Founded in 1978, Black Classic Press is devoted to publishing obscure and significant works by and about people of African descent. They specialize in republishing works that are out of print and quite often out of memory. They began publishing because They wanted to extend the memory of what they believe are important books that have helped in meaningful ways to shape the Black diasporic experience and our understanding of the world.

Black Classic Press initial publishing efforts were intended to serve a small but interested

group of readers with whom they shared a common love for the same type of book. Working with limited resources, their output of books has been slow but very consistent. It has been made easier by our readers who have become a large network of enthusiastic supporters who praise the books we publish and suggest new books for us to publish.

Influenced by their readers, they have published a list of titles that are essential to any well-rounded understanding of the Black experience. As you review their website list, we think you will agree.

 

A Panther is a Black Cat
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by Reginald Major

ISBN 13 978-1-57478-037-6
308 pp
$16.95
First published 1971. Black Classic Press published date: 2006

A Panther Is a Black Cat remains an important and valuable narrative, providing a unique perspective for exploring the early history of the Black Panther Party. It was first published in 1971 as an insider's portrait of the rapidly expanding Panther movement. Reginald Major had special access to rank-and-file Panthers, and the Party's top leadership. He was an associate of Eldridge Cleaver, the Party's Minister of Information, who introduced him to Party co-founders Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. These relationships allowed him to see and present the Panthers as serious activists committed to Black liberation. This contrasted with the image projected by the FBI and COINTELPRO of the Panthers as gun-toting militants without purpose.

A Panther Is a Black Cat captures the Panthers pre-1971, unified with nationwide support, and viewed by many as the vanguard of a new American revolution. This was before the fractious COINTELPRO inspired Newton/Cleaver separation that eventually split the Party and its supporters, aiding in its demise. The Panthers we meet on the pages of this narrative are not split. They are very much together�young, bold, men and women, ready to fix and serve free breakfast to children, or march with big Afros and leather jackets on the most fortified seats of power. They engage us and we become connected to their struggle, and their grand hopes of building a better world.

Excerpt
Sunday, November 24 [1968]. The Cleavers are receiving visitors. At home, Kathleen is Mrs. Cleaver rather than the gun-carrying Communications Secretary pictured in the revolutionary press. She and Eldridge pass wisecracks between them.

Much of the meaning is hidden from a visitor, because the private experience of marriage, with the intimate awareness that death, imprisonment or both are the only realistic expectations of any couple dedicated to bringing off revaluation, is not subject to outside understanding.

�Cleaver's living room looks smaller than it actually is. Two of the walls are completely covered with revolutionary posters from all parts of the world. One with a silhouette of Che comes from England, and features a poem, �To Eldridge,� written by Christopher Louge, one of Britain's poetic voices of extreme disaffection.

A one-foot square likeness of Stalin, woven on silk in China, is obvious in its austere black and white, even though it is placed to one side of the multi-colored, postered wall.

�Why in hell do you keep Stalin's picture up there?� asks Kathleen noting that Mao's picture was not in the room.

�I just keep it there to remind you, Baby, that Mao is a Stalinist.

When Kathleen jokingly threatens to remove it on grounds that a black revolutionary's wall should not be decorated with white people, Eldridge directs another placement of the likeness. In a few minutes, moving against desire, Kathleen relocates Stalin's picture so that it is now at the visual center of the wall.

Where the windows ought to be, there are more posters. These are placed on a floor-to-ceiling sandwich of half-inch sheet steel on three-quarter-inch plywood. All of the windows in the house are armored this way, as is the front door, and the back door located in the kitchen.

 

Continuum: New and Selected Poems
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by Mari Evans

ISBN 13: 978-1-57478-038-3
155 pp, $14.95
Published 2006, Black Classic Press

Continuum: new and selected poems by Mari Evans, is the distinguished poet's expansive new collection. Unabashedly a poet that writes for and about African people, Evans paints an intimate portrait of the Black experience in the 110 poems shared here. And yet, poetry lovers no matter how they come to the book will find access in this superb assemblage. As Evans states in the preface, ��I try, to recover for us on the page what it means to be human��

In fact, Evans� poetic voice helped defined the 1960s Black Arts Movement. A moment in time that brought to fore the work of poets like Sonia Sanchez, Amiri Baraka and Evans with their young Black fiery voices that spoke to the need to make Blackness both beautiful and powerful. In the first of four sections in Continuum are many of the poems written during that period such as the poet's signature poems �Speak the Truth to the People,� �To Be Born Black,� and �I am a Black Woman�

