The complete online text of Frederick Douglass by Charles W. Chesnutt.

Charles W. Chesnutt was the first important Afro-American writer of fiction to enlist the white-controlled publishing industry in the service of his social message, touching a significant portion of the white American reading audience with his indictment...

Charles Waddell Chesnutt, a "voluntary Negro" (one who, though so fair as to be mistaken for white, chooses not to "pass"), was born in Cleveland, Ohio, the eldest child of Andrew Jackson Chesnutt and the former Ann Maria Sampson, free blacks, who in 185...

Charles Waddell Chesnutt was America's first important black writer of fiction; no black American before him had created a sustained body of significant work. Since his life spanned nearly two halves of two different centuries, his writing reflects both...

Maya Angelou always makes me cry. She also makes me laugh, of course, and sing and think and feel. But the one certainty is that her every performance - be it at lecture hall, poetry reading, dinner table or presidential inaugural - will at...

IN HIS DRIVE-BY SHOOTINGS OF BLACK PROGRESS, CLARENCE THOMAS SPEEDS AWAY, SPITTING AT HIS VICTIMS AND SPEWING QUOTATIONS THAT STUN THE ONLOOKERS AS MUCH AS THE ORIGINAL ATTACK. NO OTHER THUG COMMITS BLACK-ON-BLACK CRIME IN THE NAME OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS. Last year, Thomas, the...

Frederick Douglass is known for fiercely opposing slavery after running away from his Maryland owner, for championing equal rights and women's rights and for being a forceful speaker.But he spent much of his adult life as a journalist, first publishing a newspaper in Rochester, N.Y.,...

8:30 a.m. The Manhattan Institute will host conference celebrating the 20th anniversary of Allan Bloom's book, “The Closing of the American Mind” at the Princeton Club, 15 West 43rd Street. 9 a.m. Operation HOPE will open a new education and banking center in Harlem...