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.
