Anthology.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 237-240).

Foreword: -- Our first stories / Nikki Giovanni ; Introduction: -- Reading matters / Stephanie Stokes Oliver -- The peril, 1800-1900. Suspected of having a book / Frederick Douglass -- Nine years deprived of a sheet of paper / Solomon Northrup -- A whole race begins to read / Booker T. Washington -- The Negro in literature and art / W.E.B. Du Bois -- The power, 1900-1968 -- Books and things / Zora Neale Hurston -- Poetry is practical / Langston Hughes -- The business of the writer / James Baldwin -- Turning point / Malcolm X -- Lessons in living / Maya Angelou -- Morehouse College / Martin Luther King Jr. -- The site of memory / Toni Morrison -- Where are the people of color in children's books? / Walter Dean Myers -- Reading for revolution / Stokely Carmichael [Kwame Ture] -- Twenty-one / Alice Walker -- A temporary library in a small place / Jamaica Kincaid -- What is an African American classic? / Henry Louis Gates Jr. -- New Black scribe / Terry McMillan -- The pleasure, 1968-2017 -- MFA vs. POC / Junot Díaz -- Create dangerously / Edwidge Danticat -- How to write / Colson Whitehead -- From Jamaica to Minnesota to myself / Marlon James -- I once was Miss America / Roxane Gay -- The mecca / Ta-Nehisi Coates -- The danger of the single story / Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie -- Bonus feature -- What books mean to me / President Barack Obama -- an interview with Michiko Kakutani.

Spanning over 250 years of history, Black Ink traces black literature in America from Frederick Douglass to Ta-Nehisi Coates in this masterful collection of twenty-five illustrious and moving essays on the power of the written word. Throughout American history black people are the only group of people to have been forbidden by law to learn to read. This unique collection seeks to shed light on that injustice and subjugation, as well as the hard-won literary progress made, putting some of America’s most cherished voices in a conversation in one magnificent volume that presents reading as an act of resistance.-- Provided by publisher.