The vernacular tradition. Spirituals. Were you there when they crucified my Lord? ; City called heaven ; God's a-gonna trouble the water ; Walk together children ; I know moon-rise ; I'm a-rollin' ; I been rebuked and I been scorned ; Didn't my Lord deliver Daniel? ; Soon I will be done ; No more auction block ; Swing low, sweet chariot ; Steal away to Jesus ; Go down, Moses ; Been in the storm so long ; Oh, freedom! -- Gospel. This little light of mine ; Down by the riverside ; Freedom in the air ; Take my hand, precious Lord ; Peace be still ; Stand by me -- The blues. Yellow dog blues ; St. Louis blues ; Beale Street blues ; Down-hearted blues ; See, see rider ; Prove it on me blues ; Gulf Coast blues ; Trouble in mind ; Backwater blues ; In the house blues ; How long blues ; Hellhound on my trail ; It's a low down dirty shame ; Good morning, blues ; Sent for you yesterday ; Going to Chicago blues ; Fine and mellow ; Hoochie coochie ; Sunnyland.

The vernacular tradition. Secular rhymes and songs, ballads, and work songs. Secular rhymes and songs. We raise de wheat ; Me and my captain ; Promises of freedom ; Jack and Dinah want freedom ; Run, nigger, run ; Learn to count ; Another man done gone ; You may go but this will bring you back -- Ballads. Poor Lazarus ; The signifying monkey ; Wild Negro Bill ; John Henry ; Frankie and Johnny ; Railroad Bill ; Stackolee ; Sinking of the Titanic ; Shine and the Titanic -- Work songs. Pick a bale of cotton ; Go down, old Hannah ; Can't you line it?

The vernacular tradition. Jazz. (What did I do to be so) black and blue / Andy Razaf -- It don't mean a thing (if it ain't got that swing) / Duke Ellington -- Parker's mood / King Pleasure.

The vernacular tradition. Rap. The revolution will not be televised / Gil Scott-Heron -- The message / Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five -- Don't believe the hype / Public Enemy -- The evil that men do / Queen Latifah.

The vernacular tradition. Sermons. God -- The Eagle stirreth her nest / C.L. Franklin -- Faith hasn't got no eyes / Zora Neale Hurston -- I have a dream ; I've been to the mountaintop / Martin Luther King -- The ballot or the bullet / Malcolm X.

The vernacular tradition. Folktales. All God's chillen had wings ; Big talk ; Deer hunting story ; How to write a letter ; "'Member youse a nigger" ; "Ah'll beatcher makin' money" ; Why the sister in black works hardest ; Why women always take advantage of men ; "De reason niggers is working so hard" ; The ventriloquist ; You talk too much, anyhow ; The king buzzard ; A flying fool ; Bur Rabbit in Red Hill churchyard ; Brer Rabbit tricks Brer Fox again ; The wonderful tar-baby story ; How Mr. Rabbit was too sharp for Mr. Fox ; The awful fate of Mr. Wolf ; What the rabbit learned.

The literature of slavery and freedom : 1746-1865. Bars fight / Lucy Terry -- The interesting narrative of the life of Olaudah Equiano, or, Gustavus Vassa, the African, written by himself. Volume 1. Chapter I ; Chapter II ; from Chapter III ; from Chapter IV / Olaudah Equiano -- Poems on various subjects, religious and moral. Preface ; Letter sent by the author's master to the publisher ; To the publick / Phillis Wheatley -- To Mæcenas ; To the University of Cambridge, in New-England ; On being brought from Africa to America ; On the death of the Rev. Mr. George Whitefield, 1770 ; To the Right Honourable William, Earl of Dartmouth ; On imagination ; To S.M., a young African painter, on seeing his works ; To Samson Occom ; To his excellency General Washington / Phillis Wheatley -- David Walker's appeal in four articles; together with a preamble, to the coloured citizens of the world. Preamble ; Article I : our wretchedness in consequence of slavery / David Walker -- The lover's farewell ; On hearing of the intention of a gentleman to purchase the poet's freedom ; Division of an estate ; The creditor to his proud debtor ; George Moses Horton, myself / George Moses Horton.

