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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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Amazon
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/
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