Anthologies of African American Writing

Cornerstones: An Anthology of African American Literature

"Cornerstones: An Anthology of African American Literature." Ed. Melvin Burke Donalson. New York: St. Martin's, 1996. xix+1,001 pp.

● Melvin Donalson / Preface

PART ONE: The Oral Tradition
● Anon. / Overview

LYRICS
● Anon. / Spiritual: Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child
● Anon. / Spiritual: Go Down Moses
● Anon. / Spiritual: Steal Away to Jesus
● Anon. / Spiritual: Roll, Jordan, Roll

Blues
● Anon. / St. Louis Blues
● Anon. / Hard Times Blues
● Anon. / Mamie’s Blues
● Anon. / Backwater Blues

Pop Lyrics
● Marvin Gaye / What’s Going On
● Stevie Wonder / Living for the City
● Siedah Garrett
● Michael Jackson / Man in the Mirror

Rap Lyrics
● Gil Scott-Heron / The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
● Public Enemy / Fight the Power
● Queen Latifah / U.N.I.T.Y.

ORATIONS: SPEECHES AND SERMONS
● Sojourner Truth / Address to the First Annual Meeting of the American Equal Rights Association
● Frederick Douglass / What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?
● Ida B. Wells-Barnett / Lynch Law in All Its Phases
● Mary McLeod Bethune / A Century of Progress of Negro Women
● Martin Luther King Jr. / Love, Law, and Civil Disobedience
● Cecil L. Murray / Making an Offer You Can’t Refuse
● Barbara Jordan / Who Then Will Speak for the Common Good?
● Jesse Jackson / Common Ground and Common Sense
● Suzan D. Johnson Cook / God’s Woman

FOLKTALES
● Anon. / Why Negros Are Black
● Anon. / Why Women Always Take Advantage of Men
● Anon. / Ole Massa and John Who Wanted to Go to Heaven
● Anon. / What Smelled Worse
● Anon. / Who Ate Up the Butter?
● Anon. / The Bear and the Rabbit
● Anon. / Tar Baby

PART TWO: Poetry
● Anon. / Overview

A FOCUSED STUDY: GWENDOLYN BROOKS
● Gwendolyn Brooks / The Mother
● Gwendolyn Brooks / The Children of the Poor
● Gwendolyn Brooks / The Bean Eaters
● Gwendolyn Brooks / A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, A Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon.
● Gwendolyn Brooks / The Boy Died in My Alley

A Critical Perspective
● George Kent / Gwendolyn Brooks’ Poetry Realism: A Developmental Survey

POETRY SELECTIONS
● Phillis Wheatley / On the Death of a Young Gentleman
● Phillis Wheatley / “To S.M., A Young African Painter,” on Seeing His Works
● Frances E. W. Harper / Bury Me in a Free Land
● Frances E. W. Harper / A Double Standard
● Paul Laurence Dunbar / When Malindy Sings
● Paul Laurence Dunbar / We Wear the Mask
● Paul Laurence Dunbar / Sympathy
● Anne Spencer / White Things
● Anne Spencer / Black Man O’ Mine
● Fenton Johnson / The Ethiopian’s Song
● Fenton Johnson / To an Afro-American Maiden
● Claude McKay / If We Must Die
● Claude McKay / The White House
● Claude McKay / America
● Sterling Brown / Children of the Mississippi
● Sterling Brown / Return
● Sterling Brown / Sharecroppers
● Langston Hughes / As I Grew Older
● Langston Hughes / Afro-American Fragment
● Langston Hughes / Mother to Son
● Langston Hughes / Georgia Dusk
● Langston Hughes / Democracy
● Countee Cullen / Heritage
● Countee Cullen / The Wise
● Countee Cullen / Yet Do I Marvel
● Countee Cullen / From the Dark Tower
● Robert Hayden / Night, Death, Mississippi
● Robert Hayden / El-Haji Malik El-Shabazz (Malcolm X)
● Samuel W. Allen / Harriet Tubman
● Samuel W. Allen / Benin Bronze
● Samuel W. Allen / About Poetry and South Africa
● Derek Walcott / Storm Figure
● Derek Walcott / Elsewhere
● Derek Walcott / Blues
● Etheridge Knight / For Freckle-Faced Gerald
● Etheridge Knight / Dark Prophecy: I Sing of Shine
● Etheridge Knight / For Black Poets Who Think of Suicide
● Sonia Sanchez / Blk/Rhetoric
● Sonia Sanchez / Summer Words of a Sistuh Addict
● Sonia Sanchez / elegy
● Henry Dumas / Afro-American
● Henry Dumas / Black Star Line
● Jay Wright / The Appearance of a Lost Goddess
● Jay Wright / Journey to the Place of Ghosts
● Jay Wright / Benjamin Banneker Helps to Build a City
● Haki R. Madhubuti / But He Was Cool or: he even stopped for green lights
● Haki R. Madhubuti / Womenblack: We Begin with You
● Haki R. Madhubuti / Black Manhood: Toward a Definition
● Nikki Giovanni / The True Import of Present Dialogue, Black vs. Negro
● Nikki Giovanni / Age
● Nikki Giovanni / Adulthood II
● Nikki Giovanni / Love: Is a Human Condition
● Quincy Troupe / South African Bloodstone
● Quincy Troupe / After Hearing a Radio Announcement: A Comment on Some Conditions
● Wanda Coleman / Dear Mama
● Wanda Coleman / In This Waking
● Wanda Coleman / Shopping Bag Lady
● Rita Dove / Particulars
● Rita Dove / After Reading Mickey in the Night Kitchen for the Third Time Before Bed
● Rita Dove / Your Death