The literature of slavery and freedom : 1746-1865. Ar'n't I a woman? speech to the Women's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, 1851 ; from The Anti-slavery bugle, June 21, 1851 ; from The narrative of Sojourner Truth, 1878 / Sojourner Truth -- Religion and the pure principles of morality, the sure foundation on which we must build. Introduction / Maria W. Stewart -- Lecture delivered at the Franklin Hall / Maria W. Stewart -- Incidents in the life of a slave girl. Preface ; Childhood ; The new master and mistress ; The trials of girlhood ; A perilous passage in the slave girl's life ; Another link to life ; The flight ; The loophole of retreat ; Preparations for escape ; The confession ; The Fugitive Slave Law ; Free at last / Harriet Jacobs -- Narrative of William W. Brown, a fugitive slave. Chapter V ; from Chapter VI / William Wells Brown -- Clotel, or, The president's daughter. The Negro sale ; Going to the South ; The quadroon's home ; To-day a mistress, tomorrow a slave ; Escape of Clotel / William Wells Brown -- Lines suggested on reading "An appeal to Christian women of the South, " by A.E. Grimke / Ada (Sarah L. Forten) -- An address to the slaves of the United States of America / Henry Highland Garnet -- The mulatto / Victor Séjour -- Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American slave, written by himself / Frederick Douglass -- My bondage and my freedom. Introduced to the abolitionists ; Twenty-one months in Great Brittain / Frederick Douglass.

The literature of slavery and freedom : 1746-1865. from What to the slave is the Fourth of July? : an address delivered in Rochester, New York, on 5 July 1852 / Frederick Douglass -- Life and times of Frederick Douglass. Second part. from Chapter XV : Weighed in the balance / Frederick Douglass -- Life and times of Frederick Douglass. Third part. Later life / Frederick Douglass -- America ; Yes! strike again that sounding string ; Self-reliance / James M. Whitfield -- Ethiopia ; Eliza Harris ; The slave mother ; Vashti ; Bury me in a free land ; Aunt Chloe's politics ; Learning to read ; A double standard ; Songs for the people ; An appeal to my country women ; The two offers ; Our greatest want / Frances E.W. Harper -- Fancy etchings. Enthusiasm and lofty aspirations ; Dangerous economies / Frances E.W. Harper -- Woman's political future / Frances E.W. Harper -- Our nig, or, sketches from the life of a free black, in a two-story white house, north. Preface ; Mag Smith, my mother ; My father's death ; A new home for me ; from Chapter VIII : Visitor and departure ; Perplexities, another death ; The winding up of the matter / Harriet E. Wilson.

Literature of the Reconstruction to the new Negro Renaissance : 1865-1919. A parting hymn / Charlotte Forten Grimké -- Journals. from Journal one ; from Journal three / Charlotte Forten Grimké -- Up from slavery. A slave among slaves ; Boyhood days ; The struggle for an education ; The Atlanta Exposition address / Booker T. Washington -- The goopherd grapevine ; The passing of Grandison ; The wife of his youth / Charles W. Chesnutt -- Womanhood a vital element in the regeneration and progress of a race / Anna Julia Cooper -- Contending forces. The sewing-circle ; Will Smith's defense of his race / Pauline E. Hopkins -- Famous men of the Negro race. Booker T. Washington / Pauline E. Hopkins -- Famous women of the Negro race. Literary workers : Frances E.W. Harper / Pauline E. Hopkins -- Letter from Cordelia A. Condict and Pauline Hopkins's reply : March 1903 / Pauline E. Hopkins -- A red record. The case stated ; The remedy / Ida B. Wells-Barnett -- A litany of Atlanta ; The song of the smoke ; The souls of black folk ; The damnation of women ; Criteria of Negro art ; Two novels / W.E.B. Du Bois.

