Foreword Ishmael Reed
I Autobiography
To My Old Master Jourdon Anderson
From Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Harriet Ann Jacobs
From Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass Frederick Douglass
I Could be a Conjure Doctor and Make Plenty of Money Lorenzo Ezell
My White Folks Treated Us Good Marriah Hines
Dont Guess Names Matter Much No Way Lizzie Williams
From Satchmo Louis Armstrong
Remembering Richard Wright Ralph Ellison
Somebody Done Hoodood the Hoodoo Man Al Young
From The Motion of Light in Water Samuel R. Delaney
Granddaddy Itabari Njeri
II Fiction
The Wife of His Youth Charles W. Chestnut
Sweat Zora Neale Hurston
Esther Jean Toomer
Almos a Man Richard Wright
Headwaiter Chester Himes
Like a Winding Sheet Ann Petry
The Homecoming Frank Yerby
Sonnys Blues James Baldwin
Son in the Afternoon John A. Williams
To Da-duh in Memoriam Paule Marshall
The Jewel in the Lotus Kristin Hunter
Recitatif Toni Morrison
The Sky is Gray Ernest J. Gaines
Answers in Progress Amiri Baraka
Five Years Ago Clarence Major
The Only Man on Liberty Street William Melvin Kelley
The Lesson Toni Cade Bambara
everybody knew bubba riff John Edgar Wideman
Nineteen Fifty-Five Alice Walker
To Die of Old Age in a Foreign Country Brenda Flanagan
Menagerie Charles Johnson
Girl Jamaica Kincaid
Kiswana Browne Gloria Naylor
The End Terry McMillan
The One That Did Not Get Away Fatima Shaik
Guess Whos Coming to Seder Trey Ellis
Paper Garden Jerome Wilson
III Poetry
An Evening Thought Jupiter Hammon
Bars Fight Lucy Terry
Imagination Phillis Wheatley
On Liberty and Slavery George Moses Horton
The Slave Auction Frances E. W. Harper
The Song of Smoke W. E. B. DuBois
Lift Every Voice and Sing James Weldon Johnson
The Creation Sympathy Paul Laurence Dunbar
When Malindy Sings
We Wear the Mask
The Tropics in New York Claude McKay
The Lynching
If We Must Die
Lamda Melvin B. Tolson
African China
After Winter Sterling A. Brown
Foreclosure
Harlem Langston Hughes
The Weary Blues
The Negro Speaks of Rivers
I, Too, Sing America
Mother to Son