  Worthy of critical exploration in the case of these figures: the extent to which, and on what terms, each of them embraced (assimilated) prevailing European and Euro-American conceptions of civilization and the processes and conditions, states of character in particular, by which a person or people could be said to be “civilized.” It is apparent in their writings and the logic of their missionary work, in other lands as well as within the United States, that neither figure accepted the long-prevailing arguments that the Negro race was inherently and ineradicably inferior. To the contrary, close scrutiny of their articulations will reveal that each was convinced that the civilizational inferiority of continental Africans, and of the ignorant, brutally constrained Negroes of deficient character in the United States, was due to conditions of deprivation fostered by the enslavement and racism perpetrated by White people. At the core of the missionary work of these men, and of many of their female and male contemporaries and successors, including persons who worked at “uplifting” enslaved and freedpersons in the United States, was a principled and dedicated commitment to well-reasoned and forcefully articulated belief in the God-given humanity and inherent worth of persons of the Negro race, and fervent and equally dedicated belief in the ameliorative and progressive benefits of education and racial independence. And each of these seminal figures took himself or herself as a living example of the actualization of the potentiality for substantial, qualitative development and advancement by Negroes, contrary to the characterizations of the race by those who rationalized and otherwise sought to justify enslavement and constrictions of the range of possibilities for Negro development. The articulations of a significant number of such persons have been preserved in the vast body of writings contending with enslavement, with aspirations and quests for freedom and justice, with what a constitutionally democratic and multiracial United States of America ought to be in order to include Coloured people as full citizens and fully respected human beings. Theirs are, indeed, philosophizings born of struggles.