Literature of the Reconstruction to the new Negro Renaissance : 1865-1919. The snapping of the bow ; Me 'n' Dunbar ; Paul Laurence Dunbar ; At the closed gate of justice ; An indignation dinner / James D. Corrothers -- Sence you went away ; Lift ev'ry voice and sing ; O black and unknown bards ; Fifty years ; Brothers ; The creation ; My city ; The autobiography of an ex-colored man / James Weldon Johnson -- The book of American Negro poetry. Preface / James Weldon Johnson -- Ode to Ethiopia ; Worn out ; A Negro love song ; The colored soldiers ; An ante-bellum sermon ; Ere sleep comes down to soothe the weary eyes ; Not they who soar ; When Malindy sings ; We wear the mask ; Little brown baby ; Her thought and his ; A cabin tale ; Sympathy ; Dinah kneading dough ; The haunted oak ; Douglass ; Philosophy ; Black Samson of Brandywine ; The poet ; The Fourth of July and race outrages / Paul Laurence Dunbar -- The hindered hand, or, The reign of the repressionist. The fugitives flee again ; The blaze / Sutton E. Griggs -- Violets ; I sit and sew ; April is on the way ; Violets / Alice Moore Dunbar Nelson -- The watchers ; The house of falling leaves ; Sic vita ; Turn me to my yellow leaves ; Quiet has a hidden sound / William Stanley Braithwaite -- Singing hallelujia ; Song of the whirlwind ; My God in heaven said to me ; The lonely mother ; Tired ; The scarlet woman / Fenton Johnson.

Harlem Renaissance : 1919-1940. The Negro digs up his past / Arthur A. Schomburg -- A winter twilight ; The black finger ; For the candle light ; When the green lies over the earth ; Tenebris / Angelina Weld Grimké -- Before the feast of Shushan ; Dunbar ; At the carnival ; Lady, lady ; Letter to my sister ; The wife-woman / Anne Spencer -- Plum bun : a novel without a moral. from Home. Black Philadelphia ; Sundays / Jessie Redmon Fauset -- The new Negro / Alain Locke -- The heart of a woman ; Youth ; My little dreams ; Lost illusions ; I want to die while you love me / Georgia Douglas Johnson -- Africa for the Africans ; The future as I see it / Marcus Garvey -- Harlem shadows ; If we must die ; To the white fiends ; Africa ; America ; My mother ; Enslaved ; The White House ; Outcast ; St. Isaac's Church, Petrograd / Claude McKay -- Home to Harlem. He also loved / Claude McKay -- Harlem runs wild / Claude McKay -- Sweat ; How it feels to be colored me ; The gilded six-bits ; Characteristics of Negro expression / Zora Neale Hurston -- Mules and men. Negro folklore / Zora Neale Hurston -- Their eyes were watching God. The return ; Pear tree / Zora Neale Hurston -- Dust tracks on a road. Research / Zora Neale Hurston -- Quicksand. To Denmark ; New life ; Talk of marriage ; Proposal ; Good-bye / Nella Larsen -- Cane / Jean Toomer -- The Negro-art hokum / George Samuel Schuyler -- The city of refuge ; The Caucasian storms Harlem / Rudolph Fisher.

Harlem Renaissance : 1919-1940. The wharf rats / Eric Walrond -- On being young, a woman, and colored / Marita Bonner -- Odyssey of Big Boy ; Long gone ; Southern road ; Strong men ; Memphis blues ; Slim Greer ; Tin roof blues ; Ma Rainey ; Cabaret ; Sporting Beasley ; Sam Smiley / Sterling A. Brown -- Heritage ; To a dark girl ; Sonnet, 2 ; Hatred / Gwendolyn B. Bennett -- Infants of the spring. Harlem salon / Wallace Thurman -- Golgotha is a mountain ; A black man talks of reaping ; Nocturne at Bethesda ; Southern mansion ; Miracles ; A summer tragedy / Arna Bontemps -- The Negro speaks of rivers ; Mother to son ; Danse africaine ; Jazzonia ; When Sue wears red ; Dream variations ; The weary blues ; I too ; A house in Taos ; Homesick blues ; Po' boy blues ; Gypsy man ; Lament over love ; Red silk stockings ; Bad man ; Song for a dark girl ; Gal's cry for a dying lover ; Hard daddy ; Sylvester's dying bed ; Ballad of the landlord ; Juke box love song ; Dream boogie ; Harlem ; Motto ; The Negro artist and the racial mountain ; The blues I'm playing / Langston Hughes -- The big sea. When the Negro was in vogue ; Harlem literati ; Downtown / Langston Hughes -- The best of Simple. Feet live their own life ; A toast to Harlem ; Jealousy / Langston Hughes -- Yet do I marvel ; Tableau ; Incident ; Saturday's child ; The shroud of color ; Heritage ; To John Keats, poet at spring time ; From the dark tower / Countee Cullen -- Poem ; Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem ; Remember not ; Invocation / Helene Johnson.

