Black Leaders of the Twentieth Century

For this, their first collaborative work, two of the leading authorities on black history in America have joined with other top scholars in the field to create an essential volume on the major achievements of fifteen twentieth-century black leaders - nationalists and integrationists, the charismatic and the bureaucratic, men and women who came from diverse walks of life including religion, labor, business, the professions, and the arts. These biographical studies, all but one written expressly for this volume, are on Martin Luther King, Jr., by David L. Lewis; Malcolm X by Peter Goldman; Booker T. Washington by Louis R. Harlan; W.E. B. Du Bois by Elliott Rudwick; A. Philip Randolph by Benjamin Quarles; Mary McLeod Bethune by B. Joyce Ross; T. Thomas Fortune by Emma Lou Thornbrough; Marcus Garve by Lawrence W. Levine; Charles Hamilton Houston by Genna Rae McNeil; James Welson Johnson by Eugen Levy; Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., by Martin Kilson; Charles Clinton Spaulding by Walter Weare; Mabel K. Staupers by Darlene Clark Hine; Ida B. Wells-Barnett by Thomas C. Holt; and Whitney M. Young, Jr., by Nancy J. Weiss. Comprehensive yet concise, Black Leaders is that rare book which will appeal as strongly to the general reader as to the specialist and which should become an integral part of all library collections.''This is a remarkable book. At is best is goes far beyond the existing literature. I am astounded by what some of the authors have been able to do in so few pages. Harlan's essay on Washington is superb and gives us a glimpse of where he will be going in the second volume of his Booker T. Washington biography. Quarles's Randolph is an elegant portrayal which captures the essence of Randolph's temperament while Lewis's King offers the best balance on King that I have read. The Rudwick, Kilson, and Goldman pieces are superb analytically, exploring both the individual and the context of the times. Nearly all address the essential questions relating to leadership. In other words, the collection works unusually well as a book, something rarely achieved in edited works of this kind.''-David M. Katzman, author of Before the Ghetto