I am a black woman/the music of my song/some sweet arpeggio of tears/is written in a minor key/and I/can be heard humming in the night
Other poems showcase explorations by Evans of subjects equally powerful and that touch on human drama, like the graphic violence of a relationship gone wrong found in �Urban Dawn�,

She, a sagging anguish/eyes half closed/hair wild upon his chest/her neck possessed;/His terrible loving arm/a careful chokehold

Whether telling a story, interpreting an event, or singing the blues; Evans shows an impressive range in poetic style and substance in these poems. Written without the flourish of fancy language, they are full of Evans's brilliance, humor, and music; and possess such astounding drama that often leaves the reader breathless by the resounding and door-slamming end. As in �Where Have You Gone?�

where have you gone/with your confident/walk your/crooked smile the/rent money/in one pocket and/my heart/in another

 

Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing
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Editors: Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal

ISBN 13: 978-1-57478-039-0
677 pp., $24.95
First published: 1968; Black Classic published date: 2006

While many texts are readily available chronicling the Black Power Movement, the same cannot be said for its �aesthetic and spiritual sister,� the Black Arts Movement. Black Fire is a rare exception that documents and captures the social and cultural turmoil of the period.

Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal, co-editors and contributors to this volume, saw Black Fire as a manifesto to bring about change in Black thought and action, generated from a Black aesthetic. Often considered the seminal work from the Black Arts Movement, Black Fire is a rich anthology and an extraordinary source document, presenting 178 selections of poetry, essays, short stories and plays from cultural critics, literary artists and political leaders. Many of the contributors became prominent, nationally and internationally. Others receded into the cultural landscape, even before Black Fire's first publication in 1968. Included in this groundbreaking volume are essays by John Henrik Clarke, Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael), Harold Cruse, and A.B. Spellman; poetry by Askia Toure, Sonia Sanchez, Gaston Neal, Stanley Crouch, Calvin C. Hernton, and surprisingly Sun-Ra; fiction by Julia Fields and drama from Ed Bullins. Sixty-three additional contributors round out this comprehensive work.

Excerpt
These are the wizards, the bards, the babalawo, the shaiks, of Weusi Mchoro. These descriptions will be carried for the next thousand years�

�We are being good. We are the beings of goodness, again. We will be righteous and our creations good and strong and righteous, and teaching. The teaching and the descriptions. The will and the strength. Songs, chants, �bad sh*t goin down,� rendered as the light beam of God warms your hearts forever. Forget, and reget. Reget and forget. Where it was. This is the source, Kitab Sudan. The black man's comfort and guide. Where we was we will be agin. Tho the map be broke and thorny tho the wimmens sell they men, then cry up hell to get them back our here agin. In the middle of my life, In the middle of our dreams. The black artist. The black man. The holy holy black man. The man you seek. The climber the striver. The maker of peace. The lover. The warrior. We are they whom you seek. Look in. Find yr self. Find the being, the speaker. The voice, the back dust hover in your soft eyeclosings. Is you. Is the creator. Is nothing. Plus or minus, you vehicle! We are presenting. Your various selves. We are presenting from God, a tone, your own. Go on. Now.

Amiri Baraka
From the Foreword

 

Black Power and the Garvey Movement
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by Theodore G. Vincent

ISBN 13: 978-1-57478-040-6
260 pp, $16.95
First published: 1970;
Black Classic Press published date: 2006

Theodore Vincent provides valuable insight into understanding Marcus Garvey, the global breadth and depth of his influence and the origins of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). From the first paragraph, Vincent unequivocally declares that he intends to �set straight� many of the stories then surrounding Garvey and Garveyites. He writes, ��historians have left us with an impression of Garveyism as an oversized sect or cult, an escapist pseudo-religion of which Garvey was God�but in its time the UNIA was the most powerful organization of black people in the world��. Initially intended to explore black militancy in the 1920's from the point of view of the black power struggles of the 1960s, Vincent now adds a new introduction, providing new perspective, since Black Power and The Garvey Movement was first published in 1971.

Excerpt
Third World cooperation during the Garvey era also involved the Central American nation of Nicaragua, which between 1927 and 1933 was engaged in an ultimately successful anti-colonialist war to drive out invading U.S. Marines. The Negro World provided copious coverage of the stand by Nicaragua's nationalist leader, General Augusto C. Sandino, against the U.S. military, which used poison gas, concentration camps, beheadings, and other gruesome methods in their efforts to subdue the Nicaraguans. Garveyites amongst the banana and lumber plantation workers on Nicaragua's Atlantic Coast became part of the Sandinistas struggle.

