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History shows that it does not matter who is in power... those who have not learned to do for themselves and have to depend solely on others never obtain any more rights or privileges in the end than they did in the beginning.
When you control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his actions. You do not have to tell him not to stand here or go yonder. He will find his 'proper place' and will stay in it. You do not need to send him to the back door. He will go without being told. In fact, if there is no back door, he will cut one f...
Chapter 1 “The Seat Of The Trouble” in this chapter Dr. Carter Woodson explains how African Americans can feel out of place as they are subjected to despise themselves within the given educational system. He identifies how African Americans are often influenced to become a “good negro” in order to become successful, an...
Chapter 2 “How We Missed The Mark” in this chapter Woodson explains how the educational system failed to support African Americans because of how their schools were unable to properly teach them, when compared to predominantly white schools that were fully furnished and had the means to give their students the right ed...
Chapter 3 “How We Drifted Away From The Truth” In this chapter Woodson discusses how African Americans are separated from the truth of their actual contributions to history due to it being “white-washed.” He analyzed many cases in which this makes white people believe they are superior by taking away the important con...
Chapter 4 “Education Under Outside Control” in this chapter Woodson speaks on how African Americans are given educationally less valuable opportunities despite whether the institution is historically black or predominately white. Woodson believes that equal education opportunities have an effect on individuals and the ...
“The Failure to Make a Living” highlights a lot of the problems that black people who attend college face when presented with how to apply that knowledge to the working world, or more specifically owning and operating a business. One of the main problems that Woodson introduces is the lack of support systems that many ...
“The Educated Negro Leaves the Masses” discusses the estrangement that many educated black people have from the black church and the lack of support the black church receives from the educated as a result. According to Woodson, some of the things educated black people are doing instead of supporting the black church ar...
In “Dissension and Weakness,” Woodson discusses the lack of tolerance those in rural areas have for dissension and differences in denomination around them. Woodson, once again, refers back to the lack of guidance and presence educated black people have in the black church and the effects of it; which includes children ...
“Professional Education Discouraged” discusses the discouragement many black Americans face in academic settings. Some of the prime examples Woodson brings to light are how black Americans are told there will be no job opportunities in particular fields should they choose to study them, being told they are not fit for ...
The next chapter, “Political Education Neglected,” begins with some examples as to how African Americans have been previously kept from learning about American politics, one example being when a bill that would print the Constitution of the United States in all schools was turned down because “it would never do to have...
“The Loss of Vision” describes how Woodson feels the black population of America has lost sight of a common goal. In this chapter he brings up how in what he calls “our so-called democracy, we are accustomed to give the majority what they want rather than educate them to understand what is best for them. We do not show...
“The Need for Service Rather than Leadership” describes the stifling of African Americans’ ambition and roadblocks that keep them from becoming leaders. Woodson also lays out the reasons as to why this, but mostly shifting the blame to the lack of unity within the African American community; often referring back to poi...
In “Hirelings in the Places of Public Servants,” Woodson brings up the lack of African Americans in positions of power in the workplace. Woodson brings up many examples of African Americans put in management positions not being given the same respect and attention their white counterparts are given, and why this is.
In “The New Type of Professional Man Required,” Woodson discusses the many hardships black lawyers and doctors encounter in their professional careers. One of the problems he discusses for black lawyers would be how they are often forced to focus on the particular laws that disproportionately affect African Americans. ...
“Higher Strivings In The Service Of The Country”. In this chapter, Woodson emphasizes his political views. Woodson believed that African Americans should not just focus on themselves and address only issues that apply to them, but should address issues that apply to everyone
In chapter 18, “The Study of the Negro,” Woodson emphasizes the importance of again knowing the history and the importance of African American culture. He strongly believed that Blacks need to study their history more. Dr. Woodson believed that blacks have come to hate their history due to slavery and being treated unf...
Many praised Woodson and his work as a glimpse into the problems that plague African Americans' social advancement.
Ron Daniels, with the Michigan City said, “Carter G. Woodson, one of our most distinguished historians, and the founder of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, was convinced that the dilemma of racial consciousness and identity was not an accident. [...] Our history, culture and identity should serv...
Another had to say, “The result was a caustic and uncompromising litany that seemed to go on forever. Negro education, Woodson charged, clung to a defunct “machine method” based on the misguided assumption that “education is merely a process of imparting information.” it failed to inspire black students and “did not br...
The Journal of Black Studies on Woodson himself said, "Carter G. Woodson believed that education was much more than the transferal of knowledge from teacher to student: He believed that authentic education would not only teach students to think and recite information also allow students to ask difficult epistemological...
