No one African American artist contributed more work to be used as illustrations for book jackets or record sleeves than Charles White. His extraordinary drawings, resonating as they did with incredible levels of sensitivity, empathy, creativity and technical skill, made White something of a go-to artist for a number of publishers. White's work was used to illustrate the cover of Black History: A Reappraisal, Edited with Commentary by Melvin Drimmer - Doubleday & Co., Inc., Garden City, New York, 1968.
The 1960s and early 1970s saw an incredible range of books such as this one being published, responding as they did to the urgency and gravity of the times. Drimmer's book consisted of essays from leading contemporary historians, journalists, and other contributors on Black history in the United States from its beginnings in colonial times to the late 1960s. This book presents the foremost interpretations of African Americans in American history, each prefaced by an analysis of the historical events surrounding the period covered. The book contains footnotes, bibliography, and an index. The book's most highly distinguished contributor was W.E.B. Du Bois (incidentally, the book was published during the year marking the centenary of Du Bois's birth, though the great man had died some five years earlier, in 1963. Other contributors included Basil Davidson, Benjamin Quarles, E. Franklin Frazier, John Hope Franklin, August Meier, E. David Cronon, and Eric Lincoln. Such contributors had distinguished themselves over the course of their careers to furthering and disseminating research and scholarship on Black History, making the book a most impressive undertaking. Du Bois provided a Prologue "Of Our Spiritual Strivings", which was followed by six sections: Africa and the Beginnings, Slavery Takes Root in the Americas, The Negro Response, The Struggle for Freedom, Patterns of Negro Life and Thought, 1880-1930, and finally, Toward a Second Reconstruction, 1933 - . This final section underlined the magnitude and gravity of the moment, in that the present-day period was framed as having started in the early 1930s, and was ongoing. It was, additionally and for good measure, cast as a 'Second Reconstruction.'
The jacket illustration was UHURU, Chinese Ink, 1964