Distilled over many years from Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s legendary Harvard introductory course in African American Studies, The Black Box: Writing the Race, is the story of Black self-definition in America through the prism of the writers who have led the way. This is the epic story of how, through essays and speeches, novels, plays, and poems, a long line of creative thinkers--from Phillis Wheatley and Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker...