Best of
African-American

1974

If Beale Street Could Talk


James Baldwin - 1974
    Told through the eyes of Tish, a nineteen-year-old girl, in love with Fonny, a young sculptor who is the father of her child, Baldwin's story mixes the sweet and the sad. Tish and Fonny have pledged to get married, but Fonny is falsely accused of a terrible crime and imprisoned. Their families set out to clear his name, and as they face an uncertain future, the young lovers experience a kaleidoscope of emotions-affection, despair, and hope. In a love story that evokes the blues, where passion and sadness are inevitably intertwined, Baldwin has created two characters so alive and profoundly realized that they are unforgettably ingrained in the American psyche.

The Black Book


Middleton A. Harris - 1974
    I still think there is no other work that tells and visualizes a story of such misery with seriousness, humor, grace and triumph.”—Toni MorrisonSeventeenth-century sketches of Africans as they appeared to marauding European traders. Nineteenth-century slave auction notices. Twentieth-century sheet music for work songs and freedom chants. Photographs of war heroes, regal in uniform. Antebellum reward posters for capturing runaway slaves. An 1856 article titled “A Visit to the Slave Mother Who Killed Her Child.”In 1974, Middleton A. Harris and Toni Morrison led a team of gifted, passionate collectors in compiling these images and nearly five hundred others into one sensational narrative of the black experience in America—The Black Book. Now in a newly restored hardcover edition, The Black Book remains a breathtaking testament to the legendary wisdom, strength, and perseverance of black men and women intent on freedom. Prominent collectors Morris Levitt, Roger Furman, and Ernest Smith joined Harris and Morrison (then a Random House editor, ultimately a two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning Nobel Laureate) to spend months studying, laughing at, and crying over these materials—transcripts from fugitive slaves’ trials and proclamations by Frederick Douglass and celebrated abolitionists, as well as chilling images of cross burnings and lynchings, patents registered by black inventors throughout the early twentieth century, and vibrant posters from “Black Hollywood” films of the 1930s and 1940s. Indeed, it was an article she found while researching this project that provided the inspiration for Morrison’s masterpiece, Beloved.A labor of love and a vital link to the richness and diversity of African American history and culture, The Black Book honors the past, reminding us where our nation has been, and gives flight to our hopes for what is yet to come. Beautifully and faithfully presented and featuring a foreword and original poem by Toni Morrison, The Black Book remains a timeless landmark work.

Never Die Alone


Donald Goines - 1974
    If it took busting an old lady's head open with a Coke bottle for her last dollar, so be it. Mixing battery acid with cocaine to gain revenge was acceptable, too. Whatever it took. Then he made it big--only to find others had not forgotten, had no intention of forgiving. They came after him. He left behind a Cadillac and a diary, left it to a writer Donald Goines called "Paul Pawlowski." Like all Goines' novels, Never Die Alone is based on truth."He lived by the code of the streets and his books vividly recreated the street jungle and its predators." --New Jersey Voice

Eldorado Red


Donald Goines - 1974
    --The Village Voice A fistful of revenge, street-style, from Donald Goines, the godfather of urban lit. . .Eldorado Red has it all--new cars, women, and plenty of money. But when you're the top dog, the sure bet is that someone--everyone--wants to take what you got. You just never think your own flesh and blood will pull the trigger. Now Eldorado's son, Buddy, is on the run. The thing is, Eldorado wants to let him go, but in the law of the streets, retribution has a mind of its own. . .He lived by the code of the streets and his books vividly recreated the street jungle and its predators. --New Jersey Voice

Ego-Tripping and Other Poems for Young People


Nikki Giovanni - 1974
    Insightful and fun, this collection of poetry captures the essence of the African American experience for young people.

Swamp Man


Donald Goines - 1974
    George Jackson, "Swamp Man," was born and bred in Mississippi as a gentle young man who turned deadly after he saw what four hill boys did to his sister.

All God's Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw


Theodore Rosengarten - 1974
    "On a cold January morning in 1969, a young white graduate student from Massachusetts, stumbling along the dim trail of a long-defunct radical organization of the 1930s, the Alabama Sharecropper Union, heard that there was a survivor and went looking for him. In a rural settlement 20 miles or so from Tuskegee in east-central Alabama he found him—the man he calls Nate Shaw—a black man, 84 years old, in full possession of every moment of his life and every facet of its meaning. . . . Theodore Rosengarten, the student, had found a black Homer, bursting with his black Odyssey and able to tell it with awesome intellectual power, with passion, with the almost frightening power of memory in a man who could neither read nor write but who sensed that the substance of his own life, and a million other black lives like his, were the very fiber of the nation's history." —H. Jack Geiger, New York Times Book Review