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Delores Phillips, author of the novel "The Darkest Child," had a promising literary career cut short by her death in 2014. The novel, set in 1958 in a fictional town in Georgia, follows the story of Rozelle Quinn and her ten children as they navigate racism and poverty in the Jim Crow South. Phillips also wrote poetry, short stories, and had two unfinished novels at the time of her death. She faced personal challenges, including multiple sclerosis and medical neglect, which influenced her writing. This article highlights the importance of oral history in recovering the lives of marginalized individuals and filling gaps in African American history. [Extracted from the article]

Delores Phillips's novel The Darkest Child (2004), which features one of the few representations of deafness in African American literature, has been largely overlooked in literary criticism. Phillips's depiction of Martha Jean challenges a long-standing tradition of deaf characters and deaf-related imagery as negative. Yet, Martha Jean is not a marginal character, nor merely a symbol or metaphor. Rather, as I show, Martha Jean constitutes a character of complex embodiment who complicates preconceived notions of Black and deaf people as "burdens" on society. Trapped under a system of capitalism which values labor, ability, and profit, Martha Jean's mother, Rozelle, considers her a burden, forcing her into a sort of indentured servitude in the domestic sphere—cooking, cleaning, and taking care of the babies that Rozelle continues to have. However, the article maintains that Martha Jean uses her position in the domestic sphere in order to reorder and redefine those terms. Ultimately, the suggestion is that by centering deafness and a deaf experience, Phillips exposes complex aspects of the novel which might otherwise be obscured. Through complicating issues surrounding literacy and education, and larger systems of racism, sexism, capitalism, and ableism, Phillips imagines a multiplicity of Black experiences in the Jim Crow South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This column includes a report from the 2021 Creative Commons Global Summit in which educators presented their experiences with the Wikipedia Student Program to teach students how to contribute to Wikipedia in the areas of African American literature, engineering, and Middle Eastern studies that led to students' increased knowledge of digital literacy and citizenship, knowledge equity and access, and the democratization of knowledge and expertise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a literary critique of the 1934 novel "Jonah's Gourd Vine," by Zora Neale Hurston, focusing on its depiction of race and race relations in the U.S. Topics addressed include Hurston's depiction and criticism of colorism within the historical African American community, the psychological effects of slavery on post-Civil War African Americans, and defense of Hurston against critics who suggest she is not political enough in her writing.