Introduction
I. Fiction
Charles W. Chestnutt
Baxter's Procrustes
Jean Toomer
Karintha
Blood-Burning Moon
Rudolph Fisher
Common Meter
Arna Bontemps
A Summer Tragedy
Langston Hughes
Tales of Simple:
Foreword: Who Is Simple?
Feet Live Their Own Life
Temptation
Bop
Census
Coffee Break
Cracker Prayer
Promulgations
Richard Wright
The Man Who Lived Underground
Ann Petry
In Darkness and Confusion
Ralph Ellison
Invisible Man (Prologue
Frank London Brown
McDougal
Paule Marshall
To Da-duh, In Memoriam
Diane Oliver
Neighbors
II. Autobiography
Frederick Douglass
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (Chapters 1, 6, 7, and 10)
James Weldon Johnson
Along This Way (Selected Episodes)
Richard Wright
The Ethics of Living Jim Crow
J. Saunders Redding
No Day of Triumph (Chapter 1: Sections 1, 5, and 7)
James Baldwin
Autobiographical Notes
Arna Bontemps
Why I Returned
Malcolm X
The Autobiography of Malcolm X (Chapter 1)
Stnaley Sanders
"I'll Never Escape the Ghetto"
III. Poetry
Paul Laurence Dunbar
We Wear the Mask
A Death Song
Sympathy
A Negro Love Song
W. E. B. Du Bois
The Song of the Smoke
A Litany at Atlanta
James Weldon Johnson
The Creation
Fenton Johnson
The Daily Grind
The World Is a Mighty Ogre
A Negro Peddler's Song
The Old Repair Man
Rulers
The Scarlet Woman
Tired
Aunt Jane Allen
Claude McKay
Baptism
If We Must Die
Outcast
The Negro's Tragedy
America
The White City
The White House
Jean Toomer
Harvest Song
Song of the Son
Cotton Song
Brown River, Smile
Countee Cullen
Yet Do I Marvel
A Song of Praise
A Brown Girl Dead
From the Dark Tower
Incident
Scottsboro, Too, Is Worth Its Song
Three Epitaphs:
For My Grandmother
For Paul Laurence Dunbar
For a Lady I Know
Melvin B. Tolson
An Ex-Judge at the Bar
Dark Symphony
Psi
Frank Horne
Kid Stuff
Nigger: A Chant for Children
Sterling A. Brown
Sister Lou
Memphis Blues
Slim in Hell
Remembering Nat Turner
Southern Road
Southern Cop
The Young Ones
The Ballad of Joe Meek
Strong Men
Arna Bontemps
A Note of Humility
Gethsemane
Southern Mansion
My Heart Has Known Its Winter
Nocturne at Bethesda
A Black Man Talks of Reaping
The Day-Breakers
Langston Hughes
Afro-American Fragment
As I Grew Older
Dream Variations
Daybreak in Alabama
Dream Boogie
Children's Rhymes
Theme for English B
Harlem
Same in Blues
Ballad of the Landlord
Frank Marshall Davis
Four Glimpses of Night
I Sing No New Songs
Robert Whitmore
Flowers of Darkness
Richard Wright
Between the World and Me
Robert Hayden
Tour 5
On the Coast of Maine
Figure
In Light Half Nightmare and Half Vision
Market
Homage to the Empress of the Blues
Mourning Poem for the Queen of Sunday
Middle Passage
Frederick Douglass
Owen Dodson
Guitar
Black Mother Praying
Drunken Lover
The Reunion
Jonathan's Song
Yardbird's Skull
Sailors on Leave
Margaret Walker
For My People
Gwendolyn Brooks
The Artist's and Models' Ball
The Mother
The Preacher: Ruminates Behind the Sermon
The Children of the Poor
We Real Cool
The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock
Dudley Randall
The Southern Road
Legacy: My South
Booker T. and W. E. B.
The Idiot
Lerone Bennett, Jr.
Blues and Bitterness
Lance Jeffers
The Night Rains Hot Tar
On Listening to the Spirituals
Grief Streams Down My Chest
The Unknown
Naomi Long Madgett
Native
Her Story
Race Question
Mari Evans
Coventry
Status Symbol
The Emancipation of George-Hector (a colored turtle)
My Man Let Me Pull Your Coat
Black Jam for Dr. Negro
Leroi Jones
Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note
The Invention of Comics
Look for You Yesterday, Here You Come Today
The Death of Nick Charles
The Bridge
IV. Literary Criticism
W. E. B. Du Bois
The Souls of Black Folk (Chapters 1 and 14)
Alain Locke
The New Negro
The Negro in American Culture
Richard Wright
How "Bigger" Was Born
Sterling A. Brown
A Century of Negro Portraiture in American Literature
James Baldwin
Many Thousands Gone
Three Papers from the First Conference of Negro Writers (March, 1959)
1. Arthur P. Davis: Integration and Race Literature
2. J. Saunders Redding: The Negro Writer and His Relationship to His Roots
3. Langston Hughes: Writers: Black and White
Blyden Jackson
The Negro's Image of the Universe as Reflected in His Fiction
John Henrik Clarke
The Origin and Growth of Afro-American Literature
Richard G. Stern
That Same Pain, That Same Pleasure: An Interview with Ralph Ellison
Dan Georgakas
James Baldwin...in Conversation
Sterling Stuckey
Frank London Brown
Darwin T. Turner
The Negro Dramatist's Image of the Universe, 1920-1960
George E. Kent
Ethnic Impact in American Literature
Clarence Major
Black Criterion
Bibliography