[By Kenton Rambsy]   1986 – A second adaptation of Richard Wright’s Native Son is made with Victor Love playing the role of Bigger Thomas and Oprah Winfrey playing his mother, Mrs. Thomas.  1988 – Toni Morrison wins the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her novel Beloved. 1989 – Donna Deitch directs the television mini-series The Women of Brewster’s Place based on Gloria Naylor’s novel. […]

[By Howard Rambsy] 1970 – The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison is published by Holt, Rinehart, and Winston Publisher. 1971 – The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest Gaines is published. 1972 – Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed is published and becomes, along with Flight to Canada (1976), one of Reed’s most critically acclaim works.  1974 – The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, a […]

[By Kenton Rambsy] The importance of chronology of African American literary history has become all the more important to me after viewing “The Timeline of African American Poetry.” My older brother, an associate professor of African American literature and director of Black Studies at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, recently compiled a timeline of significant events in African American poetry that spans from 1854 to 2012. […]