Realism, Naturalism, Modernism : 1940-1960. An ex-judge at the bar ; Dark symphony ; A legend of Versailles ; Libretto for the Republic of Liberia ; The birth of John Henry ; Satchmo / Melvin B. Tolson -- The living is easy. Cleo ; Cleo's high jinks ; Cleo goes north / Dorothy West -- Blueprint for Negro writing ; The ethics of living Jim Crow, an autobiographical sketch ; Long black song ; The man who lived underground / Richard Wright -- Black boy. Booklist ; Chicago / Richard Wright -- Salute to the passing / Chester B. Himes -- Like a winding sheet / Ann Petry -- The street. The apartment / Ann Petry -- The diver ; Homage to the empress of the blues ; Middle passage ; O Daedalus, fly away home ; Runagate runagate ; Frederick Douglass ; A ballad of remembrance ; Mourning poem for the Queen of Sunday ; Soledad ; El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz ; A letter from Phillis Wheatley / Robert Hayden -- Invisible man. Prologue ; Battle royal ; Epilogue / Ralph Ellison -- Change the joke and slip the yoke ; The world and the jug / Ralph Ellison.

Realism, Naturalism, Modernism : 1940-1960. For my people ; Poppa chicken ; For Malcolm X ; Prophets for a new day / Margaret Walker -- Kitchenette building ; The mother ; A song in the front yard ; Sadie and Maud ; The vacant lot ; The preacher : ruminates behind the sermon ; The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith ; Maxie Allen ; The rites for Cousin Vit ; The children of the poor ; The lovers of the poor ; We real cool ; The Chicago Defender sends a man to Little Rock ; A lovely love ; Malcolm X ; Two dedications ; Riot ; The third sermon on the Warpland ; Young heroes ; When you have forgotten Sunday : the love story ; Maud Martha / Gwendolyn Brooks -- Everybody's protest novel ; Many thousands gone ; Stranger in the village ; Notes of a native son ; Sonny's blues / James Baldwin -- Walking Parker home ; Grandfather was queer, too ; Jail poems ; Unanimity has been achieved, not a dot less for its accidentalness ; War memoir : jazz, don't listen to it at your own risk / Bob Kaufman -- A raisin in the sun / Lorraine Hansberry.

The black arts movement : 1960-1970. Status symbol ; I am a black woman / Mari Evans -- Towards a black aesthetic / Hoyt Fuller -- The autobiography of Malcolm X. Saved / Malcolm X (El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz) -- The man who cried I am. In an outdoor cafe ; Memories, Margrit, and morphine ; Picture of the writer / John Alfred Williams -- Letter from Birmingham jail / Martin Luther King Jr. -- The idea of ancestry ; Hard rock returns to prison from the hospital for the criminal insane ; For black poets who think of suicide / Etheridge Knight -- The black aesthetic. Introduction / Addison Gayle Jr. -- Preface to a twenty volume suicide note ; In memory of radio ; A poem for black hearts ; I don't love you ; Three movements and a coda ; SOS ; Black art ; The invention of comics ; Dutchman ; The revolutionary theatre / Amiri Baraka.

The black arts movement : 1960-1970. Homecoming ; Poem at thirty ; For our lady ; Summer words of a sistuh addict / Sonia Sanchez -- A blues book for blue black magical women. Part three. Present / Sonia Sanchez -- Goin' a buffalo : a tragifantasy / Ed Bullins -- Soul on ice. The primeval mitosis / Eldridge Cleaver -- Did John's music kill him? / A.B. Spellman -- How long has Trane been gone / Jayne Cortez -- The black arts movement / Larry Neal -- Black art : mute matter given force and function / Maulana Karenga -- Back again, home ; Introduction : to Think black ; The long reality ; Malcolm spoke/who listened? ; A poem to complement other poems / Haki R. Madhubuti -- For Saundra ; Beautiful black men ; Nikki-Rosa / Nikki Giovanni -- A solo song : for Doc / James Alan McPherson -- In Texas grass ; Conversation overheard ; Impressions/of Chicago, for Howlin' Wolf / Quincy Troupe -- Jesus was crucified ; It is deep ; For sistuhs wearin' straight hair / Carolyn M. Rodgers.

