The rich legacy of one hundred years of black critical thought, creative expression, and religious reflection comes together in Barbara Holmes's imagined conversation among the elders about the shape and conditions of black liberation. Holmes has defined key issues in black liberation and envisions a meeting of the ancestors assembled "on the other side" to discuss them. Imagine such conversations among Martin Luther King Jr. and W.E.B. DuBois and Fannie Lou Hamer, for example. Or between Barbara Jordan and Thurgood Marshall on what freedom looks like in relation to law and politics. Or between Audre Lorde and George Washington Carver on freedom in the body; or among Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Tupac Shakur on art, culture, and the liberation of the mind. Holmes's conversational harvesting of the commitments and insights of African American justice leaders, prophetic artists, and visionaries creates a unique resource for understanding the luminaries of liberation and an important reflection on the task at hand. Book jacket.