In 1956, twenty years before Alex Haley's Roots (1976) fired the imagination of black and white Americans as never before, to the importance of tracing genealogical heritage, Pauli Murray published Proud Shoes: The Story of An American Family, a book that demonstrated her awareness of how vital the past is as a means of understanding the present and for devising criteria to guide the future. Nor was the concept new to black Americans, for the headnote to Murray's book comes from the diary of her grandfather, Robert G.Fitzgerald, and reveals his consciousness of it almost a full century before her book. On 26 July 1867 he wrote: "The past is the key to the present and the mirror of the future, therefore, let us adopt as a rule, to judge the future by the history of the past, and having the key to past experience, let us open the door to...