12 Million Black Voices

Nineteen fifteen. The resurgent Ku Klux Klan met on Stone Mountain in Georgia for its first-ever cross burning. Fifty-six blacks were reported lynched. Nineteen twenty-three. Half a million blacks migrated into Northern cites with false hopes of better times in the nation's factories. Nineteen twenty-nine. The stock market crashed. Soon more than a quarter of all blacks were unemployed. Nineteen thirty-three. Under the New Deal, the segregated Civilian Conservation Corps put 200,000 black teenagers to work. Nineteen forty. Richard Wright's Native Son outsells John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath to become number one on the best-seller list. 12 Million Black Voices, first published in 1941, brilliantly captures the lives of black people in America during the early twentieth century by combining the powerful prose of Richard Wright with startling photographs selected by Edwin Rosskam from the Farm Security Administration files compiled during the Great Depression. From crowded, run-down farm shacks to Harlem storefront churches, the photographs ? by giants like Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, & Arthur Rothstein ? poignantly depict the lives of black people while the accompanying text eloquently narrates the story of the pictures & delivers a powerful commentary on the origins & history of black oppression in this country.Wright, Richard is the author of '12 Million Black Voices' with ISBN 9780938410485 and ISBN 0938410482.