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“A true poet of modern classic culture in mid-twentieth century U.S.A.”—Allen Ginsberg “At their best the poems have an intensely oral, I would like to call it glossolalic, freedom, as if they captured the essence of what one might like to express in the moment of rapture.”—David Rattray Beginning in the 1950s until his untimely death at age 49, Stephen Jonas (1921-1970) was an influential if underground figure of the New American Poetry. A gay African-American poet of self-obscured origins, h...

First published in 1920, this groundbreaking work by the pioneering African American scholar W. E. B. Du Bois is not only original and probing in its brilliant ideas but also experimental in presentation, ranging from detailed sociopolitical analyses to lyrical and poetic presentations. After an opening autobiographical essay, Du Bois launches a series of critical commentaries on some of the most important issues pertaining to white-black relations. Perhaps the most provocative of these, titled...

By 1849, the Narrative of William W. Brown was in its fourth edition, having sold over 8,000 copies in less than eighteen months and making it one of the fastest-selling antislavery tracts of its time. The book's popularity can be attributed both to the strong voice of its author and Brown's notoriety as an abolitionist speaker. The son of a slave and a white man, Brown recounts his years in servitude, his cruel masters, and the brutal whippings he and those around him received. He provides a de...

The authoritative edition of Franklin's autobiography, now with a new introduction by eminent Franklin scholar Edmund S. Morgan Translated into a dozen languages, printed in hundreds of editions, and read by millions of people, Franklin's autobiography has had an influence perhaps unequaled by any other book by an American writer. Written ostensibly as a letter to his son William, the autobiography offers Franklin's reflections on philosophy and religion, politics, war, education, material succe...

In his own voice, the history of the civil right movement told by the black gay adviser to Martin Luther King, Jr. and the organizer of the 1963 March on Washington. Bayard Rustin, the famed openly-gay African American organizer, taught Martin Luther King, Jr. strategies of nonviolence during the Montgomery Bus Boycott, thereby launching the birth of the Civil Rights Movement. Widely acclaimed as a founding father of modern black protest, Rustin reached his pinnacle of notoriety in 1963 as org...