Unprecedented in scope and approach, this primary-text reader offers a fresh and flexible framework for exploring signal issues of the black experience in the United States. With voices ranging from Phillis Wheatley in the late eighteenth century to Barack Obama in the twenty-first, Call and Response presents multiple perspectives on key controversies that probe the fundamental relationship between race and democracy. Class-tested in Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s groundbreaking introductory course at Harvard, Call and Response is an important and innovative new core reader for African American Studies and African American History courses.