African American families

Opportunity Cost

by Mitchell S. Jackson,

From Survival Math, which will be published in March by Scribner. Jackson is an associate professor of writing at New York University and the author of The Residue Years. He…

By Zora Neale Hurston, from Barracoon, a previously unpublished ethnography based on interviews that she conducted with eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis in Alabama in 1927 and 1928. Lewis was then the…

The Missing

From advertisements taken out in African-American newspapers by former slaves searching for relatives. The earliest ads appeared in 1863. Villanova University and Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, in Philadelphia,…