After learning how to fight at a young age, Oroonoko, an African prince, fights alongside his army against invading forces. When a celebrated general saves Oroonoko's life, trading his own to take an arrow for Oroonoko, the young prince feels indebted to the man and decides to go pay his respects to the late general's family. There, he meets Imoinda, the daughter of the general. Oroonoko and Imoinda quickly fall in love and become betrothed, but the...

Returning to her small North Carolina hometown for the plantation wedding of a childhood friend, Black high school teacher Mira reluctantly steps foot on the same grounds where she once encountered the ghost of an enslaved person. With the antebellum-themed nuptials underway, the spirits of the enslaved begin seeking revenge on the descendants of their tormentors, and it's up to Mira to confront the plantation's haunted history and her own connection...

"I have never placed my opposition to slavery on a basis so narrow as my own enslavement, but rather upon the indestructible and unchangeable laws of human nature, every one of which is perpetually and flagrantly violated by the slave system." - Frederick Douglass Born and brought up in slavery, Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) experienced the horrors of bondage but gained freedom and world renown as a lecturer, editor, and one of the most important...

Early in his career, Eugene O'Neill (1888–1953) wrote a series of plays revolving around characters obsessed with the sea. This period culminated in the 1922 production of Anna Christie, a Pulitzer Prize–winning drama of social realism that was among the first of the author's plays to explore characters searching for their own identities. Centering on the reunion of a barge captain and his daughter after a twenty-year separation, the play derives...

In reprinting these orations the editor has endeavored to present them here as nearly as possible in their original form. No effort has been made to improve the English. Published in this form, then, these orations will be of value not only to persons studying the development of the Negro in his use of a modern idiom but also in the study of the history of the race. It is in this spirit that these messages are again given to the public.

"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 for his special benefit. His education makes it necessary." Overcoming extreme poverty, racism, and other adversities Carter Godwin...

Protective. Obsessive. And rough around the edges. James Foster knows the rules: you don't fall for your best friend's little sister. Nina is too young, too reckless, and too busy saving the world to be tied down by the commitment he craves. If he was smart, he'd stop wanting her. But she's the one thing on earth James just can't quit. Fierce. Principled. And impossible to resist. Political campaigner Nina Chapman is sick of one-time things. She...

Revisit the debut novel of one of the "New Negroes" of the Harlem Renaissance filled with Niggerati sensibilities. Disgruntled by the treatment of Black soldiers in the military, Jake Brown heads to Harlem-the Mecca of Black creativity-to rebuild his life anew. Upon arriving, he discovers that Harlem isn't exactly the paradise of racial uplift and unity that one might read about in books; but then again, it's a far cry from the volatile streets of...

"New York, 1920s. Born to English immigrants who've built a comfortable life, idealistic Alice Jones longs for the kind of true love her mother and father have. She believes she's found it with Leonard "Kip" Rhinelander, the shy heir to his prominent white family's real estate fortune. Alice, too, is white, though she is vaguely aware of rumors that question her ancestry--gossip her parents dismiss. But when the lovers secretly wed, Kip's father threatens...

Nella Larsen was an important writer associated with the Harlem Renaissance. While she was not prolific, her work was powerful and critically acclaimed. Collected here are both, of her novels, "Passing" and "Quicksand", as well as all three of her published short stories; "Freedom," "The Wrong Man", and "Sanctuary". "Quicksand" was autobiographical in nature and examined a woman's need for sexual fulfilment balanced against respectability and acceptance...