This volume considers innovations, transitions, and traditions in both familiar and unfamiliar texts and moments in 1960s African American literature and culture. It interrogates declarations of race, authenticity, personal and collective empowerment, political action, and aesthetics within this key decade. It is divided into three sections. The first section engages poetry and music as pivotal cultural form in 1960s literary transitions. The second section explains how literature, culture, and politics intersect to offer a blueprint for revolution within and beyond the United States. The...

This volume provides the richest study available of African American literature during the years immediately following the Civil War. Studying authors from Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and William Wells Brown to Mattie Jackson and William Steward, it both recovers and innovatively studies Black print culture of US Reconstruction.