Describes his personal experience of having to work to rise up from the position of a slave child during the Civil War, to the difficulties and obstacles he overcame to get an education at the new Hampton Institute, to his work establishing vocational schools--most notably the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama--to help black people and other disadvantaged minorities learn useful, marketable skills and work to pull themselves, as a race, up by the bootstraps....

This edition includes a modern introduction and a list of suggested further reading.Army Life in a Black Regiment is a riveting and empathetic account of the lessons learned from an encounter between a New England intellectual and nearly a thousand newly freed slaves. In the fall of 1862, Thomas Wentworth Higginson was asked to take command of the 1st Regiment of South Carolina Volunteers, and he immediately understood the significance of the experiment...

First published in 1958, this novel tells the story of Okonkwo, the leader of an Igbo (Ibo) community who is banished for accidentally killing a clansman. The novel covers the seven years of his exile to his return, providing an inside view of the intrusion of white missionaries and colonial government into tribal Igbo society in the 1890s.

The day Walter White was buried in 1955 the New York Times called him "the nearest approach to a national leader of American Negroes since Booker T. Washington." For more than two decades, White, as secretary of the NAACP, was perhaps the nation's most visible and most powerful African-American leader. He won passage of a federal anti-lynching law, hosted one of the premier salons of the Harlem Renaissance, created the legal strategy that led to Brown...

W.E.B. Du Bois was one of the most prolific African-American authors, scholars, and leaders of the twentieth century. In this book, Alexander traces the development of Du Bois' thought over time.

Madam C. J. Walker--reputed to be Americas first self-made woman millionaire--has long been celebrated for her rags-to-riches story. Born to former slaves in the Louisiana Delta in the aftermath of the Civil War, married at fourteen, and widowed at twenty, Walker spent the first decades of her life as a laundress, laboring in conditions that paralleled the lives of countless poor and working-class African American women. By the time of her death in...