Reviews

A useful collection of mini-profiles of black American leaders in the struggle for equality, this book is marred by the author's admittedly unscientific attempt to rank his subjects by importance. Salley ( What Color Is Your God? Black Consciousness and the Christian Faith ) places Martin Luther King Jr. first and Frederick Douglass second, but overemphasizes certain leaders of the colonial period: the founders of the Free African Society and the Negro Masonic Order are rated well ahead of Thurgood Marshall and Malcolm X. The profiles are usually fair-minded, but Salley sanitizes a few, ignoring James Baldwin's homosexuality and Louis Farrakhan's alleged anti-Semitism. While Salley includes Bill Cosby, Toni Morrison and Colin Powell, he sometimes lacks a contemporary edge, listing filmmaker Oscar Micheaux but not Spike Lee, playwright Lorraine Hansberry but not August Wilson and academic Kenneth Clark but not Henry Louis Gates Jr. Photos not seen by PW. (Jan.)

Who are the most influential African Americans living and dead? Salley, an educator and writer ( What Color Is Your God? , Citadel, 1988), gives his own answer to that question, ranking his choices by their importance to the growth of African American society. For example, he includes David Walker, author of the antislavery pamphlet Walker's Appeal (1829), Mordecai Johnson, the first black president of Howard University, and writer Maya Angelou but omits poet Gwendolyn Brooks and Virginia Proctor Florence, the first black librarian. The biographies are quite good, as are the quotes by and about each person that accompany each article. Though solid, this work duplicates the material already available in The Negro Almanac (Gale, 1990), Who's Who Among Black Americans, 1992 (Gale, 1991), and Black Leaders of the 20th Century ( LJ 4/1/82). It is recommended for public and academic libraries that are either starting up an African American history reference collection or need access to biographies in a hurry. For libraries that have the references listed above, this may not be a necessary purchase.-- Danna C. Bell-Russel, Marymount Univ. Libs., Arlington, Va.