Like Bearden’s art, Gilmore’s biography pulses with energy and will resonate with readers of Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration.
These letters provide telling examples of the ways that Black Americans, free and enslaved, proactively and persistently sought liberty by word and deed and laid claim to the rights and responsibilities of citizenship: a truth as pertinent and pressing in the 21st century as during Lincoln’s day.