Out There

With this appreciation of three very different black writers, novelist Darryl Pinckney reminds us that marginal or neglected literary figures have a lot to tell us about the history of a people who are always "outsiders." Born in Jamaica in 1883, J. A. Rogers was an early member of the Harlem Renaissance-a newspaper columnist, historian of Negro achievement, polemicist against white supremacy, and amateur sociologist of interracial sex as evidenced in his massive three-volume work “Sex and Race”. Vincent O. Carter, who came of age in 1920's Kansas City, wrote “The Bern Book”, an exploration of being black in a Swiss rather than an American setting.