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Community-based oral history projects, often seeking to enhance feelings of local identity and pride, tend to side step more difficult and controversial aspects of a community's history, as interviewer and narrator collude to present the community's best face.

More practically, narrators whose interviews are intended for web publication, with a potential audience of millions, are perhaps more likely to exercise a greater degree of self-censorship than those whose interviews will be placed in an archive, accessible only to scholarly researchers. Personal motives too can color an interview.

This reader collects fourteen influential essays by Herbert Aptheker (1915–2003) on the African American experience. Written with passion and eloquence, they are full of ideas originally dismissed by a white, segregated academy that have now become part of the scholarly mainstream. Covering topics including slave resistance, black abolitionists, Reconstruction, and W. E. B. Du Bois, these essays demonstrate the critical connection between political commitment and the advancement of scholarship, while restoring Aptheker's central place as one of the founding scholars in the development of African American studies.

Herbert Aptheker (July 31, 1915 – March 17, 2003) was an American Marxist historian and political activist. He authored over 50 volumes, mostly in the fields of African American history and general U.S. history, most notably, American Negro Slave Revolts (1943), a classic in the field, and the 7-volume Documentary History of the Negro People. He was a prominent figure in U.S. scholarly discourse since the 1930s.