Profiles the late African American leader, providing a startling picture of the life of the controversial and important historical figure. Reprint.

In Transcending the Talented Tenth, Joy James provocatively examines African American intellectual responses to racism and the role of elitism, sexism and anti-radicalism in black leadership politics throughout history. She begins with Du Bois' construction of "the Talented Tenth" as an elite leadership of race managers and takes us through the lives and work of radical women in the anti-lynching crusades, the civil rights and black liberation movements, as well as explores the contemporary struggles among black elites in academe.

Traces the birth of the American civil rights movement and profiles Martin Luther King, Jr., detailing the roles played by key figures around him and in government

Presents a personal perspective on the American light-skinned Negro's experience in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

Not only one of the last of over one hundred slave narratives published separately before the Civil War, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) is also one of the few existing narratives written by a woman. It offers a unique perspective on the complex plight of the black woman as slave and as writer. In a story that merges the conventions of the slave narrative with the techniques of the sentimental novel, Harriet Jacobs describes her efforts to fight off the advances of her master, her eventual liaison with another white man (the father of two of her children), and her ultimately successful struggle for freedom. Jacobs' account of her experiences, and her search for her own voice, prefigure the literary and ideological concerns of generations of African-American women writers to come.

Dramatizes the life of Jelly Roll Morton, pianist, composer, and self-proclaimed inventor of jazz

This family success story centers on Maggie Comer, an unskilled, illiterate Black woman who rose from abject poverty in the rural South to become the mother of five college-educated children

Careful study of the Nat Turner slave rebellion of 1831 reveals much about master, slaves, and the relationship between them in the antebellum South. The central document in this volume — Nat Turner's confession follwing the rebellion in Virginia — is supported by newspaper articles, trial transcripts, and excerpts from the diary of Virginia governor John Floyd.

The Black writer recalls his early years spent in Paris and Harlem of the Twenties

Shows how race has played a central role at every historical turning point in American history