First published in 1903, this eloquent collection of essays exposed the magnitude of racism in our society. The book endures today as a classic document of American social and political history: a manifesto that has influenced generations with its transcendent vision for change.

David W. Blight is associate professor of history and black studies at Amherst College. He is the author of Frederick Douglass Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee (1989) and essays on abolitionism, the Civil War, and American historical memory. He is the editor of the Bedford edition of the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1993).

Robert Gooding-Williams is George Lyman Crosby 1896 Professor of Philosophy and professor of black studies at Amherst College. He is the editor of Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising (1993) and the author of essays on Frederick Nietzxche, Du Bois, multiculturalism, and the representation of race in film.