Literature since 1970. Train whistle guitar. History lessons / Albert Murray -- Still I rise ; My Arkansas / Maya Angelou -- I know why the caged bird sings. Mrs. Flowers ; "Mam" / Maya Angelou -- Reena ; To Da-duh, in memoriam ; The making of a writier : from the poets in the kitchen / Paule Marshall -- A movie star has to star in black and white / Adrienne Kennedy -- Sula / Toni Morrison -- The sky is gray / Ernest J. Gaines -- Father Son and Holy Ghost ; The winds of Orisha ; Coal ; Now that I am forever with child ; A litany for survival ; The evening news ; Poetry is not a luxury / Audre Lorde -- Pike Street bus ; The Griots who know Brer Fox ; Tapestries ; Caledonia / Colleen McElroy -- The bodies broken on ; The lost baby poem ; Prayer ; Malcolm ; Kali ; If mama/could see ; Homage to my hips ; What spells raccoon to me ; 1. At Jonestown ; A woman who loves ; Wishes for sons ; Move / Lucille Clifton -- In memoriam : Martin Luther King Jr. ; I must become a menace to my enemies ; Poem about my rights ; Poem for Guatemala ; The female and the silence of a man ; Intifada ; A new politics of sexuality / June Jordan -- Swallow the lake ; Round midnight ; On watching a caterpillar become a butterfly ; Chicago heat / Clarence Major.

Literature since 1970. There is a tree more ancient than Eden. The epistle of Sweetie Reed / Leon Forrest -- Dear John, dear Coltrane ; Deathwatch ; Here where Coltrane is ; Br'er Sterling and the rocker ; Grandfather ; "Goin' to the territory" ; In Hayden's collage ; The ghost of soul-making / Michael S. Harper -- I am a cowboy in the boat of Ra ; Railroad Bill, a conjure man ; Dualism : in Ralph Elliison's Invisible man ; Chattanooga ; Oakland blues ; Neo-HooDoo manifesto / Ishmael Reed -- Mumbo jumbo. Chapters 1-2 / Ishmael Reed -- Raymond's run / Toni Cade Bambara -- A dance for Ma Rainey ; Conjugal visits / Al Young -- The seduction of light. Ben Franklin ; Secondhand business / Al Young -- Brothers and keepers. Robby's version / John Edgar Wideman -- Damballah / John Edgar Wideman -- Atlantis : model 1924 (d) / Samuel R. Delany -- The peacock poems : 1 ; I want Aretha to set this to music ; Tell Martha not to moan / Sherley Anne Williams -- Women ; Outcast ; On stripping bark from myself ; "Good night, Willie Lee, I'll see you in the morning" ; In search of our mothers' gardens ; Everyday use ; Advancing Luna, and Ida B. Wells / Alice Walker -- The color purple. God love all them feelings / Alice Walker -- Fences / August Wilson -- Within the veil ; Columba / Michelle Cliff.

Literature since 1970. Emmett Till ; Today I am a homicide in the north of the city ; Be quiet, go away ; At the record hop ; American sonnet (10) ; Bedtime story ; Mastectomy / Wanda Coleman -- Bloodchild / Octavia Butler -- February in Sydney ; Facing it ; Sunday afternoons ; Banking potatoes ; Birds on a powerline / Yusef Komunyakaa -- Falso brilhante ; Song of the Andoumboulou : 8 / Nathaniel Mackey -- Djbot Baghostu's run. 26.IX.81 / Nathaniel Mackey -- The education of Mingo / Charles Johnson -- from For colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf ; Nappy edges ; Bocas : a daughter's geography / Ntozake Shange -- Annie John. The circling hand / Jamaica Kincaid -- The Chaneysville incident. Old Jack / David Bradley -- The women of Brewster Place. The two / Gloria Naylor -- Quilting on the rebound / Terry McMillan -- David Walker (1785-1830) ; Parsley ; Receiving the stigmata ; from Thomas and Beulah ; The event ; Motherhood ; Daystar ; The Oriental ballerina ; Pastoral ; from Mother love ; Persephone abducted ; Statistic : the witness ; Mother love ; Demeter mourning ; History ; Demeter's prayer to Hades / Rita Dove -- Devil in a blue dress. DeWitt Albright ; Joppy ; Daphne Monet / Walter Mosley -- Conditions. XXI ; XXII ; XXIV / Essex Hemphill.