Throughout the history of the United States, African Americans have offered alternative visions of their nation's future and alternative definitions of their nation's progress. Not limited to reforming the worst social ills, these discourses have called for a fundamental restructuring of our political, economic, and social relations. Jupiter Hammon, the aged slave, preacher, and poet of Colonial New York, preceded the young Phyllis Wheatley in offering a distinctly African reproach of bondage. After the American Revolution, Africans established the foundations of black nationalism and separatism. In the decades that followed, black Americans were central players in organizing anti-slavery societies in Northern cities, and providing abolitionism with a coherent critique of bondage. Boston's David Walker was killed for publishing his Appeal to the Coloured Citizens. Frederick Douglass emerged as the most famous man in America because of his involvement in an international assault on servitude. Black men and women took up arms against the Confederacy to destroy slavery, and then did the same against the United States to preserve the victories of Reconstruction. Interestingly, in the twentieth century, leaders like Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey, Paul Robeson, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. borrowed on centuries-old social traditions to answer the racial dilemmas of the nation. The thread of continuity was provided by a radical tradition through which African Americans cultivated and passed on a legacy of social resistance. Evaluation will be based on class participation, one essay, a midterm and a final exam. Group A