Gathers the erotic writings of such authors as Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, Charles Blockson, Audre Lourde, and Essex Hemphill

A young African-American man describes growing up in an all-black Brooklyn housing project, one of twelve children of a white mother and black father, and discusses his mother's contributions to his life and coming to terms with his confusion over his own identity. Reissue.

The author recounts the shock he experienced when he learned his father's relatives in Muncie, Indiana, were poor and Black, and the prejudice that he and his brother endured from both sides

The time is 1927. The place is a run-down recording studio in Chicago. Ma Rainey, the legendary blues singer, is due to arrive with her entourage to cut new sides of old favorites. Waiting for her are her black musician sidemen, the white owner of the record company, and her white manager. What goes down in the session to come is more than music. It is a riveting portrayal of black rage . . . of racism, of the self-hate that racism breeds, and of racial exploitation . . .

Collects the civil rights leader's writings on nonviolence, social policy, integration, black nationalism, and more

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

A touching, meticulous portrait of two boys growing up in a Chicago housing project reveals how they help each other maintain a shred of innocence among street gangs, gunfire, violence, and drugs. Reprint.

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.

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.