2003/04
To Be Shared With All Generations
and All Cultures

The Spook Who Sat By The Door

By Sam Greenlee

OCTOBER 15, 2003

An explosive, award-winning novel in the black literary tradition, The Spook Who Sat by the Door is both a satire of the civil rights problems in the United States in the late 1960s and a serious attempt to focus on the issue of black militancy.

I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings

By Maya Angelou

NOVEMBER 12, 2003

James Baldwin writes: "Maya Angelou confronts her own life with such a moving wonder, such a luminous dignity. I have no words for this achievement. Her portrait is a biblical study of life in the midst of death."

Their Eyes Were Watching God

By Zora Neale Hurston

DECEMBER 17, 2003

"The prototypical Black novel of affirmation: it is the most successful, convincing, and exemplary novel of blacklove that we have. Period." -- June Jordan, Black World

The Fire Next Time

By James Baldwin

JANUARY 14, 2004

At once a powerful evocation of Baldwin's early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice-to both the individual and the body politic.

Invisible Man

By Ralph Ellison

FEBRUARY 11, 2004

Ralph Ellison's nightmare journey across the racial divide tells unparalleled truths about the nature of bigotry and its effects on the minds of both victims and perpetrators, it gives us an entirely new model of what a novel can be.

Native Son

By Richard Wright

MARCH 10, 2004

Wright's powerful novel is an unsparing reflection of the poverty and feelings of hopelessness experienced by people in inner cities across the country and of what it means to be black in America in the 1930s.

The Color Purple

By Alice Walker

APRIL 14, 2004

This is the story of two sisters-one a missionary in Africa and the other a child wife living in the South-who sustain their loyalty to and trust in each other across time,distance, and silence.