Articles

Born in 1880 in East Texas, educator and author Lillian Horace stated her ambitions at a young age: "to read—to unite—to teach—to possess no fear of death." Her first novel, 1916’s Five Generations Hence, was a utopian account of Black Americans escaping the Jim Crow South through migration to Africa. The book was ahead of its time, predicting both Marcus Garvey’s popular emigration movement and the Afrofuturism of Black science fiction. Horace's works were not widely distributed in her lifetime, and it was decades before scholars uncovered the rich creative life of this revered public figure. Horace is now recognized as Texas’s first Black woman novelist. More»