Students explore their personal identities, then analyze primary sources to examine the tension experienced by African Americans as they struggled to establish a vibrant and meaningful identity based on the promises of liberty and equality in the midst of a society that was ambivalent towards them and sought to impose an inferior definition upon them. After, students choose a subject from one primary source and bring this speaker into the present to talk with the class about his or her observation of today's world compared with his or her own.