A Muslim scholar from Senegal. Twenty-five years studying the Qur’an in Arabic. Captured at thirty-seven on the last legal slave ship to Charleston. A month-long run from a South Carolina rice planter. A jail cell in Fayetteville with a fireplace and a piece of coal. He covered the walls with Arabic. He kept writing for fifty-six years — letters, prayers, an autobiography, eighteen surviving manuscripts in a language nobody around him could read. His enslavers said he had become a contented Christian. Newspapers wrote his obituary as a model convert. The 1925 Harvard-trained editor who first published his autobiography wanted to cut the chapter of the Qur’an Omar had placed at the front, deeming it not autobiographical. He missed what the writer had done. Omar ibn Said wrote the only Arabic autobiography by an enslaved person in American history, framed it with the Qur’anic chapter on God’s exclusive Sovereignty over human beings, and laid down a record his captors could not read and history could not erase. Omar ibn Said needs to be remembered.