ABSTRACT
The study of African American leadership has long been a subject of im portance to historians and social scientists (see Walters and Johnson, 1999 for a recent bibliography, and Walters and Smith, 1999). A lacuna in the extensive historical and social science scholarship is that there has never been an attempt to systematically compare and rank black leaders in terms of the individuals impact on the black freedom struggle. In 1982 and 1988 the historians August Meier, Leon Litwack, and John Hope Franklin edited two volumes of essays on important black leaders of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (see Table 1). But, they did not seek to rank the individuals in terms of their significance or “greatness” and the criteria of selection for both volumes was idiosyncratic depending on the importance and significance of the individual but also on the availability of contributors to write the papers. (Franklin and Meier, 1982; Litwack and Meier, 1988). 1 Thus, there were some obvious omissions, for example, Franklin and Meier mention Walter White, Paul Robeson, William Monroe Trotter, Mordicai Johnson, and Father Divine as important twentieth-century leaders not included. And from Litwack and Meier’s list of seventeen nineteenth-century leaders the most obvious omissions are David Walker/whose Appeal was enormously influential at the time it was published in 1831 (its publication may have led to his murder) and subsequently, and Maria B. Stewart, the feminist and abolitionist writer and lecturer.
