Zora Neale Hurston's first book, the story of the last survivor of the last American slave ship, has been published for the first time. Sam Gillette is a Staff Writer on the Human Interest team at ...

At age 19, Oluale Kossola was preparing for marriage in his native West African village when he was captured by warriors from a rival tribe and sold into slavery. It was 1860 — a half-century after ...

"Barracoon: The Story of the Last 'Black Cargo,'" one of the only surviving first-person accounts of the transatlantic slave trade, was published in May. WHYY reporter Annette John-Hall interviews ...

"I want to know who you are and how you came to be a slave." That was one of the first questions that Zora Neale Hurston asked 86-year-old Cudjo Lewis when she traveled from New York to Mobile, Ala., ...

Slave narratives tend equally to fascinate and appall. They can represent history, red in tooth and claw, or, in the words of noted multiculturalist Lawrence W. Levine, "a mélange of accuracy and ...

“I want to ask you many things. I want to know who you are and how you came to be a slave; and to what part of Africa you belong, and how you fared as a slave, and how you managed as a free man.” So ...

Sitting on his porch in 1928, under the Alabama sun, snacking on peaches, Cudjo Lewis (born Oluale Kossola) recounted to his guest his life story: how he came from a place in West Africa, then ...

It's been over half a century since Zora Neale Hurston died, but the author of Their Eyes Were Watching God isn't done making waves in the literary world quite yet. On May 8, Barracoon, a nonfiction ...

Author Zora Neale Hurston at the New York Times Book Fair in 1937. Zora Neale Hurston, one of the best known writers of the Harlem Renaissance — and the author of Their Eyes Were Watching God — has a ...

Precolonial black history is often reduced to a troubling binary: Africans as a uniformly subservient arm of the triangular trade and Africa through the lens of monarchies like ancient Egypt and Haile ...