The title of Lauryn Hill's 1998 best-selling album "The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill" is a reference to the book's naming.
Urban Christian fiction is a subgenre of Christian fiction and urban fiction in which conflicting stories of emotion and vividness mixes God, the urban church, and faith. Violence and sex is not purposely excluded, but are included whenever necessary for the story line. God is the center of the characters' lives in Urb...
Black Futures is an American anthology of Black art, writing, and other creative work, edited by writer Jenna Wortham and curator Kimberly Drew. Writer Teju Cole, singer Solange Knowles and activist Alicia Garza, who cofounded Black Lives Matter, are among the book's more than 100 contributors. The 544-page collection ...
Beginning their collaboration in 2015, "New York Times" writer Jenna Wortham and curator and activist Kimberly Drew aimed to record the way "communities of Black people [were] interacting and engaging in new ways because of social media ... creating our own signage and language," Wortham said. They originally conceived...
The 544-page collection, designed by Wael Marcos and Jonathan Key, was published on December 1, 2020 by One World, publisher Chris Jackson's imprint at Penguin Random House.
The 544-page anthology, collecting works of more than 100 contributors, includes discussions, like writer Rembert Browne and filmmaker Ezra Edelman on Colin Kaepernick, as well as works, for example artist Yetunde Olagbaju's "I Will Protect Black People" contract. In addition to traditional media such as painting and e...
Other contributors include activist Alicia Garza (co-founder of Black Lives Matter), writer Morgan Parker, comedian Ziwe Fumudoh, writer Teju Cole and singer Solange Knowles.
"Black Futures" received enthusiastic reviews, beginning with a starred review in "Kirkus". Writing in "The Root", Maiysha Kai called "Black Futures" "a weighty and gorgeously bound compendium of Black creativity".
For Koul, who is not Black, the cumulative experience creates a call to action—"a question any non-Black person inevitably comes back to again and again throughout the book: If you know the fight, will you join it?" "Publishers Weekly" also emphasized this effect, "This unique and imaginative work issues a powerful cal...
The Langston Hughes Medal has been awarded annually by the Langston Hughes Festival of the City College of New York since 1978. The medal "is awarded to highly distinguished writers from throughout the African American diaspora for their impressive works of poetry, fiction, drama, autobiography and critical essays that...
Recipients of the Langston Hughes medallion are:
Urban fiction, also known as street lit or street fiction, is a literary genre set in a city landscape; however, the genre is as much defined by the socio-economic realities and culture of its characters as the urban setting. The tone for urban fiction is usually dark, focusing on the underside of city living. Profanit...
Contemporary urban fiction was (and largely still is) a genre written by African Americans. In his famous essay "The Souls of Black Folk", W. E. B. Du Bois discussed how a veil separated the African American community from the outside world. By extension, fiction written by people outside the African American culture c...
City novels of yesteryear that depict the low-income survivalist realities of city living can also be considered urban fiction or street lit. In her book, "The Readers' Advisory Guide to Street Literature" (2011), Vanessa Irvin Morris points out that titles considered canonical or "classic" today, could be considered t...
Titles that depict historical inner-city realities include Stephen Crane's "" (1893), Charles Dickens's "Oliver Twist" (1838), Paul Laurence Dunbar's "The Sport of the Gods" (1902) and Langston Hughes's “The Ballad of the Landlord” (1940). In this vein, urban fiction is not just an African American or Latino phenomenon...
In the 1970s, during the culmination of the Black Power movement, a jailed Black man named Robert Beck took the pen name Iceberg Slim and wrote "Pimp", a dark, gritty tale of life in the inner-city underworld. While the book contained elements of the Black Power agenda, it was most notable for its unsparing depiction o...
Iceberg Slim wrote many other novels and attained an international following. Some of the terminology he used in his books crossed over into the lexicon of Black English. Other writers included Donald Goines and, notably, Claude Brown's "Manchild in the Promised Land", which was published in 1965. Also published that y...
Hip hop lit: hip hop music as an urban ballad.
During the 1980s and early 1990s, urban fiction in print experienced a decline. However, one could make a cogent argument that urban tales simply moved from print to music, as hip hop music exploded in popularity. Of course, for every emcee who signed a recording contract and made the airwaves, ten more amateurs plied ...
One of the most famous emcees, Tupac Shakur, is sometimes called a ghetto prophet and an author of urban fiction in lyrical form. Shakur's early poetry was posthumously compiled into a volume entitled "The Rose That Grew from Concrete" in 1999.
