Maps the changing conditions of black political practice and experience from Emancipation to Obama with excursions into the Jim Crow era, Black Power radicalism, and the Reagan revolt. This book includes essays that define historically and conceptually discrete problems affecting black Americans.

Introduction, Adolph Reed Jr., Kenneth W. Warren; Part I Emancipation, Reconstruction, and Retrenchment; Chapter 1 Frederick Douglass's Life and Times, Kenneth W. Warren; Chapter 2 "Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others", Judith Stein; Part II The Jim Crow Era; Chapter 3 How Black "Folk" Survived in the Modern South, William P. Jones; Chapter 4 An Inevitable Drift?, Kenneth W. Warren; Chapter 5 The Educational Alliance and the Urban League in New York, Touré F. Reed; Chapter 6 The Chicago School of Human Ecology and the Ideology of Black Civic Elites, Preston H. Smith II; Chapter 7 "What a Pure, Healthy, Unified Race Can Accomplish", Michele Mitchell; Chapter 8 Black Power Nationalism as Ethnic Pluralism, Dean E. Robinson; Part III The Post-Jim Crow Era; Chapter 9 The Postmodern Moment in Black Literary and Cultural Studies, Madhu Dubey; Chapter 10 The "Color Line" Then and Now, Adolph Reed Jr.; conclusion Conclusion, Adolph Reed Jr., Kenneth W. Warren;