Frank J. Webb, an African American born and raised in antebellum Philadelphia, worked during the late 1820s for Freedom's Journal, the first newspaper published by African Americans, and was a regular contributor to The New Era: A Colored American National Journal in the early 1870s. Robert Reid-Pharr is an assistant professor of English at the Johns Hopkins University.

That this American classic does not occupy a prominent place in the literary canon is not really a mystery, though it is a shame. Its subject is not the almost invisible flaw in a golden bowl carved from pristine crystal, but the visible fracture in our American ideal; its scarlet letter is the color of our skin. -- Jamaica Kincaid O The Oprah Magazine

Frank J. Webb, an African American born and raised in antebellum Philadelphia, worked during the late 1820s for Freedom's Journal, the first newspaper published by African Americans, and was a regular contributor to The New Era: A Colored American National Journal in the early 1870s. Robert Reid-Pharr is an assistant professor of English at the Johns Hopkins University.

That this American classic does not occupy a prominent place in the literary canon is not really a mystery, though it is a shame. Its subject is not the almost invisible flaw in a golden bowl carved from pristine crystal, but the visible fracture in our American ideal; its scarlet letter is the color of our skin. -- Jamaica Kincaid O The Oprah Magazine

Frank J. Webb, an African American born and raised in antebellum Philadelphia, worked during the late 1820s for Freedom's Journal, the first newspaper published by African Americans, and was a regular contributor to The New Era: A Colored American National Journal in the early 1870s. Robert Reid-Pharr is an assistant professor of English at the Johns Hopkins University.

That this American classic does not occupy a prominent place in the literary canon is not really a mystery, though it is a shame. Its subject is not the almost invisible flaw in a golden bowl carved from pristine crystal, but the visible fracture in our American ideal; its scarlet letter is the color of our skin. -- Jamaica Kincaid O The Oprah Magazine