Gerald Early is the Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters in the African and African American Studies Department at Washington University. His books include Tuxedo Junction: Essays on American Culture; This is Where I Came In: Essays on Black America in the 1960s; and The Culture of Bruising: Essays on Prizefighting, Literature, and Modern American Culture.
Black Americans still embrace the exodus story as the defining trope of their collective experience.