The Project on the History of Black Writing was founded by Dr. Maryemma Graham in 1983 at the University of Mississippi-Oxford as the Afro-American Novel Project. It was organized to compile a comprehensive bibliography of largely neglected and out-of-print novels published by African American authors and to provide a study guide for both teachers and students to facilitate the use of African American texts in the classroom. This guide first appeared in 1986 and was revised later.

The project moved to Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts in 1989, becoming affiliated with the W.E.B. DuBois Institute at Harvard University and operating under a three-year grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. At this point it also was renamed to become the Project on the History of Black Writing (HBW).

In 1996 the HBW became affiliated with the Smithsonian Museum of American History and developed a prototype electronic version of the full texts of works collected by the HBW.

In 1998 the project moved to the University of Kansas in Lawrence, where it has remained since. Projects have included the 2002 national conference on the centennial of Langston Hughes' birth, held at the KU campus, and poetry circles held around the country in which groups met to discuss the life and works of Hughes.

The Project on the History of Black Writing continues to be committed to recovering fugitive texts written by African Americans, providing innovative scholarship in the fields of book history and digital humanities, providing public literacy programming, and professional development and transforming curriculum.

James Mercer Langston Hughes was born in 1901 and passed away on May 22, 1967. He was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist from Joplin, Missouri who spent several years as a child living with his grandmother in Lawrence, Kansas. One of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form called jazz poetry, Hughes is best known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance in New York City.

The Langston Hughes National Poetry Project, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities, was organized by Doctor Maryemma Graham and Doctor Doretha Williams of the University of Kansas English Department on the centennial of Hughes' birth to celebrate the life and works of Langston Hughes and expand coversations about Langston's works and African-American literature.

The project recruited public libraries, cultural centers, writers' groups, educational institutions, bookstores, corporate offices, housing developments, and churches as well as internationally recognized poets and scholars, to become a part of a national effort to extend the legacy of Langston Hughes. A major component of the project was a national conference on Langston Hughes that took place on the University of Kansas campus in 2002.