A guide to literature by and about African Americans organizes entries into historical periods, and provides information on individual authors and genres.

Best Literature by and About Blacks

Richards, Phillip M.

Schlager, Neil

Literature & Fiction

Gale/Cengage Learning

Black Heart is a provocative and polemical critique of African American literary studies at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Through a series of sharp and insightful essays on a wide range of critical thinkers, Phillip M. Richards traces what he sees as an erosion of moral reflection in African American literary culture – a process that has left contemporary black academic criticism socially, politically, and culturally hollow. Exploring the work of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Michael Dyson, Karla Holloway and others, Black Heart sets forth the rhetorical strategies of present-day African American critical writing, and probes the ethical dimensions of its institutional life in the academy, the media, and the public sphere. Richards undertakes to recover the procedures by which cultural and moral value may be recovered for black literary culture and to establish the possibilities for a new humanism in African American writing and literary culture.

Black Heart: The Moral Life of Recent African American Letters (Intersections in Communications and Culture)

History & Criticism

Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers

The memoir of a bookish black youth in mid-twentieth century Cleveland When Phillip M. Richards graduated from Yale in 1972, he had fulfilled his parents’ dreams. Like many other black Clevelanders of their generation, they had come up from the South in the late forties and moved from neighborhood to neighborhood in search of better schools. As they followed bourgeois African Americans’ circular migration from Mt. Pleasant to Lee Harvard to South Taylor Road and finally to Forest Hills, Richards’s parents provided him with all of what they called “the good situations”: major work, classes at the Institute of Music, Boy Scouts, and education at University School―which midcentury Cleveland could offer its most ambitious new black residents. In An Integrated Boyhood, Richards candidly describes how this exemplary middle-class Cleveland sojourn left him hopelessly confused and dislocated at the very moment of his parents’ triumph. His narrative of success provides the background to a more private turmoil: Richards’s struggle to read the shifting meanings of his privileged experience amid the city’s shifting racial lines, the fringe on the Left, the tumult of rising black consciousness, and the fears of nervous white suburban neighbors. This coming-of-age story sings the undersong of an older generation’s hard-won success. Like all black Clevelanders, Richards was forced to struggle for his understanding of the city’s―and his own―endless racial confusion in the midst of frightening historical change. It is this reality that recurs throughout Richards’s memoir: the early encounters of a scared, bookish African American boy from Mt. Pleasant with what can only be described as thereal world.

An Integrated Boyhood: Coming of Age in White Cleveland (Voices of Diversity)

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

The Kent State University Press

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Books by Richards, Phillip M.