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This chapter demonstrates that the first black-authored lynching play, Rachel, by Angelina Weld Grimké, emerged in 1914 partly because the mainstream stage accepted black actors but limited them to comedy or white-authored material. Grimké and others thus began privileging playwriting over acting in order to control the race's representation. Nevertheless, African American intellectuals and artists came to value black dramatists because of the success of performers—even minstrels and musical comedians. Moreover, Grimké's Rachel proved influential enough to initiate the genre of lynching drama because other poets and fiction writers also began writing plays. As Grimké's successors offered generic revisions, their efforts helped to redefine black theater again. The chapter therefore identifies the differences and commonalities between their work and Grimké's.

This chapter discusses a speech delivered to the National Negro Congress by renowned writer and poet Sterling Brown, in which he relayed the many obstacles facing black authors: “The Negro writer is faced by a limited audience: his own group, for various reasons, reads few books and buys less; and white America, in the main, is hardly an audience ready for truthful representation of Negro life. The Negro writer has the job revising certain stereotypes of Negro life and character, whose growth extends from the beginning of the American novel in Cooper to the latest best seller, ‘Gone With the Wind’.” While this outlook reflects Brown's own pessimism, it was shaped, at least in part, by his experience with the Federal Writers' Project's Negro Affairs.

This chapter draws distinctions among the reading strategies of white readers in order to shed light on the failures and the political promise of cross-racial empathy. It focuses largely on middle-class white women as they encounter black-authored fiction within book-club settings. In contrast to much of the scholarship on cross-racial sympathy that replicates a monolithic view of whiteness, the chapter emphasizes how multiple identities of gender, class, age, ethnicity, education, and political affiliation work to complicate “white” modes of reading. Given the larger argument that empathy is a key ingredient in the development of anti-racist white identities, this chapter is structured to distinguish among different deployments of empathy and their political consequences.

Citing historical examples of the “nasty review” and its sometimes tragic consequences, the chapter argues that while a reviewer can rescue a book from obscurity with a favorable review, a harsh review or simple inattentiveness can provide lubrication to the conveyor belt into oblivion. Addressing, in particular, the responsibility of the academic book reviewer, it focuses on the fate of black and women authors whose works have been subject to criticisms of exceptionalism, inauthenticity, trivialization—or, worse, subject to neglect or suppression. Proposing that the reviewer attend to issues of power, positionality, and process (the power of the review, the positionality of the reviewer, and the process of reading), the chapter explores the viability of alternative models for reviewing, especially as these address the politics and ethics of women reviewing women. The protocol it recommends entails what can be described fundamentally as a dialogic process of “critical conversation” between reviewer and author.

This chapter focuses on the relationship between the Census Bureau and African Americans. In the first half of the twentieth century, the history of the agency’s relations with the black population was one of an incomplete transformation. For the census, blacks were the most objectified inhabitants, to the point that slaves were deprived of names to become numbers in the population statistics, and the ones least likely to be viewed as subjects. At the same time, blacks as a category were always the object of particular attention in census reports. The chapter also describes the growing involvement of black authors and statisticians in publications for the black population; the career of Charles E. Hall with respect to the census, who became the first African American to be given supervisory responsibilities over black employees; and the Census Bureau’s relations with the African American business community.

This chapter presents Alice Walker's reflections on the America of her youth compared to the promise of the campaign, which reflects the view of many older African Americans who never expected to see the day a Black man would occupy the White House. She says that she is a supporter of Obama because she believes that he is the right person to lead the country at this time. He offers a rare opportunity for the country and the world to start over, and to do better. She expresses deep sadness that many of her feminist white women friends cannot see him and what he stands for. Cannot hear the fresh choices toward Movement he offers. That they can believe that millions of Americans—black, white, yellow, red, and brown—choose Obama over Clinton only because he is a man, and black, feels tragic to her.