Using an interdisciplinary approach, this book argues that American artistry in the 1960s can be understood as one of the most vital and compelling interrogations of modernity. James C. Hall finds that the legacy of slavery and the resistance to it have by necessity made African Americans among the most incisive critics and celebrants of the Enlightenment inheritance. Focusing on the work of six individuals—Robert Hayden, William Demby, Paule Marshall, John Coltrane, Romare Bearden, and W.E.B. DuBois—Mercy, Mercy Me seeks to recover an American tradition of evaluating the "dialectic of the Enlightenment."