Though not blind to Abraham Lincoln's imperfections, Black Americans long ago laid a heartfelt claim to his legacy. At the same time, they have consciously reshaped the sixteenth president's image for their own social and political ends. Frederick Hord and Matthew D. Norman's anthology explores the complex nature of views on Lincoln through the writings and thought of Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mary McLeod Bethune, Thurgood Marshall, Malcolm X, Gwendolyn Brooks, Barbara Jeanne Fields, Barack Obama, and dozens of others. The selections move from speeches to letters to book excerpts, mapping the changing contours of the bond--emotional and intellectual--between Lincoln and Black Americans over the span of one hundred and fifty years. A comprehensive and valuable reader, Knowing Him by Heart examines Lincoln's still-evolving place in Black American thought.

First published in 1995, I Am Because We Are has been recognized as a major, canon-defining anthology and adopted as a text in a wide variety of college and university courses. Bringing together writings by prominent black thinkers from Africa, the Caribbean, and North America, Fred Lee Hord and Jonathan Scott Lee made the case for a tradition of ""relational humanism"" distinct from the philosophical preoccupations of the West. Over the past twenty years, however, new scholarly research has uncovered other contributions to the discipline now generally known as ""Africana philosophy"" that were not included in the original volume. In this revised and expanded edition, Hord and Lee build on the strengths of the earlier anthology while enriching the selection of readings to bring the text into the twenty-first century. In a new introduction, the editors reflect on the key arguments of the book's central thesis, refining them in light of more recent philosophical discourse. This edition includes important new readings by Kwame Gyekye, Oyèrónké Oy ewùmí, Paget Henry, Sylvia Wynter, Toni Morrison, Charles Mills, and Tommy Curry, as well as extensive suggestions for further reading.