August Meier is Professor Emeritus of History at Kent State University. He is the author of Negro Thought in America, 1880–1915, a coauthor, with Elliott Rudwick, of From Plantation to Ghetto and Black History and the Historical Profession, and a coeditor, with John Hope Franklin, of Black Leaders of the Twentieth Century. The late Elliott Rudwick was a professor of history and sociology at Kent State University. His books include From Plantation to Ghetto and W. E. B. Du Bois: A Study in Minority Group Leadership.David Levering Lewis is Martin Luther King, Jr., University Professor at Rutgers and the winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Bancroft Prize, the Francis Parkman Award, and the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award for W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race.

"Meier and Rudwick's intellectual passion, professional integrity, and almost manic involvement in virtually every aspect of their academic specialty were of inestimable value to the coming of age of African American history." -- from the foreword