1. Yosef Afredo Antonio ben-Jochannan -- 2. Edward Wilmot Blyden -- 3. Alexander Crummell -- 4. Martin Robinson Delany -- 5. Frederick Douglass -- 6. Marcus Mosiah Garvey -- 7. Nicolás Guillén -- 8. Alain LeRoy Locke -- 9. Booker T. (Taliaferro) Washington -- 10. Ida Bell Wells-Barnett -- 11. Richard Wright.

This book argues that just as the ideas of Pan-Africanism birthed by Henry Sylvester-Williams and others in the late 1800s and Negritude ushered by Aimé Césaire and others in the early 1900s emboldened many major Black thinkers to push for independence across Africa, so will these early thinkers’ ideas help in the building of a new Africa. The various chapters explore the proposition that the thoughts of early great Diaspora Black thinkers are still wellsprings of tenets that can be used to build a new Africa. The chapters examine how these thinkers conceptualized Africa in their works, with the main objective of delineating their conceptualizations to generate suggestions on how to build a new Africa.