African-American Writers and Journalists

Spans nearly three centuries of literary and journalistic history, from a long-unpublished ballad composed in the 1740s by a slave named Lucy Terry to the works of the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison.

It tells the stories of figures such as Frederick Douglass, whose towering intellect and powerful prose helped animate the movement to abolish slavery; Ida B. Wells and Charlotta Bass, journalists who risked their lives to report on racial violence and injustice; and Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright, who challenged society with hard questions about race and equality.