In 1931, Sandinistas captured the coastal town of Puerto Cabezas, which was then an almost entirely Black West Indian immigrant community of 1200 people, 500 of whom, the Negro World declared, were UNIA members. U.S. Marines dispatched from Panama sailed to Puerto Cabezas and were met at the end of that city's long pier by terrified whites who claimed that �the Blacks� ran the town and had captured and executed eleven white job foremen and company officials. The Marines, depicted in Hollywood movies as always ready to jump into a fight, waited to recapture Puerto Cabezas until the Blacks had retreated into the jungle. The northeastern Nicaraguan coastal interior remained in Sandinista/Garveyite hands while U.S. congressmen and senators expressed shock over their force's failure to avenge the deaths of the whites of Puerto Cabezas. Shortly after the Marines left Nicaragua in 1933, the foreign owners of the coastal mills closed their businesses, claiming a bad economic climate and insufficient security for their property. Almost all the mills remained closed until after World War II. Without work, the Black West Indians drifted back into Puerto Cabezas, from which they returned to their home islands, and an episode of Latino/Black cooperation became forgotten history.

Theodore G. Vincent
From the New Introduction for the 2006 Edition

 

What Next: A Memoir Toward World Peace
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by Walter Mosley

Format: Paperback, 124pp.
ISBN: 1574780204
Publisher: Black Classic Press
Pub. Date: February 2003

Read an AALBC.com Review by Paige Turner

This impassioned essay urges black Americans to take the lead in shaping America's response to the September 11 attacks. Mosley, author of the Easy Rawlins mystery series, puts forth a radical critique of U.S. foreign policy, recalling U.S. interventions in Indochina, Central America and the Middle East to assert that America often acts as a "pillager-nation" concerned more with corporate profits and cheap oil than with democracy and human rights; Arab antipathy towards the U.S. is thus more a response to U.S. economic imperialism than to religious or cultural antagonisms.... �Publishers Weekly

 

Cultural Genocide in the Black and African Studies Curriculum
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by Yosef ben-Jochannan. 1972*, 2004.

As Black and African Studies programs emerged in the early 1970's, the question of who has the right and responsibility to determine course content and curriculum also emerged. In 1972, Dr. Ben's critique on this subject was published as Cultural Genocide in The Black and African Studies Curriculum. It has been republished several times since then and its topic has remained timely and unresolved. 150 pp. (paper $14.95 ISBN 1-57478-022-0).

The Negro
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by W. E. B. Du Bois. With an introduction by W. Burghart Turner and Joyce Moore Turner. 1915*, 2005.

Originally published in 1915, Dr. W. E. Burghardt Du Bois� �little book,� as he called it, was one of the most important and seminal works on African and African American history. It was small in size but gigantic in purpose. In it Du Bois, unquestionably an eminent historian attempted to encapsulate the ten thousand year record of the peoples of Africa, then referred to as �Negroes.� 281 pp. (paper $14.95.ISBN 1-58073-032-9).

 

Historical Sketches of the Ancient Negro: A Compilation
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by Edward E. & Josephine E. Carlisle. 1920*, 2005.

In this early African centered work, Edward and Josephine Carlisle explore the ancient worlds of Cush, Ethiopia, Nubia and other kingdoms, documenting ancient African contributions to world culture. 96 pp. (paper $8.95. ISBN 1-58073-017-5).

 

William Cooper Nell: Selected Writings 1832-1874
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by Dorothy Porter Wesley & Constance Porter Uzelac, eds. 2002

For the first time, a biography of William Cooper Nell and a major portion of his articles from �the Liberator�, �National Anti-Slavery Standard�, and �the North Star� have been published in a single volume. The book is the first to document the life and works of Nell and includes correspondence with many noted abolitionists from Wendell Phillips and Frederick Douglass to Amy Kirby Post and Charles Sumner. 725 pp. (paper $45.00. ISBN 1-57475-019-0).

 

An Account of Some of the Principal Slave Insurrections: And others, which have occurred, or been attempted, in the United States and elsewhere, during the last two centuries
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by Joshua Coffin. 1860* 2005.

This pamphlet contains accounts from actual historical records pertaining to incidents of slave insurrections in the U.S. and other slave holding countries. 36 pp. (paper $4.00. ISBN 1-57478-029-8).

 

W. Paul Coates
Director
BLACK CLASSIC PRESS
P.O. Box 13414
Baltimore, MD 21203
410.358.0980
410.358.0987 Fax

 

Related Links

W. Paul Coates Remembers Glen Thompson
http://reviews.aalbc.com/remembering_glenn_thompson.htm

BCP Digital Printing's Web site
http://www.bcpdigital.com/