When he is sent home alone for misbehaving in church, Tommy discovers that his house is a station on the Underground Railroad.

Rogers' book was priceless because he was delivering enlightenment and pride, steeped in historical research, to a people too long starved on the lie that they were worth nothing. For African Americans of the Jim Crow era, Rogers' was their first black history teacher. But Rogers was not always shy about embellishing the facts and minimizing ambiguity; neither was he above shock journalism now and then. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. gives us a corrective...