What the Negro Wants (The African American Intellectual Heritage)

In 1944, distinguished Howard University historian Rayford W. Logan gathered together essays on the subject “What the Negro Wants” written by fifteen prominent African American intellectuals, including Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Mary McLeod Bethune, A. Philip Randolph, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Roy Wilkins. The outspoken views expressed in the essays shocked even white liberals by their unanimous call for an end to segregation. The publication of What the Negro Wants thus helped set the agenda for the Civil Rights Movement to come. /// This edition includes Rayford Logan’s introduction to the 1969 reprint, a new introduction by Kenneth Janken, and an updated bibliography.