Black in America samples the breadth of nonfiction writing on African American experiences in the United States from the eighteenth century to the present. The anthology emphasizes twenty-first-century authors such as Ta-Nehisi Coates, Claudia Rankine, and Roxane Gay, but a substantial selection of important earlier writers--from Phillis Wheatley and Olaudah Equiano, through Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass, to James Baldwin and Audre Lorde--is also included.