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FREEDOMWAYS  FOURTH QUARTER 1966

John O. Killens and Paule Marshall are not mentioned; nor are Kenneth R. Rowe's A Theatre in Your Head (1960) containing the only complete printed text of Theodore Ward's great play Our Lan'; Bowdoin College's The Portrayal of the Negro in American Painting (1964) and the special issue of Drama Critique: A Critical Review of Theater Arts and Literature (Spring 1964) on "The Negro in the Theatre." There is nothing on the Negro in films or the dance. Peter Noble's The Negro in Films and V. J. Jerome's The Negro in Hollywood Films are apparently unknown. Also missing are John J. Martin's The Dance (section on Negro dance) and essays on Negro dance in books and magazines devoted to the dance. Negro contributions to American dance are impressive from the slave period to the present. Donald McKayle, Alvin Ailey, Pearl Primus, Arthur Mitchell, Carmen De Lavallade, Matt Turney and Mary Hinkson (both with Martha Graham) are current Negro dancers and choreographers.

Irving J. Sloan's small book The American Negro: A Chronology and Fact Book has been criticized rather severely by Herbert Aptheker for its many errors. But work like this book, done by a Scarsdale, N.Y., public school teacher and not a specialist in Negro studies, represents a lot of hard work and time sacrificed. It has some useful material: a chronology of people and events in Negro history, a bibliography of selected works dealing with the Negro and lists of Negro colleges and universities, Negro organizations, Negro population in the U.S. (from 1790 to 1960) and Negro newspapers and periodicals. This book represents great interest in Negro life and history which it can help to communicate to other teachers as well as students. As such, it should be encouraged although the errors should be corrected in the next edition if there is one.

Elizabeth W. Miller's The Negro in America: A Bibliography comes with extravagant claims for itself. With the aid of a Carnegie Corporation grant, this book is supposed to be a comprehensive bibliographic survey of recent writing on the Negro (including scholarly studies from many disciplines, together with material on events in the growing struggle for Negro rights) during the years between the U.S. Supreme Court decision (May 17, 1954) and the enactment of the Voting Rights Bill in August 1965. Older material has been included, says the compiler, to illuminate the background, explain attitudes or the direction of developments. The bibliography, continues the compiler, embraces the polemical, the scholarly, the clinical, the prescriptive and the journalistic and hopes to point up gaps in knowledge.

Thomas F. Pettigrew, in a foreword to the volume, says that "not

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