The Black Book

By Middleton A. Harris

Book Overview

A new edition of the classic New York Times bestseller edited by Toni Morrison, offering an encyclopedic look at the black experience in America from 1619 through the 1940s with the original cover restored.

"I am so pleased the book is alive again. I still think there is no other work that tells and visualizes a story of such misery with seriousness, humor, grace and triumph."--Toni Morrison

Seventeenth-century sketches of Africans as they appeared to marauding European traders. Nineteenth-century slave auction notices. Twentieth-century sheet music for work songs and freedom chants. Photographs of war heroes, regal in uniform. Antebellum reward posters for capturing runaway slaves. An 1856 article titled "A Visit to the Slave Mother Who Killed Her Child."

In 1974, Middleton A. Harris and Toni Morrison led a team of gifted, passionate collectors in compiling these images and nearly five hundred others into one sensational narrative of the black experience in America--The Black Book. Now in a newly restored hardcover edition, The Black Book remains a breathtaking testament to the legendary wisdom, strength, and perseverance of black men and women intent on freedom. Prominent collectors Morris Levitt, Roger Furman, and Ernest Smith joined Harris and Morrison (then a Random House editor, ultimately a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning Nobel Laureate) to spend months studying, laughing at, and crying over these materials--transcripts from fugitive slaves' trials and proclamations by Frederick Douglass and celebrated abolitionists, as well as chilling images of cross burnings and lynchings, patents registered by black inventors throughout the early twentieth century, and vibrant posters from "Black Hollywood" films of the 1930s and 1940s. Indeed, it was an article she found while researching this project that provided the inspiration for Morrison's masterpiece, Beloved.

A labor of love and a vital link to the richness and diversity of African American history and culture, The Black Book honors the past, reminding us where our nation has been, and gives flight to our hopes for what is yet to come. Beautifully and faithfully presented and featuring a foreword and original poem by Toni Morrison, The Black Book remains a timeless landmark work.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1400068487
• ISBN13: 9781400068487
• Release Date: December 2019
• Publisher: Random House
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 1.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 8.3" x 11.6"

Customer Reviews

Excellent Condition!!!!!

This book is in excellent condition, much better then I expected for how old it is. Thank you for such a wonderful seller.

Teacher

I absolutely love this book! I don't recommend it for elementary, but definitely for middle school and high school, with some modifications at the middle school level. I happen to find my book at a garage sale and was delighted and bewildered at their loss. I couldn't understand why any family of African descent would get rid of this book. It gives a much more accurate perception of the events that took place in OUR history than that of the school curriccullum. Every citizen, and those wanting to become citizens, need to know the truth. It is AMERICA'S history.

A rare American treasure that every American should own.

This book is one of America's greatest treasures!!! It has been a part of my household ever since I was a young girl. No American, black, white, or otherwise should be without this book and the knowledge of its contents. This book is an accurate depiction of how far we as African-Americans have come and, hopefully, an insight as to where we as an American culture are going. This book should never have gone out of print! I recommend that this book be used as a textbook in all elementary school, middle school, high school, and college history courses! America as a whole will never be able to mend the wounds if we do not learn about each other, acknowledge one another, learn to understand one another, and teach each other how to heal all of our wounds and correct the wrongs of the past. Ignorance is not an istinct or a natural trait, it is a parasitic sore that is handed down from generation to generation.

A haunting yet true account of the horrors of Black hatred

This book is an accurate account of the horrors and stereotypes that surrounded Diaspora Africans in America. It is my hope that every African American read this bok, and treasure it as I have.