African-American Writers and Journalists spans nearly three centuries of literary and journalistic history, from a long-unpublished ballad composed in the 1740s by a slave named Lucy Terry to the works of the Nobel Prize–winning novelist Toni Morrison. It tells the stories of figures such as Frederick Douglass, whose towering intellect and powerful prose helped animate the movement to abolish slavery; Ida B. Wells and Charlotta Bass, journalists who risked their lives to report on racial violence and injustice; and Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright, who challenged society with hard questions about race and equality.