This 1892 work was among the first novels published by an African-American woman. Its striking portrait of life during the Civil War and Reconstruction recounts a mixed-race woman's devotion to uplifting the black community.

"Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911) was the most important and the most popular black feminist abolitionist writer and activist of the nineteenth century. A Brighter Day Coming, the most comprehensive collection of her works, includes all the poems from Harper's extant original volumes, plus many that have never been collected and one that was discovered in manuscript; speeches; and a selection of prose, including excerpts from the novel Iola Leroy and the serialized novel Fancy Etchings, and a generous group of letters ..."--Back cover.

First published in the year 1912, 'The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man' by James Weldon Johnson is the fictional account of a young biracial man, referred to as the "Ex-Colored Man", living in post-Reconstruction era America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

In this important study, poet Melba Joyce Boyd analyzes Harper not simply as a feminist and an activist, but as a writer.

Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890–1930 demonstrates that popular lynching plays were mechanisms through which African American communities survived actual and photographic mob violence. Often available in periodicals, lynching plays were read aloud or acted out by black church members, schoolchildren, and families. Koritha Mitchell shows that African Americans performed and read the scripts in community settings to certify to each other that lynching victims were not the isolated brutes that dominant discourses made them out to be. Instead, the play scripts often described victims as honorable heads of households being torn from model domestic units by white violence. In closely analyzing the political and spiritual uses of black theatre during the Progressive Era, Mitchell demonstrates that audiences were shown affective ties in black families, a subject often erased in mainstream images of African Americans. Examining lynching plays as archival texts that embody and reflect broad networks of sociocultural activism and exchange in the lives of black Americans, Mitchell finds that audiences were rehearsing and improvising new ways of enduring in the face of widespread racial terrorism. Images of the black soldier, lawyer, mother, and wife helped readers assure each other that they were upstanding individuals who deserved the right to participate in national culture and politics. These powerful community coping efforts helped African Americans band together and withstand the nation's rejection of them as viable citizens. The Left of Black interview with author Koritha Mitchell begins at 14:00. An interview with Koritha Mitchell at The Ohio Channel.