The black box

Distilled over many years from Henry Louis Gates Jr's legendary Harvard course in African American Studies, 'The Black Box' is the story of Black self-definition in America through the prism of the writers who have led the way. From Phillis Wheatley and Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, to Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright, James Baldwin and Toni Morrison, these writers used words to create a liveable world - a 'home' - for Black people destined to live in a bitterly racist society.