The Black Book.

The Black Book (1974), co-edited by Roger Furman, Middleton A. Harris, Morris Levitt, and Ernest Smith and uncreditedly compiled by Toni Morrison, is a collage-style documentary volume that presents a visual and archival history of African American life in the United States. Composed of facsimiles of photographs, advertisements, obituaries, patents, sheet music, artwork, and other historical materials, the book functions as a scrapbook-like panorama intended to counter narratives that compress Black history into slavery followed by the civil rights era. As Morrison emphasized, the largely visual format was designed to speak directly to younger audiences and to demonstrate the intellectual, creative, and entrepreneurial activity of African Americans across centuries, resisting reductive or minstrelized representations.