A collection of approximately forty portraits with mini biographies of Maryland's extraordinary African American men and women. Included are well known luminaries Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, "Baby Joe" Gans, Leon Day, Lillie Carroll Jackson, and Thurgood Marshall and equally brave yet not-so-famous Marylanders such as Ann Weems, a fifteen-year-old runaway slave, author Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, physician Louise Young, and Harry Cummings, the first African American to hold public office in Baltimore City.

An introductory high school textbook surveying the history of Maryland, with emphasis on the blacks, women, immigrants, and other special groups contributing to the variety of its population.