The Black Book is an anthology of photographs, newspaper clippings, quotations, sheet music, patent applications, advertisements, and other ephemera, which together form a picture of Black life in America. The volume, assembled by Middleton A. Harris under the editorial eye of Toni Morrison—whose uncredited poem appears on the back jacket—is unflinching in its documentation of slavery, racially motivated violence, and the perpetuation of negative stereotypes. Saar was in the midst of her own reclamation of racist imagery when the book was published, having produced The Liberation of Aunt Jemima two years earlier. In A Call to Arms, Saar stenciled the Langston Hughes excerpt seen here onto a vintage washboard, where it joins other imagery to create a narrative of Black liberation.
Betye Saar
Middleton A. Harris (1908–1977)
The Black Book
First edition
New York: Random House, 1974
Rachel Federman: In the 1960s and '70s, Toni Morrison was an influential editor of African diasporic literature at Random House. Among her projects were books by Angela Davis, Henry Dumas, and The Black Book. This is Morrison speaking to author Junot Díaz about that time in her life.
Toni Morrison: Nevertheless, the job at Random was extremely important to me because there was a lot going on. As you remember, the late '60s and '70s, even the '80s, I wasn't able to participate politically, that is running up and down the streets in parades and with a megaphone, but I thought it would be a shame if that information was not in a book, the history of it. So I made it my business to collect African Americans who were vocal, either politically or just writing wonderful fiction.
Audio: New York Public Library