This volume of writings by Black founders takes its place not only alongside the canonical volumes of founding era history and literature, but at the core of the long and still-evolving tradition of African American history and culture. During the 1850s, arguably the darkest decade in our country’s political history, the Boston Transcendentalist Theodore Parker gave Americans a hopeful vision for the future. Speaking of what he called “the moral universe,” he said that its “arc is a long one . . . But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice. Things refuse to be mismanaged long. Jefferson trembled when he thought of slavery and remembered that God is just.” A century later, in the midst of the civil rights struggle that would cost him his life, Martin Luther King, Jr., embraced and repeated in speech after speech the same hopeful idea about the future of America. Days before his assassination in 1968, King included in his sermon at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., his uplifting refrain, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Now in this book, by restoring to view these long-lost texts, we can see that an early force propelling that moral arc forward were the Black writers of the founding era.
—James Basker, Black Writers of the Founding Era (Introduction, page )