HENRY LOUIS GATES

Welcomed on publication as "brilliant, definitive, and a joy to teach from," (Russ Castronovo, University of Miami) The Norton Anthology of African American Literature was adopted at more than 1,275 colleges and universities worldwide. Now, the new Second Edition offers these highlights: Nine new writers The Second Edition includes nine new writers spanning three centuries: Jupiter Hammon, Venture Smith, Martin Delany, Elizabeth Keckley, Gayl Jones, Caryl Phillips, Edwidge Danticat, Colson Whitehead, and Harryette Mullen. Strengthened Vernacular Tradition Building on the editors'' view that vernacular expression lives in performance, the original Audio Companion CD has been expanded to a two-CD set; Disc 1, Music, includes vocal and instrumental pieces-from ragtime to Motown. Disc 2, Spoken Word, offers 24 speeches, readings, and performances, from Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois to Amiri Baraka and Rita Dove. 11 complete longer works Venture Smith, A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, A Native of Africa: But Resident Above Sixty Years in the United States of America (new); Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave; James Weldon Johnson, Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man; Nella Larsen, Quicksand (new); Richard Wright, The Man Who Lived Underground; Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha; Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun; Amiri Baraka, Dutchman; Ed Bullins, Goin''a Buffalo: A Tragifantasy; Adrienne Kennedy, A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White; August Wilson, Joe Turner''s Come and Gone (new). Strengthened Apparatus and a More Readable Format An extensive, new Selected General Bibliography Revisedsome entirely rewrittenperiod introductions, headnotes, footnotes, and updated author bibliographies Updated timeline A new trim size and bolder typeface for easier reading Thoroughly Revised "Literature Since 1975" Succeeding the late Barbara Christian, new editor Cheryl A. Wall has included 5 new writers-poet Harryette Mullen and fiction writers Gayl Jones, Caryl Phillips, Edwidge Danticat, and Colson Whitehead. In addition, Wall has rewritten the period introduction a

Unlike most white Americans who, if they are so inclined, can search their ancestral records, identifying who among their forebears was the first to set foot on this countrys shores, most African Americans, in tracing their familys past, encounter a series of daunting obstacles. Slavery was a brutally efficient nullifier of identity, willfully denying black men and women even their names. Yet, from that legacy of slavery, there have sprung generations whove struggled, thrived, and lived extraordinary lives. For too long, African Americans family trees have been barren of branches, but, very recently, advanced genetic testing techniques, combined with archival research, have begun to fill in the gaps. Here, scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., backed by an elite team of geneticists and researchers, takes nineteen extraordinary African Americans on a once unimaginable journey, tracing family sagas through U.S. history and back to Africa. Those whose recovered pasts collectively form an African American peoples history of the United States include celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey, Whoopi Goldberg, Chris Rock, Don Cheadle, Chris Tucker, Morgan Freeman, Tina Turner, and Quincy Jones; writers such as Maya Angelou and Bliss Broyard; leading thinkers such as Harvard divinity professor Peter Gomes, the Reverend T. D. Jakes, neurosurgeon Ben Carson, and sociologist Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot; and famous achievers such as astronaut Mae Jemison, media personality Tom Joyner, decathlete Jackie Joyner-Kersee, and Ebony and Jet publisher Linda Johnson Rice. More than a work of history, In Search of Our Roots is a book of revelatory importance that, for the first time, brings to light the lives of ordinary men and women who, by courageous example, blazed a path for their famous descendants. For a reader, there is the stirring pleasure of witnessing long-forgotten struggles and triumphsbut theres an enduring reward as well. In accompanying the nineteen contemporary achievers on their journey into the past and meeting their remarkable forebears, we come to know ourselves.

Finding Oprahs Roots will not only endow readers with a new appreciation for the key contributions made by historys unsung but also equip them with the tools to connect to pivotal figures in their own past. A roadmap through the intricacies of public documents and online databases, the book also highlights genetic testing resources that can make it possible to know ones distant tribal roots in Africa.For Oprah, the path back to the past was emotion-filled and profoundly illuminating, connecting the narrative of her family to the larger American narrative and anchoring her in a way not previously possible. For the reader, Finding Oprahs Roots offers the possibility of an equally rewarding experience.

"This is a book of stories," writes Henry Louis Gates, "and all might be described as narratives of ascent." As some remarkable men talk about their lives, many perspectives on race and gender emerge. For the notion of the unitary black man, Gates argues, is as imaginary as the creature that the poet Wallace Stevens conjured in his poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird."James Baldwin, Colin Powell, Harry Belafonte, Bill T. Jones, Louis Farrakhan, Anatole Broyard, Albert Murray -- all these men came from modest circumstances and all achieved preeminence. They are people, Gates writes, "who have shaped the world as much as they were shaped by it, who gave as good as they got." Three are writers -- James Baldwin, who was once regarded as the intellectual spokesman for the black community; Anatole Broyard, who chose to hide his black heritage so as to be seen as a writer on his own terms; and Albert Murray, who rose to the pinnacle of literary criticism. There is the general-turned-political-figure Colin Powell, who discusses his interactions with three United States presidents; there is Harry Belafonte, the entertainer whose career has been distinct from his fervent activism; there is Bill T. Jones, dancer and choreographer, whose fierce courage and creativity have continued in the shadow of AIDS; and there is Louis Farrakhan, the controversial religious leader.These men and others speak of their lives with candor and intimacy, and what emerges from this portfolio of influential men is a strikingly varied and profound set of ideas about what it means to be a black man in America today.

