Nonfiction Literary Criticism A magnificent, foundational reckoning with how Black Americans have used the written word to define and redefine themselves, in resistance to the lies of racism and often in heated disagreement with one another, over the course of the country’s history. Paperback 304 pages Penguin Books 2025
This is the epic story of how, through essays and speeches, novels, plays, and poems, a long line of creative thinkers has unveiled the contours of—and resisted confinement in—the black box inside which this nation within a nation has been assigned, willy-nilly, from the nation’s founding through to today. This is a book that records the compelling saga of the creation of a people
Distilled over many years from Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s, legendary Harvard introductory course in African American studies, The Black Box: Writing the Race, is the story of Black self-definition in America through the prism of the writers who have led the way. From Phillis Wheatley and Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, to Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright, James Baldwin and Toni Morrison—these writers used words to create a livable world, a home, for Black people destined to live out their lives in a bitterly racist society.
It is a book grounded in the beautiful irony that a group formed legally and conceptually by its oppressors to justify brutal subhuman bondage transformed itself through the word into a community joined in overcoming one of history’s most pernicious lies. Out of that contested ground has flowered a resilient, creative, powerful, diverse culture of people who have often disagreed markedly about what it means to be Black, and about how best to use the past to create a more just and equitable future.
.
About the Author
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. An award-winning filmmaker, literary scholar, and institution builder, Professor Gates has authored numerous books, including most recently Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow and The Black Church, and has created more than twenty documentary films, including his groundbreaking genealogy series Finding Your Roots. His six-part PBS documentary, The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross, earned an Emmy Award, a Peabody Award, and an NAACP Image Award. This series and his PBS documentary series Reconstruction: America after the Civil War were both honored with the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award. His most recent PBS documentary is Gospel.
