The History of Black America
African Past
to
the Civil War
Golden Age of Africa
Contrary to widespread misinformation, the history of black Americans does not begin with their arrival in the New World on slave ships. It has its true beginning in remotest antiquity on their ancestral continent, Africa. Recent archaeological findings identify Africa not only as the source of much of Western culture but as the cradle of mankind…
Slave Trade
One of the most important events in shaping modern history was the African slave trade. The institution of slavery, which has existed throughout the ages in one form or another among peoples of all races, reached unprecedented dimensions following the penetration of Africa by Europeans in the fifteenth century…
Arrival
The history of the black man in British America began__harmlessly enough__with the unscheduled arrival of a Dutch man-of-war at the newly established settlement of Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619, a year before the Mayflower dropped anchor at Plymouth Rock. Among its cargo were twenty blacks of undetermined origin and status whom the captain turned over to the colonists in exchange for food and other necessities…
Revolutionary War
The contradiction of slavery within a nation preparing to wage war in in defense of “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness,” was not lost on the country’s great patriots, nor__for that matter__ on the slaves. Thomas Jefferson, himself a slave-owner with second thoughts, wrote a paragraph into one of the early drafts of the Declaration of Independence, denouncing England’s King George III for promoting slavery…
Blacks and Native Americans
Few aspects of American History are more deserving of historians’ attention__yet few have been more neglected by them__than the encounters of the black man and the Native American, the two major victims in the monumental tragedy perpetrated by the white man during his conquest of North America. In this encounter, Blacks and Native Americans interacted in a multitude of ways__most frequently as allies and collaborators against the common oppressor, but occasionally as adversaries, the often unwitting agents of the white man’s power politics…
Slavery
With the invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney in 1793, the stage was set for the establishment of the most exploitative and degrading social system ever forced upon one race by another. This system, whose purpose was to ensure whites the unencumbered enjoyment of vast profits, depended for its smooth operation on the total suppression and denial of black people’s humanity. Toward this end, an elaborate set of legal codes was adopted by the various state legislatures and individual cities and communities, each designed to impress upon the slaves the utter futility of any thought__not to mention attempt__ of ever rising above their status as powerless and voiceless pieces of merchandise…
Free Blacks
Resistance
Slavery was never secure in America. Its existence depended on the cultural and physical repression of blacks and whites, both of which group suffered for the benefit of a slaveholding minority. Book burning and other attempts at thought control became common in the American South during the nineteenth century. Slavery fostered self-delusion, hypocrisy, and violence. It perverted religion and the law. The slave system, in addition to being morally corrupt, was economically detrimental to the majority of Southerners, a fact that the slaveholders had to hide from the majority at any cost…
Civil War
No war has affected the political nature and history of America more than the Civil War. During a period of grave internal strife over the issue of slavery, when it seemed that the nation would dissolve into weak and defenseless units, the four-year Civil War (April 12, 1861, to April 8, 1865) unified the country and created conditions leading to the emancipation of the slaves.
"Morning came at last and a sad morning it was. The flags that floated so gaily yesterday now were draped in black, and hung in silent folds at half-mast. The President was dead, and a nation was mourning for him. Every house was draped in black, and every face wore a solemn look. People spoke in subdued tones, and glided whisperingly, wonderingly, silently about the streets."
"…Barely had blacks begun to enjoy freedom when they were stunned by the death of President Abraham Lincoln. At Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C., at 10 p.m., April 14, he was shot by John Wilkes Booth, a rebel sympathizer. Lincoln died at 7:30 a.m. the following day.
Thousands of blacks were among the more than one million Americans who either attended the president’s wake or viewed his funeral train as it carried his body from Washington to Springfield, Illinois. Elizabeth Keckly, Mrs. Lincoln’s personal confidante, was one of the blacks who saw the president’s body and wrote a moving account of her experience:
​ Morning came at last and a sad morning it was. The flags that floated so gaily yesterday now were draped in black, and hung in silent folds at half-mast. The President was dead, and a nation was mourning for him. Every house was draped in black, and every face wore a solemn look. People spoke in subdued tones, and glided whisperingly, wonderingly, silently about the streets.​​​​​
The death of Lincoln was a loss, but blacks and liberal whites rallied to continue the fight for freedom. Thus in victory and tragedy, personal and collective, blacks and liberal whites rededicated themselves to the fight for freedom, a fight that persists to this very day and involves the same circumstances, though the names and dates have changed."