Modern hip-hop literature in print form is a thriving and popular genre. Many non-fiction publications from figures in the hip-hop realm such as Russell Simmons, Kevin Liles, LL Cool J, and FUBU founder Daymond John feature prominently in this genre. Karrine Steffans and shock jock Wendy Williams have written blockbust...
Contemporary street lit: The new wave of urban fiction.
Toward the end of the 1990s, urban fiction experienced a revival, as demand for novels authentically conveying the urban experience increased, and new business models enabled fledgling writers to more easily bring a manuscript to market and to libraries. The first writer in this new cycle of urban fiction was Omar Tyre...
The genre gained significant momentum in 1999 with Sister Souljah's bestseller "The Coldest Winter Ever". Teri Woods's "True to the Game" was also published in 1999, and became the standard from which the entrepreneurial publishing and distribution of contemporary urban fiction took note. The simultaneous publishing of...
Sister Souljah describes the untapped market for urban fiction and the stereotypes that held it back in its early years:
In less than a decade, urban fiction has experienced a renaissance that boasts thousands of titles. The newest wave of street fiction is urban Latino fiction novels such as "Devil's Mambo" by Jerry Rodriguez, Chained by Deborah Cardona (a.k.a. Sexy) and Jeff Rivera's "Forever My Lady".
Major writers of contemporary urban fiction include Wahida Clark, Vickie Stringer, Nikki Turner, K'wan Foye, Toy Styles, Roy Glenn, Kwame Teague, who many believed penned Teri Woods' "Dutch", and the writing duo Meesha Mink & De'Nesha Diamond.
There is also an unexpected literary wave of hip-hop fiction and street lit, which was sparked by Sister Souljah. Authors with a book or books in this offering include Saul Williams, Abiola Abrams, and Felicia Pride. These are hip hop lit or street lit books that take a more literary approach using metaphor, signifying...
With this new wave of renaissance, "street lit" was breaking new ground when it came to promotion and exposure. Aside from hand-to-hand sales, which seems to work best in a genre where word-of-mouth has proven to be worth more than any large ad campaign, the Internet has increased the authors' and publishers' ability t...
With Internet savvy, many self-published authors who once had no shot of recognition are now household names, such as author Rasheed Clark, who went from relatively unknown, to being honored with fourteen Infini Literary Award nominations for his first two novels, "Stories I Wouldn't Tell Nobody But God" and "Cold Summ...
Authors in this genre such as K'wan Foye, Nikki Turner, and Toy Styles are known for bringing street teams and other musical promotion efforts to the book scene. In recent years, some of these authors have joined with hip hop artists such as 50 Cent to further promote the genre by penning the musicians' real-life stori...
In 2010, the hip hop music label Cash Money Records established a publishing branch, Cash Money Content. However, Cash Money Content's last book, "Animal 3", was published in November 2014.
Vickie Stringer is an urban lit author, as well as founder and CEO of her own publishing company, Triple Crown Publications, a publisher of 45 novels and 35 writers as of 2008.
Forums like AALBC are often used to keep track of the progressive urban fiction genre as it grows tremendously daily.
Early criticism of street lit was that books were badly edited due to lack of copy editing by independent publishers. However, in recent years the mainstream publishing industry recognized the genre's potential and signed many street lit authors to contracts, thus producing better packaged product. One such author was ...
The reach of urban fiction into a large youth readership is undeniable today. Researchers have turned their attention to its influence on urban literacy, particularly among adolescent girls. Despite misgivings about editing quality issues, secondary school teachers in suburban settings have included urban literature in...
Because this genre is very popular with urban teenagers, the following reading lists should prove to be helpful for teachers and librarians.
Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (), published in 1987, is a book by Hazel Carby which centers on slave narratives by women.
Carby received her Ph.D. in 1984 from Birmingham University. Her doctoral dissertation later became the foundation for the book. "Reconstructing Womanhood" analyzes writings from black women in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as examines the social, political, and historical landscapes in which th...
Your Silence Will Not Protect You is a 2017 posthumous collection of essays, speeches, and poems by African American author and poet Audre Lorde. It is the first time a British publisher collected Lorde's work into one volume. The collection focuses on key themes such as: shifting language into action, silence as a for...
The collection is made up of five sections. A preface by Reni Eddo-Lodge, an introduction by Sara Ahmed, 13 essays, and 17 poems, and a Note on the Text. As the Note on the Text states, many of the essays in the collection were given as papers at conferences across the U.S. Further, Lorde often revised early poems and ...
