October 22, 1999

Journal Examines 'Communal Literacy' of Early Black Literary Societies; 2 Top U.S. Medical Journals Are Now Edited by Women

Book publishers, we hear, are finally discovering that black people read, and are eager to follow on the success of novels like Terry McMillan's Waiting to Exhale and How Stella Got Her Groove Back.

But reading is not exactly a novel idea among African Americans. As early as the 1820s, free blacks in the North formed literary societies to read newspapers and journals as well as books, writes Elizabeth McHenry in the new issue of the journal Callaloo. Members

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