Blind Persistence: The History of the Before Columbus Foundation

The Before Columbus Foundation, founded in 1976 by Ishmael Reed and others, is "dedicated to the promotion and dissemination of contemporary American multicultural literature." It operates on the premise that storytelling traditions existed thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans, which counters the myth that storytelling begins with the Puritan settlement. Puritans weren’ t even the first Europeans to arrive in North America. It founded the American Book Awards in 1978, which ha...