CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Sonic Color Line and the Listening Ear

1.  The Word, the Sound, and the Listening Ear: Listening to the Sonic Color Line in Frederick Douglass’s 1845 Narrative and Harriet Jacobs’s 1861 Incidents

2.  Performing the Sonic Color Line in the Antebellum North: The Swedish Nightingale and the Black Swan

3.  Preserving “Quare Sounds,” Conserving the “Dark Past”: The Jubilee Singers and Charles Chesnutt Reconstruct the Sonic Color Line

4.  “A Voice to Match All That”: Lead Belly, Richard Wright, and Lynching’s Soundtrack

5.  Broadcasting Race: Lena Horne, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Ann Petry

Afterword

Notes

Index

About the Author