PART THREE: Fiction
● Anon. / Overview

A FOCUSED STUDY: ALICE WALKER
● Alice Walker / Her Sweet Jerome
● Alice Walker / A Sudden Trip Home in the Spring
● Alice Walker / from “The Color Purple”

A Critical Perspective
● Barbara Christian / Alice Walker: The Black Woman Artist as Wayward

FICTION SELECTIONS
● Harriet E. Wilson / A Friend for Nig
● William Wells Brown / from “Clotel, or, The President’s Daughter”
● Charles W. Chesnutt / The Sheriff’s Children
● Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins / A Dash for Liberty
● Sutton E. Griggs / from “Imperium in Imperio”
● Jessie Fauset / Mary Elizabeth
● Nella Larsen / from “Passing”
● Jean Toomer / Theater
● Zora Neale Hurston / Sweat
● Wallace Thurman / Emma Lou
● Richard Wright / The Man Who Killed a Shadow
● Chester Himes / One More Way to Die
● Ann Petry / The Witness
● James Baldwin / Previous Condition
● John A. Williams / Son in the Afternoon
● Toni Morrison / Recitatif
● Ishmael Reed / from “Japanese by Spring”
● Toni Cade Bambara / A Tender Man
● J. California Cooper / Happiness Does Not Come in Colors
● John Edgar Wideman / Doc’s Story
● Octavia Butler / from “Kindred”
● Gayl Jones / White Rat
● Gloria Naylor / Lucielia Louise Turner
● Terry McMillan / Zora
● Walter Mosley / from “Devil in a Blue Dress
● Jess Mowry / Crusader Rabbit

PART FOUR: Drama
● Anon. / Overview

A FOCUSED STUDY: AUGUST WILSON
● August Wilson / Fences

A Critical Perspective
● Michael Awkward / The Crookeds with the Straights’: “Fences”, Race, and the Politics of Adaptation

DRAMA SELECTION
● Pearl Cleage / Hospice: A Play in One Act

PART FIVE: Nonfiction
● Anon. / Overview

A FOCUSED STUDY: W.E.B. DU BOIS
● W.E.B. Du Bois / Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others
● W.E.B. Du Bois / The Talented Tenth
● W.E.B. Du Bois / The Souls of White Folk

A Critical Perspective
● Marcus Bruce / Black and Blue: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Meaning of Blackness

AUTOBIOGRAPHY
● Olaudah Equiano / from “The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African
● Harriet Jacobs / The Perils of a Slave Woman’s Life
● Booker T. Washington / from “Up from Slavery”
● Malcolm X / from “The Autobiography of Malcolm X”
● Maya Angelou / from “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”
● Itabari Njeri / Has-beens Who Never Were

CULTURAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL ESSAYS
● Benjamin Banneker / Letter to Thomas Jefferson
● David Walker / from “Walker’s Appeal in Four Articles Together with a Preamble to the Colored Citizens of the World, but in Particular and Very Expressly to Those of the United States”
● Martin R. Delany / from “The Condition, Elevation, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, Politically Considered”
● Mary Church Terrell / What Role Is the Educated Negro Woman to Play in the Uplifting of Her Race?
● Marcus Garvey / An Appeal to the Conscience of the Black Race to See Itself
● Ralph Ellison / What America Would Be Like without Blacks
● Amiri Baraka / Malcolm as Ideology
● Audre Lorde / Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference
● David Levering Lewis / The Harlem Renaissance
● Kwame Toure and Charles V. Hamilton / Black Power: Its Need and Substance
● Angela Davis / We Do Not Consent: Violence against Women in a Racist Society
● Ron Simmons / Some Thoughts on the Challenges Facing Black Gay Intellectuals
● bell hooks / Revolutionary Black Woman: Making Ourselves Subject
● Michael Eric Dyson / The Culture of Hip-Hop

PART SIX: Literary Criticism and Theory
● Anon. / Overview
● Houston A. Baker Jr. / There Is No More Beautiful Way
● Valerie Smith / Form and Ideology in . . . Slave Narratives
● Henry Louis Gates Jr. / The Blackness of Blackness: A Critique of the Sign and the Signifying Monkey
● Michael Thelwell / Toward a Collective Vision: Issues in International Literary Criticism
● Larry Neal / The Black Arts Movement
● Charles Johnson / Being and Race
● Hazel V. Carby / Rethinking Black Feminist Theory
● Charles I. Nero / Toward a Black Gay Aesthetic: Signifying in Contemporary Black Gay Literature

● INDEX

• n/a

not in Kinnamon 1997
• Indexed in "The Columbia Granger's Index to African-American Poetry" (1999)

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