Examines the speeches and writings of Frederick Douglass, Booker T Washington, Ida B Wells, W E B Du Bois, Mary McLeod Bethune, Martin Luther King, Jr, and Jesse Jackson to show how black leaders have employed American jeremiad to create a variant that is specifically Afro-American.

Throughout his analysis the author addresses the ebb and flow of optimism about American promise and progress. Concluding with a discussion of the continued presence of black jeremiahs such as Jesse Jackson, Howard-Pitney describes how this rhetoric has been most successful in fomenting social-political reform with regard to civil rights and least successful when advocating basic economic change. David Howard-Pitney is a Lecturer in American History and Studies at San Jose State University.

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Civil Religion and the Anglo-and Afro-American Jeremiads
1. Frederick Douglass's Antebellum Jeremiad against Slavery and Racism
2. The Brief Life of Douglass's "New Nation": From Emancipation-Reconstruction to Returning Declension, 1861-1895
3. The Jeremiad in the Age of Booker T. Washington: Washington versus Ida B. Wells, 1895-1915
4. Great Expectations: W.E.B. Du Bois's Jeremiad in the Progressive Era
5. Mary McLeod Bethune and W.E.B. Du Bois: Rising and Waning Hopes for America at Midcentury
6. Martin Luther King, Jr., and America's Promise in the Second Reconstruction, 1955-1965
7. King's Radical Jeremiad, 1965-1986: American as the "Sick Society"
Conclusion: The Black Jeremiad and the Jackson Phenomenon
Notes
Index