Black American History in Ballad, Song & Prose

Performed by Langston Hughes, Ossie Davis, Jean Brannon, W.E.B. DuBois, and Pete Seeger, this collection of spoken word, oral history, speech and song represents a comprehensive sociopolitical history of black America. Beginning with America’s rediscovery in 1492 and Columbus’s supposedly black pilot, Pedro Alonso Niño, the collection covers the colonial period, the slave experience, the Civil war, notable African-American women, nineteenth-century black intellectuals, the Jim Crow years and the struggle for civil rights, ending with the late Martin Luther King Jr.