"Your Silence Will Not Protect You" was published posthumously in order to bring together Lorde's essential poetry, speeches, and essays, into one volume for the first time. As Silver Press states, "Her extraordinary belief in the power of language – of speaking – to articulate selfhood, confront injustice and bring ab...
"Your Silence Will Not Protect You" is a quote from the first essay to appear in the collection, "The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action". She states, "My silences had not protected me. Your silences will not protect you". This references her belief in speaking for oneself and taking language into actio...
In "The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action", Lorde discussed various themes that recur throughout the book, including silence as a form of violence, shifting language into action, and the splintering of the feminist movement. She argued that using her voice to speak and connect with other women during h...
"Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power" discussed how each person has both used and unused types of power. She speaks to the dichotomy of sexuality, and in particular how women have been suppressed from utilizing its power. "We have been taught to suspect this resource, vilified, abused, and devalued within western s...
"A Conversation between Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich" discussed different periods in Lorde's life, and her struggles with family, writing, and teaching. At one point, she discusses how Black women were sexually assaulted and harmed during times of revolution. She recalls, "And while we’d be trying to speak to them as ...
In "For Each Of You" Lorde reinforced the idea of being proud and speaking your mind, especially for the Black community. She tells people to "be proud of who you are and who you will be", and "speak proudly to your children wherever you may find them". According to a series of interviews conducted with Lorde, this poe...
In "A Poem For Women in Rage", Lorde imagines a Black woman intending to kill a white woman waiting for her lesbian lover. Through fury and rage, Lorde confronts the issues between white and Black women and how, "I am weeping to learn the name of those streets my feet have worn thin with running and why they will never...
"Sister Outsider" is a poem that also happens to be a book by the same name by Lorde. Lorde compares how, "We were born poor in a time never touching each other's hunger" but that now, children are raised to respect themselves and each other. She argues that while accepting and acknowledging the best parts of oneself a...
This collection contains 13 essays and 17 poems, with the essays also including various speeches Lorde made.
Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Words and Writings by Women of African Descent from the Ancient Egyptian to the Present is a compilation of orature and literature by more than 200 women from Africa and the African diaspora, edited and introduced by Margaret Busby, who compared the process of assembli...
First published in 1992, in London by Jonathan Cape (having been commissioned by Candida Lacey, now publisher of Myriad Editions), and in New York by Pantheon Books, "Daughters of Africa" is regarded as a pioneering work, covering a variety of genres — including fiction, essays, poetry, drama, memoirs and children's wr...
The anthology's title derives from an 1831 declaration by Maria W. Stewart (1803–1880), the first African-American woman to give public lectures, in which she said: "O, ye daughters of Africa, awake! awake! arise! no longer sleep nor slumber, but distinguish yourselves. Show forth to the world that ye are endowed with ...
A companion volume entitled New Daughters of Africa, featuring a further 200-plus contributors, was published in 2019. As described by Bernardine Evaristo in "The Guardian" in June 2020: "Bringing together fiction, poetry, memoir and essays, both books are an incredible introduction to black women’s writing from around...
"Daughters of Africa" was widely praised on publication. Reviewing the anthology for Black British newspaper "The Weekly Journal", Evie Arup wrote: ""Daughters of Africa" is a literary first. Never before has the work of women of African descent world-wide been gathered together in one volume. The breadth of this colle...
A reviewer from "The Independent" observed: "This book may seem to be about literature but in the end it is as much a testament to language: its power to create attitudes as well as its potency as a means of expression." Described by "The Observer" as a "glorious fat anthology that makes a history out of a selection, a...
Lorna Sage in the "Independent on Sunday" concluded that ""Daughters of Africa" has a paradoxical universality", while "The Washington Post Book World" called it: "A magnificent starting place for any reader interested in becoming part of the collective enterprise of discovering and uncovering the silent, forgotten, an...
The "Times Literary Supplement" review by Maya Jaggi stated: "With rare exceptions, anthologies of black writing and of women's writing have given the impression that there was very little literary endeavour by black women before the 1980s. Margaret Busby's impressive and imaginative selection of 'words and writings', ...
Jaggi goes on to say: "Some writings (such as those by ancient Egyptian or Ethiopian queens) have been selected primarily for their historical significance, or to celebrate little-known landmarks of achievement. Most, however, have been chosen for their literary qualities, making the anthology a source of continual ple...
