Introduction: Notes from a darker sister / Rudine Sims Bishop --
Foreword: The poem speaks / Nikki Giovanni --
Like I am. Me and the mule / Langston Hughes --
The rebel / Mari Evans --
We real cool / Gwendolyn Brooks --
Cross / Langston Hughes --
Aunt Jane Allen / Fenton Johnston --
The whipping; Those winter Sundays / Robert Hayden --
Flash cards / Rita Dove --
Nikki-Rosa / Nikki Giovanni --
A song in the front yard / Gwendolyn Brooks --
Flowers of darkness / Frank Marshall Davis --
Juke box love song / Langston Hughes --
The glory of the day was in her face / James Weldon Johnson --
Bronzeville man with a belt in the back / Gwendolyn Brooks --
Madhouse / Calvin C. Hernton --
Genealogy. Each morning / Amiri Baraka --
A moment please / Samuel Allen (Paul Vesey) --
The Negro speaks of rivers / Langston Hughes --
Southern mansion / Arna Bontemps --
O Daedalus, fly away home / Robert Hayden --
October journey / Margaret Walker --
Dust bowl / Robert A. Davis --
A ballad of remembrance ; Middle passage / Robert Hayden --
The idea of ancestry / Etheridge Knight --
Blackbottom / Toi Derricotte --
now poem. for us. / Sonia Sanchez --
Our grandmothers / Maya Angelou --
Shall be remembered. Frederick Douglass ; Runagate Runagate / Robert Hayden --
Memorial wreath / Dudley Randall --
Vaticide / Myron O'Higgins --
A poem for Black hearts / Amiri Baraka --
For Malcolm who walks in the eyes of our children / Quincy Troupe --
To Richard Wright / Conrad Kent Rivers --
American gothic / Samuel Allen (Paul Vesey) --
When Mahalia sings / Quandra Prettyman --
Yardbird's skull / Owen Dodson --
Montgomery / Sam Cornish --
Here where Coltrane is / Michael S. Harper --
Martin Luther King Jr. / Gwendolyn Brooks --
If we must die. If we must die ; The lynching / Claude McKay --
"So quietly" / Leslie Pinckney Hill --
The daybreakers / Arna Bontemps --
Song for a dark girl / Langston Hughes --
Old Lem / Sterling A. Brown --
Between the world and me / Richard Wright --
When I know the power of my Black hand / Lance Jeffers --
Lynching and burning / Primus St. John --
Endangered species / Al --
I am the darker brother. I, too, sing America / Langston Hughes --
A Black man speaks of reaping / Arna Bontemps --
From the dark tower / Countree Cullen --
On passing two Negroes on a dark country road somewhere in Georgia / Conrad Kent Rivers --
Tired / Fenton Johnson --
Sympathy / Paul Laurence Dunbar --
Sorrow is the only faithful one / Owen Dodson --
If the stars should fall / Samuel Allen (Paul Vesey) --
For a lady I know ; Incident / Countree Cullen --
We wear the mask / Paul Laurence Dunbar --
Hokku : in the falling snow / Richard Wright --
Yet do I marvel / Countree Cullen --
The train runs late to Harlem / Conrad Kent Rivers --
Status symbol / Mari Evans --
Black is a soul / Joseph White --
Jacket notes / Ishmael Reed --
The hope of your unborn. The still voice of Harlem / Conrad Kent Rivers --
Dream variation / Langston Hughes --
Listen children / Lucille Clifton --
change-up / Haki Madhubuti --
Suicide / Alice Walker --
For each of you / Audre Lorde --
The men / E. Ethelbert Miller --
Poems for my brother Kenneth VII / Owen Dodson --
In time of crisis / Raymond Richard Patterson --
The noonday April sun / George Love --
After the winter / Claude McKay --
Four sheets to the wind and a one-way ticket to France / Conrad Kent Rivers --
For my people / Margaret Walker --
Afterword : thirty years after words.