Light Ahead for the Negro, by Edward A. Johnson (1904)

Conversations with a young nurse reveal the steps that have brought this about: the initially modest changes of the "absence of slurs" directed toward Black Americans in media and the proliferation of racially mixed labor unions, then a radical overhaul of the agricultural industry of the South and, finally, in a lovely display of pre-Orwellian optimism, the abolition of Congress for a government run by "bureaus" and "departments." Even the role of President has been replaced with an Executive Department.

Johnson presents a remarkable figure in American letters. Born into slavery in 1860, he went on to become a politician, attorney, scholar, author, and activist, and the first African American to be elected to the New York Legislature. Light Ahead for the Negro may be read within a tradition of early African-American utopian fiction, joining Pauline Hopkins's "Of One Blood" (1902) and W.E.B. Du Bois's later "The Comet" (1920) as works that imagined the place of race in an America yet-to-come. This tradition challenged works like King Wallace's The Next War: A Prediction (1892) in a time when such matters as interracial marriage and the ability to vote arguably constitued "science fictions" in their own right.

—Phoenix Alexander