The Open Road Blog

Black History Month reflects on, celebrates and honors the African-American experience. Everywhere you look, black culture, talent, and political efforts have played an enormous role in shaping America's past and present.

African Americans have  revered good stories and storytellers. The story-telling history of Africa is rich and varied, and it remains a living tradition that continues to evolve and flourish in the diaspora today. "How many of us really know about the truly great civilizations of Africa, in their days as glorious and resplendent as any on the face of the earth?" asks Henry Louis Gates Jr., educator, author, ...

“I couldn’t not be a part of the movement,” says Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple, about her involvement in the civil rights struggle. “The whole South was in an uproar because we were trying to change the very system that my parents and grandparents and great-grandparents had suffered under.” 

To mark the national celebration of the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., we interviewed writers—and their friends, family, and colleagues—about their experiences during the civil rights movement.

Walker speaks about the problems faced by students participating in the movement, while Arnold Adoff, husband of the late ...

“Anyone has the right to write about any subject available to be written about. That’s what the academy is all about. That’s what art is all about.” —Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

This February marks the thirty-fifth anniversary of Black History Month. This year also marks forty-four years since the publication of a novel that polarized America: The Confessions of Nat Turner, William Styron’s Pulitzer Prize–winning portrait of the leader of America’s bloodiest slave revolt.

In an exclusive interview with Open Road, Harvard University Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., one of the nation’s foremost academic authorities on African American ...