Alex Haley's 1976 novel Roots presents the history of a black family from pre-slavery times up to the present. The sections concerning his slave ancestors are very vividly rendered and give the reader a good sense of what life in plantations was like for slaves.
Poet, ambassador, and publisher James Weldon Johnson's 1927 volume of poems, God's Trombones, is written in the voice that a nineteenth-century preacher would use in addressing a congregation, but unlike the poet in "Swing Low Sweet Chariot," Johnson pointedly refuses to use dialect in spelling words, for reasons explained beautifully in the introduction. The history lesson to be gained from the introduction alone makes this book worth reading.
W.E.B. du Bois was one of our country's lead ing African-American intellectuals. His 1961 collection.....
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