A unique supplement to one of the most important African American novels of this century. As Invisible Man chronicles the major moments of African American life during the first half of the twentieth century, this volume illuminates and contextualizes the novel with a collection of speeches, essays, folktales, historical analyses, photographs, and other cultural and historical documents.
Preface Introduction
I. "The Scaffolding of a Nation": The Black Belt and Beyond
Booker T. Washington, Atlanta Exposition Address
W. E. B. Du Bois, Of Our Spiritual Strivings
W. E. B. Du Bois, Of Mr. Booker T. Washington
Anson Phelps Stokes, Founder's Day Address at Tuskegee, 1931
Langston Hughes, Cowards from the Colleges
Gunnar Myrdal, Social Equality
Supreme Court Brief, Brown v. Board of Education: The Effects of Segregation
Charles S. Johnson, The Shadow of the Plantation
Bernice Kelly Harris, Tore Up and a-Movin'
William N. Colson, An Analysis of Negro Patriotism
W. T. Andrews, The Black Migration
Richard Wright, 12 Million Black Voices
II. "A Heap of Signifying": Vernacular Culture
Andy Razaf, (What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue
African American Folk Song, Run, Nigger, Run
African American Folk Song, Jack the Rabbit! Jack the Bear!
Peetie Wheatstraw, The Devil's Son-In-Law
African American Spiritual, Many Thousands Gone
Emma Backus, Why Mr. Dog Runs Brer Rabbit
Carl Carmer, Brer Rabbit and the Goobers
Street Market Song, De Sweet Pertater Man
Leo Gurley, Sweet-the-Monkey
Mezz Mezzrow, Hip Language
III. "The City Within a City": Harlem, U. S. A.
Federal Writers' Project, Portrait of Harlem
Alain Locke, The New Negro
Sterling Spero and Abram L. Harris, Blacks in the Labor Movement
Cyril V. Briggs, Race Catechism
Marcus Garvey, Africa for the Africans
Marcus Garvey, Speech Delivered at Liberty Hall, August 1921
Harry Haywood, The Road to Negro Liberation
Will Herberg, Marxism and the American Negro
Avram Landy, Marxism and the Woman Question
James Weldon Johnson, Negro Americans, What Now?
Claude McKay, Harlem Runs Wild
Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., The Harlem Riot of 1943
Ralph Ellison, The Negro and the Second World War
Ralph Ellison, Harlem Is Nowhere
Bibliography