Light Ahead for the Negro

Light Ahead for the Negro (1904) is a novel by Edward A. Johnson. Written while Johnson was working as an assistant U. S. Attorney in North Carolina, the novel is a groundbreaking work of speculative fiction and Afrofuturism from a pioneering African American politician and lawyer. “I glanced through the floor but the earth was almost indistinguishable, and was disappearing rapidly. There was absolutely nothing that I could do. I looked up again at my friend, who was clambering up rather clumsily, I remember thinking at the moment. […] Involuntarily, I closed my eyes for a moment. When I opened them again, he was gone! My feelings were indescribable. I commenced to lose consciousness, owing to the altitude and the ship was ascending more rapidly every moment. Finally I became as one dead.” The son of an abolitionist applies to work at a school for African American children in Georgia. In June 1906, he joins a wealthy friend on a flight from New York City to Mexico, boarding an experimental airship at a West 59th Street pier. When an instrument failure sends them spiraling into the upper atmosphere, the narrator loses consciousness. One hundred years later, he lands on a lawn in Georgia, awakening to discover a utopian society in which anti-blackness has been completely eradicated. This edition of Edward A. Johnson’s Light Ahead for the Negro is a classic work of African American literature reimagined for modern readers.

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