The Gathering Storm documents four decades of intense and often violent struggle to end slavery and establish rights for blacks, both free and enslaved, in the United States. It is a tale of remarkable achievements and stunning setbacks, of courageous figures who fought and often died to obtain liberty for themselves and their descendants: Richard Allen, founder of the Free African Society and of the first independent black church in America; merchant-seaman Paul Cuffe and editor John Russwurm, proponents of the colonization movement, which sought to resettle free American blacks in West Africa; Gabriel Prosser and Denmark Vesey, whose planned slave uprisings rocked the complacency of proslavery factions; and David Walker, an African-American firebrand whose Appeal of 1829 urged violent revolt and eerily presaged the country's bloody Civil War.
