12 Million Black Voices

Locations
Call Number: Black Studies 305.896 Wr
On Shelf At: Downtown Library

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	Black Studies 305.896 Wr	4-week checkout	On Shelf

Previously published: 12 million black voices : a folk history of the Negro in the United States. New York : Viking Press, 1941.
New forward in 2002 written by Noel Ignatiev.
Chiefly photographs collected by the Farm Security Administration.

REVIEWS & SUMMARIES

Summary / Annotation
Author Notes

COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Photo history submitted by redwood on July 28, 2023, 3:52pm 12 Million Black Voices consists of Wright’s text accompaniment to a series of Depression-era photographs by Edwin Rosskam of the Farm Credit Administration. The introduction says that Wright was asked to write 20 pages, but wrote more than double instead. Using the first-person plural, he catalogues Black life and history in the rural South and the urban North, alongside stoic photographs of laborers and children. Wright’s Communist values undergird a focus on labor: “We are the children of the black sharecroppers, the first-born of the city tenements.” The first-person plural is, of course, flattening, but the text within is also fascinating.