Almost one-hundred years ago, W.E.B. Du Bois proposed the notion of the "talented tenth," an African American elite that would serve as leaders and models for the larger black community. In this unprecedented collaboration, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Cornel West--two of Du Boiss most prominent intellectual descendants--reassess that relationship and its implications for the future of black Americans. If the 1990s are the best of times for the heirs of the Talented Tenth, they are unquestionably worse for the growing black underclass. As they examine the origins of this widening gulf and propose solutions for it, Gates and West combine memoir and biography, social analysis and cultural survey into a book that is incisive and compassionate, cautionary and deeply stirring. "Todays most public African American intellectual voices...West and Gates have made a valuable contribution."--Julian Bond, Philadelphia Inquirer"Brilliant...a social, cultural and political blueprint...that attempts to illumine the future path for blacks and American democracy."--New York Daily News"Henry Louis Gates., Jr., and Cornel West are among the most renowned American intellectuals of our time."--New York Times Book Review

The instant New York Times bestseller and companion book to the PBS series.Absolutely brilliant . . . A necessary and moving work. Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., author of Begin AgainEngaging. . . . In Gatess telling, the Black church shines bright even as the nation itself moves uncertainly through the gloaming, seeking justice on earthas it is in heaven. Jon Meacham, New York Times Book ReviewFrom the New York Times bestselling author of Stony the Road and The Black Box,and one of our most important voices on the African American experience, comes a powerful new history of the Black church as a foundation of Black life and a driving force in the larger freedom struggle in America.For the young Henry Louis Gates, Jr., growing up in a small, residentially segregated West Virginia town, the church was a center of gravityan intimate place where voices rose up in song and neighbors gathered to celebrate lifes blessings and offer comfort amid its trials and tribulations. In this tender and expansive reckoning with the meaning of the Black Church in America, Gates takes us on a journey spanning more than five centuries, from the intersection of Christianity and the transatlantic slave trade to todays political landscape. At roads end, and after Gatess distinctive meditation on the churches of his childhood, we emerge with a new understanding of the importance of African American religion to the larger national narrativeas a center of resistance to slavery and white supremacy, as a magnet for political mobilization, as an incubator of musical and oratorical talent that would transform the culture, and as a crucible for working through the Black communitys most critical personal and social issues.In a country that has historically afforded its citizens from the African diaspora tragically few safe spaces, the Black Church has always been more than a sanctuary. This fact was never lost on white supremacists: from the earliest days of slavery, when enslaved people were allowed to worship at all, their meetinghouses were subject to surveillance and destruction. Long after slaverys formal eradication, church burnings and bombings by anti-Black racists continued, a hallmark of the violent effort to suppress the African American struggle for equality. The past often isnt even pastDylann Roof committed his slaughter in the Mother Emanuel AME Church 193 years after it was first burned down by white citizens of Charleston, South Carolina, following a thwarted slave rebellion.But as Gates brilliantly shows, the Black church has never been only one thing. Its story lies at the heart of the Black political struggle, and it has produced many of the Black communitys most notable leaders. At the same time, some churches and denominations have eschewed political engagement and exemplified practices of exclusion and intolerance that have caused polarization and pain. Those tensions remain today, as a rising generation demands freedom and dignity for all within and beyond their communities, regardless of race, sex, or gender. Still, as a source of faith and refuge, spiritual sustenance and struggle against societys darkest forces, the Black Church has been central, as this enthralling history makes vividly clear.

Stony the Road presents a bracing alternative to Trump-era white nationalism. . . . In our current politics we recognize African-American historythe spot under our countrys rug where the terrorism and injustices of white supremacy are habitually swept. Stony the Road lifts the rug." Nell Irvin Painter, New York Times Book ReviewA profound new rendering of the struggle by African-Americans for equality after the Civil War and the violent counter-revolution that resubjugated them, by the bestselling author of The Black Church and The Black Box.The abolition of slavery in the aftermath of the Civil War is a familiar story, as is the civil rights revolution that transformed the nation after World War II. But the century in between remains a mystery: if emancipation sparked "a new birth of freedom" in Lincolns America, why was it necessary to march in Martin Luther King, Jr.s America? In this new book, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., one of our leading chroniclers of the African-American experience, seeks to answer that question in a history that moves from the Reconstruction Era to the "nadir" of the African-American experience under Jim Crow, through to World War I and the Harlem Renaissance. Through his close reading of the visual culture of this tragic era, Gates reveals the many faces of Jim Crow and how, together, they reinforced a stark color line between white and black Americans. Bringing a lifetime of wisdom to bear as a scholar, filmmaker, and public intellectual, Gates uncovers the roots of structural racism in our own time, while showing how African Americans after slavery combatted it by articulating a vision of a "New Negro" to force the nation to recognize their humanity and unique contributions to America as it hurtled toward the modern age.The story Gates tells begins with great hope, with the Emancipation Proclamation, Union victory, and the liberation of nearly 4 million enslaved African-Americans. Until 1877, the federal government, goaded by the activism of Frederick Douglass and many others, tried at various turns to sustain their new rights. But the terror unleashed by white paramilitary groups in the former Confederacy, combined with deteriorating economic conditions and a loss of Northern will, restored "home rule" to the South. The retreat from Reconstruction was followed by one of the most violent periods in our history, with thousands of black people murdered or lynched and many more afflicted by the degrading impositions of Jim Crow segregation. An essential tour through one of Americas fundamental historical tragedies, Stony the Road is also a story of heroic resistance, as figures such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells fought to create a counter-narrative, and culture, inside the lions mouth. As sobering as this tale is, it also has within it the inspiration that comes with encountering the hopes our ancestors advanced against the longest odds.

