An innovative contribution to the growing body of research about urban African-American culture in the South, Black Dixie is the first anthology to track the black experience in a single southern city across the entire slavery/post-slavery continuum. It combines the best previously published scholarship about black Houston and little-known contemporary eyewitness accounts of the city with fresh, unpublished essays by historians and social scientists.

Divided into four sections, the book covers a broad range of both time and subjects. The first section analyzes the development of scholarly consciousness and interest in the history of black Houston; slavery in nineteenth-century Houston is covered in the second section; economic and social development in Houston in the era of segregation are looked at in the third section; and segregation, violence, and civil rights in twentieth-century Houston are dealt with in the final section.

Collectively, the contents of Black Dixie utilize the full range of primary sources available to scholars studying the black South. These include such traditional material as newspapers and diaries as well as newer techniques involving quantification and statistical analysis. The editors' remarks relate the individual essays to one another as well as placing them within the context of scholarly literature on the subject. Hence Black Dixie will serve both as a resource and as a model for the study of black urban culture in Texas and throughout the South.

Howard Beeth is associate professor of history at Texas Southern University in Houston, Texas. He received his bachelor's and master's degrees from Temple University and his doctorate from the University of Houston. He was head of the Afro-American Research Collection at the Houston Public Library's Metropolitan Research Center from 1981 to 1987 and has written several articles dealing with various aspects of the South. Cary D. Wintz is professor of history and director of academic computing at Texas Southern University. He received his bachelor's degree from Rice University and his master's and doctoral degrees from Kansas State University. He has written a number of articles on blacks in Houston and is the author of Black Culture and the Harlem Renaissance (Rice University Press, 1988).