The Combahee River Collective Statement: Annotated
The Black feminist collective's 1977 statement has been a bedrock document for academics, organizers and theorists for 45 years.
Julia C. Collins & the Black Elite of the Gilded Age
HBO's The Gilded Age has done its homework on Black History, creating a character based upon real life wealthy Black women of the time.
Elizabeth Keckley’s Memoir Behind the Scenes, or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four in the White House
Keckley’s decision to write about her employers from the viewpoint of a household laborer—she was seamstress to Mary Todd Lincoln—enraged audiences.
Remembering Emmett Till in Song
The murder of Emmett Till has been memorialized in song by such artists as Langston Hughes and Bob Dylan.
The Plagiarism Scandal That Ended Nella Larsen’s Career
Larsen's 1930 story "Sanctuary" had a similar plot to an earlier British story. So what? Perhaps the tale never really belonged to either writer.
Teaching Black Women’s Self-Care during Jim Crow
Maryrose Reeves Allen founded a wellness program at Howard University in 1925 that emphasized the physical, mental, and spiritual health of Black women.
The Haiku of Richard Wright
As he lay bedridden with dysentery, the author wrote an astonishing number of haiku. What inspired him?
Sonnets by 11 Contemporary Poets
The name of this fourteen-line poetic form comes from the Italian sonetto, meaning "a little sound or song."
Poems by 10 Contemporary Black Poets
Poems by Black poets, including Morgan Parker, Hanif Abdurraqib, Simone White, Terrance Hayes, and more.
Black Caribbeans in the Harlem Renaissance
The "Capital of Black America" was also a world capital, thanks to the influence of West Indian–born artists and writers like Claude McKay.