The Black Book: 35th Anniversary Edition
Book DescriptionSeventeenth-century sketches of Africa as it 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 500 others into one sensational narrative of the black experience in America:The Black Book.Now in a deluxe 35th anniversary hardcover edition,The Black Bookremains 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, as well as Middleton Harris and Toni Morrison (then a Random House editor, now a two-time Pulitzer Prize—winning Nobel laureate) spent months studying, laughing at, and crying over these materials–from transcripts of fugitive slaves’ trials and proclamations by Frederick Douglass and other celebrated abolitionists to chilling images of cross burnings and lynchings, patents registered by black inventors throughout the early twentieth century to vibrant posters from “Black Hollywood” films from the 1930s and 1940s.A labor of love and a vital link to the richness and diversity of African American history and culture,The Black Bookhonors 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 new Foreword and original poem by Toni Morrison,The Black Bookremains a timeless landmark work.Look InsideThe Black Book: 35th Anniversary EditionClick on thumbnails for larger imagesCakewalking CoupleCourtesy of VertaMae GrosvenorSunlight Soap: Advertisement, circa 1890Courtesy of VertaMae GrosvenorSculptured Mask: Ife Bronze Head, 13th century. This head, uncovered in Ife, Nigeria, was made by the “lost wax” process long before Europeans reached the region (960 – 1160 A.D.)Courtesy of the Greater Acacia CollectionSheet Music forThe Funny Little Darkies(circa 1870)Movie Poster forWhile Thousands Cheer(1940), starring Kenny Washington and Mantan MorelandCourtesy of the Ernest Smith Collection