No issue, of course, raises deeper questions about the founders' commitment to liberty and self-government than slavery. Critics of the Founding Fathers ask how can we take seriously anything said by Jefferson, Madison, and their contemporaries on the subject of liberty and democracy when these men and many of their countrymen were denying liberty and self-government to some hundreds of thousands of black Americans. Common today is the view that "the founders excluded the Negroes …showed first 75 words of 387 total…

…showed last 75 words of 387 total…progressed in making a civil society together." Yet race relations remain a serious problem for American democracy. For guidance into how the two races can be brought into a genuine community of citizens, Storing turns to the thought of Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington, whose teachings he contrasts with those of W. E. B. Du Bois, the inspiration for much of black political thought in the United States in the early and mid-twentieth century.