This essential collection comprises a trio of the most influential African-American writings of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Exploring such themes as slavery and its abolition, the struggle for equality, and the impassioned rise from bondage to international recognition, each landmark book is a founding work in the civil rights literature of America.Included here are Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery, W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk, and Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. These stirring accounts, significant testaments to our nation's past together in one volume, belong on the bookshelves of everyone interested in African-American history.