The first edition of Joel Augustus Rogerss now legendary 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro with Complete Proof, published in 1934, was billed as A Negro Believe It or Not. Rogerss little book was priceless because he was delivering enlightenment and pride, steeped in historical research, to a people too long starved on the lie that they were worth nothing. For African Americans of the Jim Crow era, Rogerss was their first black history teacher. But Rogers was not always shy about embellishing the facts and minimizing ambiguity; neither was he above shock journalism now and then. With elan and eruditionand with winning enthusiasmHenry Louis Gates, Jr. gives us a corrective yet loving homage to Rogers work. Relying on the latest scholarship, Gates leads us on a romp through African, diasporic, and African-American history in question-and-answer format. Among the one hundred questions: Who were Africas first ambassadors to Europe? Who was the first black president in North America? Did Lincoln really free the slaves? Who was historys wealthiest person? What percentage of white Americans have recent African ancestry? Why did free black people living in the South before the end of the Civil War stay there? Who was the first black head of state in modern Western history? Where was the first Underground Railroad? Who was the first black American woman to be a self-made millionaire? Which black man made many of our favorite household products better? Here is a surprising, inspiring, sometimes boldly mischievousall the while highly instructive and entertainingcompendium of historical curiosities intended to illuminate the sheer complexity and diversity of being Negro in the world.(With full-color illustrations throughout.)

In a coming-of-age story as enchantingly vivid and ribald as anything Mark Twain or Zora Neale Hurston, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., recounts his childhood in the mill town of Piedmont, West Virginia, in the 1950s and 1960s and ushers readers into a gossip, of lye-and-mashed-potato processes, and of slyly stubborn resistance to the indignities of segregation. A winner of the Chicago Tribunes Heartland Award and the Lillian Smith Prize, Colored People is a pungent and poignant masterpiece of recollection, a work that extends and deepens our sense of African American history even as it entrances us with its bravura storytelling

The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross is the companion book to the six-part, six-hour documentary of the same name. The series is the first to air since 1968 that chronicles the full sweep of 500 years of African American history, from the origins of slavery on the African continent and the arrival of the first black conquistador, Juan Garrido, in Florida in 1513, through five centuries of remarkable historic events right up to Barack Obamas second term as president, when the United States still remains deeply divided by race and class. The book explores these topics in even more detail than possible in the television series, and examines many other fascinating matters as well, guiding readers on an engaging journey through the Black Atlantic worldfrom Africa and Europe to the Caribbean, Latin America, and the United Statesto shed new light on what it has meant, and means, to be an African American. By highlighting the complex internal debates and class differences within the black experience in this country, readers will learn that the African American community, which black abolitionist Martin R. Delany described as a "nation within a nation," has never been a truly uniform entity, and that its members have been debating their differences of opinion and belief from their very first days in this country. The road to freedom for black people in America has not been linear; rather, much like the course of a river, it has been full of loops and eddies, slowing and occasionally reversing current. Ultimately, this book emphasizes the idea that African American history encompasses multiple continents and venues, and must be viewed through a transnational perspective to be fully understood.

A foundational reckoning with how Black Americans have used the written word to define and redefine themselves over the course of the countrys history.Distilled over many years from Henry Louis Gates Jrs legendary Harvard course in African American Studies, The Black Box: Writing the Race is the story of Black self-definition in America through the prism of the writers who have led the way. From Phillis Wheatley and Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, to Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright, James Baldwin and Toni Morrison, these writers used words to create a liveable world a home for Black people destined to live in a bitterly racist society.This is a community that defined and transformed itself in defiance of oppression and lies; a collective act of resistance and transcendence that is at the heart of its self-definition. Out of that contested ground has flowered a resilient, creative, powerful, diverse culture formed by people who have often disagreed markedly about what it means to be Black, and about how best to shape a usable past out of the materials at hand, to call into being a more just and equitable future.This is the epic story of how, through essays and speeches, novels, plays and poems, a long line of creative thinkers has unveiled the contours of and resisted confinement in the black box that this nation within a nation has been assigned, from its founding to today. It is a book that records the compelling saga of the creation of a people.