These works were the ancient teachers that Black leaders used to hold our nation accountable to standards that we pointed toward but so often failed to uphold. The Black Intellectual Tradition offers back to us all, a shared relationship with our living tradition in the Greco-Roman and Christian classics. There is a shared story that has been largely forgotten: our common heritage in the classics and the liberal arts. This heritage has united, instructed, and inspired us all—slave and free, White and Black—over the few centuries of our history as a nation. As we have in recent years collectively wandered far away from the gracious and firm tutelage of the classics, much has been lost.