Showing results for "Black Box" in African American

Distilled over many years from Henry Louis Gates Jr's legendary Harvard course in African American Studies, The Black Box: Writing the Race is the story of Black self-definition in America through the prism of the writers who have led the way. From Phillis Wheatley and Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, to Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright, James Baldwin and Toni Morrison, these writers used words to create a liveable world – a “home” – for Black people destined to live in a bitterly racist society.

William Wells Brown (1814-1884) was a prominent abolitionist, historian, novelist, and playwright. Brown was an African-American pioneer in various literary genres. His novel Clotel; or, The President's Daughter (1853), was published in London, England in 1853. It is the story of Clotel and her sister Althesa who are fictional slave daughters of Thomas Jefferson, and explores the destructive effects of slavery on African-American families, the difficult lives of people of mixed-race, and the degraded and immoral relationship between master and slave.