Table of Contents:
  • Introduction / Phillis Wheatley / from "To the Right Honorable William, Earl of Dartmouth, etc.,"
  • His Excellency, General Washington
  • On Being Brought from Africa to America
  • George Moses Horton / George Moses Horton, Myself
  • On Liberty and Slavery
  • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper / The Slave Auction
  • Paul Laurence Dunbar / The Paradox
  • Harriet Beecher Stowe
  • To a Captious Critic
  • The Poet
  • The Haunted Oak
  • The Debt
  • Robert Gould Shaw
  • James Weldon Johnson / Saint Peter Relates and Incident of the Resurrection Day
  • Anne Spencer / At the Carnival
  • Dunbar
  • Georgia Douglass Johnson / I Want to Die While You Love Me
  • Fenton Johnson / Tired
  • The Minister
  • The Banjo Player
  • Claude McKay / Spring in New Hampshire
  • The Tropics in New York
  • If We Must Die
  • St. Isaac's Church, Petrograd
  • Jean Toomer / from "Karintha"
  • Reapers
  • from "Carma"
  • Song of the Son
  • Georgia Dusk
  • Melvin B. Tolson / African China
  • from "Harlem Gallery"
  • Frank Horne / To James, from "Letters Found Near a Suicide"
  • Kid Stuff
  • Sterling A. Brown / Mose
  • Strange Legacies
  • Revelations
  • Sporting Beasley
  • Arna Bontemps / Close Your Eyes!
  • Southern Mansion
  • Reconnaissance
  • To a Young Girl Leaving the Hill Country
  • A Black Man Talks of Reaping
  • Langston Hughes / I, Too
  • Jazzonia
  • Pennsylvania Station
  • Two Somewhat Different Epigrams
  • Montmartre
  • Desert
  • Where?When?Which?
  • Late Corner
  • Countee Cullen / A Brown Girl Dead
  • Tableau
  • Saturday's Child
  • Wisdom Cometh with the Years
  • For a Lady I Know
  • For John Keats
  • For Paul Laurence Dunbar
  • From the Dark Tower
  • Frank Marshall Davis / Robert Whitmore
  • Arthur Ridgewood, M.D.
  • Giles Johnson, Ph. D.
  • Robert Hayden / The Diver
  • Full Moon
  • The Ballad of Sue Ellen Westerfield
  • "summertime and the living ..."
  • Frederick Douglass
  • Owen Dodson / Circle one
  • When I Am Dead
  • Conversation on V
  • Hymn Written After Jeremiah Preached to Me in a Dream
  • from "The Confession Stone"
  • Margaret Danner / I'll Walk the Tightrope
  • These Beasts and the Benin Bronze
  • Sadie's Playhouse
  • Through the Varied Patterned Lace
  • Dudley Randall / Booker T. and W.E.B.
  • George
  • Souvenirs
  • Margaret Abigail Walker / For My People
  • Lineage
  • Molly Means
  • Towa Farmer
  • Childhood
  • Samual Allen / To Satch
  • A Moment Please
  • Gwendolyn Brooks / Hunchback Girl: She Thinks of Heaven
  • Negro Hero
  • Piano after War
  • Mentors
  • But can see better there, and laughing there
  • Strong Men, Riding Horses
  • The Bean Eaters
  • Myron O'Higgins / Vaticide
  • M. Carl Holman / Notes for a Movie Script
  • Song
  • Three Brown Girls Singing
  • Mr. Z
  • James A. Emmanuel / The Young Ones, Flip Side
  • Wedding Procession, from a Window
  • The Negro
  • Mari Evans / The World I See
  • If There Be Sorrow
  • ... And the Old Women Gathered
  • Naomi Long Madgett / The Reckoning
  • Two Poems from "Trinity: A Dream Sequence"
  • G.C. Oden / The Carousel
  • Review from Staten Island
  • " ... As When Emotion Too Far Exceeds its Cause"
  • A Private Letter to Brazil
  • Oliver Pitcher / Salute
  • Raison d'Étre
  • Ted Joans / Voice in the Crowd
  • It is Time
  • Calvin C. Hernton / Young Negro Poet
  • Madhouse
  • Gerald William Barrax / The Sacrifice
  • Christmas 1959 et cetera
  • Patroness
  • The Death of a Squirrel in McKinley Park
  • Black Narcissus
  • Conrad Kent Rivers / The Invisible Man
  • The Still Voice of Harlem
  • The Subway
  • Leroi Jones / Epistrophe
  • Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note
  • Snake Eyes
  • Audubon, Drafted
  • Bob Kaufman / To My Son Parker, Asleep in the Next Room
  • Perhaps
  • Who Has Seen the Wind?
  • Response
  • Julia Fields / Madness One Monday Evening
  • David Henderson / Sketches of Harlem
  • Julius Lester / Poems
  • Carl Wendell Hines, Jr. / Two Jazz Poems
  • D.L. Graham / soul.