Includes index.

The slave mother / Frances Watkins Harper -- On being brought from Africa to America / Phillis Wheatley -- Runagate Runagate / Robert Hayden -- Letter to his master / Frederick Douglass -- From the Dark tower / Countee Cullen -- If we must die / Claude McKay -- I, too / Langston Hughes -- Willie / Maya Angelou -- A summer tragedy / Arna Bontemps -- People who could fly / Julius Lester -- Stagolee / Julius Lester -- How Buck won his freedom / Anonymous -- The steel drivin' man / A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen -- The man who was almost a man / Richard Wright -- Sonny's blues / James Baldwin -- The only man on Liberty Street / William Melvin Kelley -- In my father's house / Ernest J. Gaines -- To Mississippi youth / Malcolm X -- Mother to son / Langston Hughes -- one thing i dont need / Ntozake Shange -- To Da-duh, in memoriam / Paule Marshall -- Magic / Rita Dove -- Plumes / Georgia Douglas Johnson -- Getting the facts of life / Paulette Childress White -- Miss Rosie / Lucille Clifton --

The wife of his youth / Charles W. Chesnutt -- Like a winding sheet / Ann Petry -- Sweat / Zora Neale Hurston -- The bean eaters / Gwendolyn Brooks -- The creation / James Weldon Johnson -- Women / Alice Walker -- Thank you, m'am / Langston Hughes -- For my people / Margaret Walker -- See how they run / Mary Elizabeth Vroman -- We wear the mask / Paul Laurence Dunbar -- Vive noir! / Mari Evans -- Nikka-Roasa / Nikki Giovanni -- The immediate program of the American Negro / W.E.B. Du Bois -- Preface to a twenty volume suicide note / Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) -- Assassination / Haki Madhubuti (Don L. Lee) -- I have a dream / Martin Luther King, Jr. -- On the pulse of morning / Maya Angelou.