The history of blacks is complicated, fragmented, disturbing to contemplate - not a neat trail of challenges met or of felled trees blocking the path to the mountain top.

Steven Spielberg's 'The Color Purple' might as well have been about a bunch of dancing eggplants for all it has to say about black history.

History is a sly boots, and for a generation of blacks that cannot identify with the frustrations of Jim Crow, and for whites who cannot understand the hard deal that faces working-class blacks, it is difficult to reconcile Hughes's reputation as a poet-hero with his topical verse and uncomplicated prose.

No matter what historians claimed, BC really stood for "Before Coffee.

Ellison was prominent on the lecture circuit even in the Black Aesthetic days of the Sixties when his defiantly pro-American and prickly-proud intellectual act met with some hostility.

In the years after World War I, blacks began to migrate to the North and its imagined freedoms in great numbers - 'Russian' came to mean a black who had rushed from the South.