerous criminals, whose bodies, dress, actions, attitudes, and language both rep…
Fifty years after Freedom Summer, To Write in the Light of Freedom offers a glimpse into the hearts of the African American youths who attended the Mississippi Freedom Schools in 1964. One of the most successful initiatives of Freedom Summer, more t…
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 by court order, documents from the Mississippi…
African American Haiku: Cultural Visions offers insights into African American poets' innovations in the haiku form, shedding light on a neglected aspect of black poetry.Notable scholars present new interpretations of well-known works. Essays trace…
This Woman's Work presents a social history and critical biography based on the life of award-winning writer Bebe Moore Campbell (1950-2006). It offers the personal story of a popular novelist, journalist, and mental health advocate. This book exami…
Ann Petry (1908-1997) achieved prominence during a period in which few black women were published with regularity in America. Her novels Country Place (1947) and The Narrows (1988), along with various short stories and nonfiction, poignantly describ…
In 1966, a year after the Voting Rights Act began liberating millions of southern blacks, New Yorkers challenged a political system that weakened their voting power. Andrew W. Cooper (1927-2002), a beer company employee, sued state officials in a ca…
Percival Everett (b. 1956) writes novels, short stories, poetry, and essays and is one of the most prolific, acclaimed, yet under-examined African American writers working today. Although to date Everett has published eighteen novels, three collecti…
The Souls of White Folk: African American Writers Theorize Whiteness is the first study to consider the substantial body of African American writing that critiques whiteness as social construction and racial identity. Arguing against the prevailing…
Through an examination of various couples who were forced to live in slavery, Rebecca J. Fraser argues that slaves found ways to conduct successful courting relationships. In its focus on the processes of courtship among the enslaved, this study off…
Using the slave narratives of Henry Bibb and Frederick Douglass, as well as the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Walter Mosley, and Barack Obama, Ronda C. Henry Anthony examines how women's bodies are used in African American literature to f…
Hoo-Doo Cowboys and Bronze Buckaroos undertakes an interdisciplinary exploration of the African American West through close readings of texts from a variety of media. This approach allows for both an in-depth analysis of individual texts and a discu…
Raymond Pace Alexander (1897-1974) was a prominent black attorney in Philadelphia and a distinguished member of the National Bar Association, the oldest and largest association of African American lawyers and judges. A contemporary of such nationall…
In All Stories Are True, Tracie Church Guzzio provides the first full-length study of John Edgar Wideman's entire oeuvre to date. Specifically, Guzzio examines the ways in which Wideman (b. 1941) engages with three crucial themes-history, myth, and…
In All Stories Are True, Tracie Church Guzzio provides the first full-length study of John Edgar Wideman's entire oeuvre to date. Specifically, Guzzio examines the ways in which Wideman (b. 1941) engages with three crucial themes--history, myth, and…
Contributions by Tunde Adeleke, Brian D. Behnken, Minkah Makalani, Benita Roth, Gregory D. Smithers, Simon Wendt, and Danielle L. Wiggins Black intellectualism has been misunderstood by the American public and by scholars for generations. Historical…
Americans in the World War II era bought the novels of African American writers in unprecedented numbers. But the names on the books lining shelves and filling barracks trunks were not the now-familiar Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, but Frank Yer…
Winner 2010 Outstanding Academic Title Choice Winner 2010 EBSCOhost / Research Society for American Periodicals Book Prize Honorable Mention 2010 Thomas J. Lyon Book Award, Western Literature Association In January of 1861, on the eve of both the Ci…
Following the collapse of Reconstruction in 1877, African Americans organized a movement in the South for economic and political reform: Black Populism. Between 1886 and 1900, tens of thousands of black farmers, sharecroppers, and agrarian workers c…
Some of the best known African American poems are sonnets: Claude McKay's ""If We Must Die,"" Countee Cullen's ""Yet Do I Marvel,"" Gwendolyn Brooks's ""First fight. Then fiddle."" Yet few readers realize that these poems are part of a rich traditi…
Fame to Infamy: Race, Sport, and the Fall from Grace follows the paths of sports figures who were embraced by the general populace but who, through a variety of circumstances, real or imagined, found themselves falling out of favor. The contributors…
