"Plugging holes to create a new kind of fabric" is how W. Paul Coates characterizes his approach to running Black Classic Press, the book publishing and printing company he has owned and operated since 1978. With the purpose of printing books that are "significant and obscure by and about people of African descent," Black Classic has built an impressive list of some forty-four novels and a dozen or so pamphlets. It also offers an alternate perspective on matters of racial inequality, economic injustice, and the history of slavery that, ironically enough, you won't find in the Oprah book club.

Black Classic was preceded by the Black Book, a bookstore that Coates opened on the corner of Pennsylvania and Park Heights Avenues in 1973. As an ex-Black Panther (the head of the Baltimore chapter), Coates' mission was to spread the word one book at time, providing a crossroad for new ideas and empowered African American identity expressed in bricks and mortar. As the bookstore expanded, Coates discovered that essential titles were out of print. Taking on the role of curator in the guise of communitarian, Coates launched Black Classic to ferret out the forgotten titles.

Launching the nascent business with a pamphlet series of out-of-print or hard-to-find short works, Coates found a market for neglected gems like the pointedly polemic poem by Marcus Garvey "The Tragedy of White Injustice." As the company evolved into a full-scale book publisher, Coates employed the "plugging holes" approach, seeking out voices of dissent to integrate into an unwieldy yet evocative mosaic of titles. Twenty-five years later, Black Classic has nine employees, an on-demand printing service, and most importantly, a viable back list the fabric of which represents the fruits of Coates' intuitively cultural approach to picking and choosing what is best.

100 Years of Lynching by Ralph Ginzburg offers unedited newspaper accounts of racially-motivated hangings culled from newspaper archives. Seize the Time is the caustic memoir of Black Panther party founder Bobby Seale, a phase-shifting narrative that reasserts the primacy of African American identity outside the sometimes-toxic heliosphere of present day popular culture. Tropical Dependency is a pure delineation of the pathos of racial hatred written by Lady Lugar, a British colonialist and white slave owner, to justify the supremacy of European economic and social brutality. In all, the Black Classic list floats outside the spectrum of the here and now, offering a literary outsider's perspective built upon the idea that history should be written by the righteous.