Cultural Studies.

The American jeremiad is a rhetoric of indignation, expressing deep dissatisfaction and challenging the nation to reform. David Howard-Pitney examines the speeches and writings of Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells, W. E. B. Du Bois, Mary McLeod Bethune, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Jesse Jackson to show how Black leaders have employed this rhetoric of social prophecy and criticism to create a variant that is specifically Afro-American.