These shared experiences help define African-Americans and their culture.
Illustrations allow the visual images to tell their own stories and arrive at their own conclusions.
In determining how to select images, Wright and Southern stipulated that they must show Blacks in everyday life as part of their private social world from which whites were excluded and that they focus on the centrality of traditional music for the Black American expressive culture. Artists featured in the book include some of the most eminent American painters of the 19th and 20th Centuries, including Thomas Eakins, Charles Demuth, Eastman Johnson, Winslow Homer, and William Sidney Mount.