This is the 30th-anniversary edition of the book published in 2007; the original was published in 1977. It's wonderful to have access to this edition because it includes a long new preface written by the author to put the book in context, explaining how he came to write the book and how it was deeply connected to the Civil Rights struggles of the 1960s, and also how he immersed himself in the study of anthropology and, specifically, folklore (!!!) in order to write the book.
Levine completed the preface in September of 2006, and he died in October of that same year, at the too young age of 73. You can read about his life and career at Wikipedia. You can also read the tribute to him in the New York Times: Lawrence W. Levine, 73, Historian and Multiculturalist, Dies; here's an excerpt:
Mr. Levine’s most critically acclaimed work was probably “Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom” (1977). In it, he examined religion, music, humor, folk tales and superstitions to show how slaves developed their own culture within the confines of slavery. He said that jokes told by slaves represented an effort to laugh even during their trials.
You can also find the original edition of the book, plus more books by Levine at the Archive too:
This book had a huge impact on me when I read it back when I first started working on the Joel Chandler Harris corpus of stories, and this 30th-anniversary edition was the one that I read also, so I was so glad to see that it is available at the Archive. Highly recommended!
by Lawrence Levine
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