The books piled up on the coffee table until they threatened to block the view of my living room. Fifty-three books, twenty thousand pages of African-American history, politics, fiction, essays, and poetry. It was the first day of June 1996, and I had to read them all by September 3rd. On that day, seven eager young Black men and women would show up at New Africa House on the University of Massachusetts campus, ready to start a demanding new doctoral program in Afro-American Studies. We would require them in the first year to read all fifty-three books and write a paper on each one. They would look to me as Graduate Program Director for guidance, encouragement, and wisdom, and there I sat, knowing next to nothing about the history, the trials, the triumphs, the artistic creations, the experiences of Black folk in America.

My field was Philosophy, not Afro-Am, and at that moment, I probably knew less about the discipline of Afro-American Studies than one of our undergraduate majors. I thought that my politics were impeccable, my commitments clear. I had managed an anti-apartheid organization of Harvard graduates for two years, and for the past six years, I had run a little one-man scholarship organization raising money for poor Black university students in South Africa. I had picketed Woolworth's in the sixties, supporting the young Black students who started the modern Civil Rights Movement with their sit-in in Greensboro. But I knew virtually nothing about slavery, Reconstruction, share-cropping, Black Codes, Jim Crow, the Harlem Renaissance, the World War I riots, or the Black Arts Movement.

I am a slow, methodical reader, incapable of skimming lightly through a book. This is fine if you are going to be a philosopher. Close reading of a small number of famous texts is what philosophers do. I often pointed out to my students during my days as a Professor of Philosophy that you could get a pretty fair education as a student of philosophy by mastering perhaps twenty-five or thirty texts from the Western tradition. Indeed, if you were willing to treat all of Plato's Dialogues as one enormous book, you could probably bring the list down to twenty titles. So the mountain of volumes awaiting me was daunting indeed. It was going to be a long summer.