WVU Reprinting Long-lost African American Works

MORGANTOWN, W.Va.  _ West Virginia University Press is reprinting important African American texts that have either gone unnoticed for generations or fallen out of print.

The initiative, “Regenerations: African American Literature and Culture,” is aimed at encouraging regional research into Black history.

To start, WVU Press has reprinted the 1896 novel “Hearts of Gold” by J. McHenry Jones, an activist from Ohio who became principal of the Lincoln School in Wheeling.

Jones spent more than a decade as president of the West Virginia Colored Institute, now West Virginia State University.

The novel challenges the conventional wisdom of the time on a variety of subjects that other writers were unwilling to address, from interracial relationships to forced labor in coal mines.