Born enslaved in Maryland, Henry Highland Garnet escaped with his family via the Underground Railroad to New York City and went on to become a major voice in Black abolitionism. He led organizations that confronted kidnappers and traders preying on Black New Yorkers, and he caused a sensation in 1843 by publicly advocating for armed Black resistance to slavery. Despite a painful disability, Garnet became renowned as a masterful orator, pastored several important Black churches, and was a fixture at Black political conventions. He and his rival Frederick Douglass were frequently cited as the most famous Black men in the United States. He crystallized the role of an activist clergyman, anticipating Martin Luther King Jr.’s social gospel. Laying the groundwork for the Black nationalism of Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X, he also became an advocate of African emigration and was eventually appointed an ambassador to Liberia, where he died. In this book — the first biography of Garnet in fifty years — the eminent Graham Russell Gao Hodges reveals Garnet’s unflinching defense of Black civil rights and his influential thinking about building Black communities, ideas that continue to reverberate in our debates around race and society.