Coates pages 1-71.

Coates writes of how unfamiliar he was with the black intellectual titans except for the obvious ones. Similarly, he writes of how the full panoply of black experience was never presented to him: “Everyone of any import, from Jesus to George Washington, was white… the history books… spoke of black people only as sentimental ‘firsts’… Serious history was the West, and the West was white” (43).