Erika DeSimone – “Voices Beyond Bondage”

Popular culture tends to portray African Americans of the 19th Century as unschooled, unskilled, illiterate slaves. That obscures the contributions of thousands of African Americans who expressed themselves eloquently and passionately through poetry. Book editor Erika DeSimone joins us to discuss “Voices Beyond Bondage: An Anthology of Verse by African Americans of the 19th Century”, a collection of 150 poems she and co-editor Fidel Louis gathered mainly from Black newspapers published before and after the Civil War.