Part 1 of 12 in the unabridged audiobook of Chancellor Williams’ landmark study of African history. This opening installment presents the book’s dedication, preface, and framing question — “What became of the Black people of Sumer?” — and lays out Williams’ comparative method for tracing the rise and decline of Black civilizations across six thousand years. Williams, a historian and sociologist, wrote the work as a corrective to Eurocentric scholarship, drawing on decades of his own field study across Africa. For the readers of Black Boys In Crisis, it is a foundational text on African self-knowledge, cultural memory, and the long view of Black history that grounds the education of young Black men.