Darryl Pinckney

Manhattan was the capital of the twentieth century for black writers, artists, and intellectuals as much as it was for their white counterparts. ”

In the years after World War I, blacks began to migrate to the North and its imagined freedoms in great numbers - 'Russian' came to mean a black who had rushed from the South. ”

After Reconstruction, black newspapers evolved from being a propaganda arm into a kind of opposition press, because even the friends of former slaves had their fears. ”

New York's various undergrounds can make for a disciplined apprenticeship, and Gaga takes pride in her earliest fan base of art, fashion and music students. ”

High Cotton' is more conscious of class than 'Black Deutschland.' ”

The city - as the theater of experience, the refuge, the hiding place - has, in turn, been replaced by an abstraction, the fast lane. In the fast lane, the passive observer reduces everything - streets, people, rock lyrics, headlines - to landscape. Every night holds magical promises of renewal. But burnout is inevitable, like some law of physics. ”

None of the black abolitionist newspapers, the first of which appeared in 1827, was in existence after the Civil War. ”

That slave narratives existed at all implied a satisfactory conclusion to the journey - the attainment of literacy, the escape to the place where one could reflect on the experience of bondage and the flight to freedom, and, in the early days of the slave trade, the conversion to Christianity. ”

Novels set in distant places give us expectations not unlike those we have of travel writing, and often the distinctions are blurred, as in, say, the way the low life of Tokyo's Shinjuku Ward is depicted in John David Morley's recent 'Pictures from the Water Trade.' ”

When writing on black life, whites have often been unwelcome, usually called upon to give witness or hauled in as the accused. ”