The anthology was included in "Sacred Fire: "QBR" 100 Essential Black Books", which said: ""Daughters of Africa" is a monumental achievement because it is the most comprehensive international anthology of oral and written literature by women of African descent ever attempted. (...) The success of the collection is that...
"Daughters of Africa"′s accomplishment lies in its glorious portrayal of the richness and magnitude of the spiritual well from which we've all drawn inspiration and to where we've all gone for sustenance, and as such, it is a stunning literary masterpiece."
The anthology was on the Royal African Society's list of "50 Books By African Women That Everyone Should Read", was named by "Ms Afropolitan" as one of "7 non-fiction books African feminists should read", features regularly on many required-reading lists, and in the words of Kinna Likimani: "It remains the ultimate gui...
More than 200 women are featured in "Daughters of Africa", including:
The anthology inspired Koyo Kouoh to edit a German-language equivalent, "Töchter Afrikas", that was published in 1994.
In 2009 "Daughters of Africa" was on "Wasafiri" magazine's list of 25 Most Influential Books from the previous quarter-century.
In November 2017, "Wasafiri" included a special feature marking the 25th anniversary of the first publication of "Daughters of Africa", including an interview with the editor by Ellah Wakatama Allfrey, an article by Candida Lacey and contributions from Ayobami Adebayo, Edwige-Renée Dro, Angela Barry, Goretti Kyomuhendo...
Listing many of the names included in "Daughters of Africa", Tom Odhiambo of the University of Nairobi stated: "These writers can be described as the matriarchs of African literature. They pioneered 'African' writing, in which they were not simply writing stories about their families, communities and countries, but the...
In December 2017, it was announced that a companion volume, entitled New Daughters of Africa, had been commissioned from Margaret Busby by Myriad Editions. Published on 8 March 2019 and characterised as "a behemoth of thought and reflection, exploring sisterhood, tradition, romance, race and identity – individually, an...
"New Daughters of Africa" was launched in London at the South Bank Centre on 9 March 2019 at the WOW Festival, and contributors were subsequently featured at many other festivals and venues in the UK and abroad, including at the Wimbledon BookFest, the NGC Bocas Lit Fest in Trinidad, the Bernie Grant Arts Centre, and S...
The review in the "Irish Times", describing "New Daughters of Africa" as a "vast and nuanced collection", notes that it is "arranged in order of the women's birth decades, a chronological reminder that African women have been creating art for many centuries; the youngest included are still in their twenties. ... a nece...
Imani Perry wrote in the "Financial Times": "Anthologies can read as mere assortment or collection. But their function, particularly when well composed — as is the case with this book — can be much more deliberate. Busby's choice to organise the writers by generation, rather than region or date of publication, has a po...
The review by in the Kenyan "Daily Nation" said: "It is the kind of literary compendium that many prospective African women writers need to have today..."New Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Writing by Women of African Descent" is a collection that the expert on literature, women studies, gender studi...
In the opinion of the reviewer for the "New York Journal of Books": "Here is the book so many have been waiting for. The book to make sense of so many others...The topics are just as varied and shine bright lights on the lives of critically underrepresented women of color, and on the contributions of these gifted liter...
In fact, the only thing that is not varied here is the gloriously even quality of the writing. These are stories for crying and laughing and thinking. They are narratives for understanding, for seeking, for finding, yes, because it is a catalogue of lives that are not shown as much and as consistently as we need them t...
...It is, perhaps, this bulk, this excess, this non-superfluous surplus, this literal and literary embarrassment of riches that sends the strongest of messages. Yes, there is this much talent and achievement here in the literature of people of color, the roots of these writers in Africa, but their immense contribution ...
Connected with the new anthology, the Margaret Busby "New Daughters of Africa" Award was announced by the publisher, Myriad Editions, in partnership with SOAS, University of London, that will benefit an African woman student, with accommodation provided by International Students House, London. The launch of the award w...
Also in 2020, Busby and Myriad teamed with community-interest organization The Black Curriculum – founded to address the lack of black British history being taught – to donate 500 copies of "New Daughters of Africa" to schools in the UK.
"New Daughters of Africa" was nominated for a 2020 NAACP Image Award in the category of Outstanding Literary Work, alongside books by Petina Gappah, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Jacqueline Woodson, and Margaret Wilkerson Sexton, who was the eventual winner for Fiction.
In this charged collection, Lorde challenges sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and classism with determination. She propounds the recognition of difference as an empowering vehicle for action and creative change and emphasizes the necessity for applying these concepts to the next generation of feminism - a response t...

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