This reader collects fourteen influential essays by Herbert Aptheker (1915–2003) on the African American experience. Written with passion and eloquence, they are full of ideas originally dismissed by a white, segregated academy that have now become part of the scholarly mainstream. Covering topics including slave resistance, black abolitionists, Reconstruction, and W. E. B. Du Bois, these essays demonstrate the critical connection between political commitment and the advancement of scholarship, while restoring Aptheker's central place as one of the founding scholars in the development of African American studies.