Unprecedented in scope and approach, this collection explores debates about the signal issues of the black experience in the United States, from Phillis Wheatley in the late eighteenth century to Barack Obama in the present. Over 270 primary texts--essays, speeches, petitions, editorials, newspaper and journal articles, manifestos, political cartoons, plays, advertisements, and photographs--map the controversies surrounding emigration and migration, black nationalism and separatism, strategies for change, the relationship between race and gender, the existence of a black aesthetic and responsibilities of black artists, and the role of religion in the civil rights struggle, among other topics. Boxed sections throughout the book focus on a controversy at a specific point in time, such as Ebonics, the Million Man March, or the competing artistic philosophies of Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston. Henry Louis Gates Jr."s introduction usefully clarifies and complicates the role of these debates--many ongoing, all multisided---in African American history and present-day cultural and political life.