I majored in social studies and history in undergraduate school and at the masters level. Nevertheless, I was well into the second year of my masters program before I had an opportunity to take my first course dealing with black people. It was a course in African politics offered in the early 1960s as Africa was just beginning to break the bonds of colonialism. I had gone through grade school, junior and senior high, undergraduate school, and a year of graduate school before any aspect of the black experience was offered as a formal part of the curriculum. What I had learned prior to that was what a few conscientious black teachers in the all-black grade school and junior high school in Chester, Pennsylvania, slipped into their courses. Mostly, they taught about black heroes and sheroes like Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Harriett Tubman, Booker T. Washington, and George Washington Carver—black role models to be emulated. Black history was essentially black biography—hero and shero stories about great black men and women who triumphed over the odds.
Not until I enrolled in the Ph.D. program in black history at the University of California at Berkeley in 1970 did I begin to see the breadth, depth, and impact of the black experience not only in the United States but throughout the world. Almost everywhere one looked in America, the impact of black peoples’ presence, creativity, laboring activity, and social and cultural imprint was there for all to see. But few saw it and even fewer had studied it. Only a very few had studied as much as I. Over the last thirty-five years or more, I have spent my life learning all I could about the black experience and making that knowledge available to the public—children and adults, blacks and whites, and all the rest of humankind. This book, Becoming American: The African-American Journey, is a chronological history of African Americans as it has evolved within the context of American and world history.
The African-American experience in the United States had its origins on the continent of Africa. Indeed, all of humankind traces its roots back to Africa. Whether one uses the biblical Adam and Eve or the anthropological Lucy as a point of origin, Africa is recognized as the place where human beings originated as a species. Ancient Egypt, the most highly developed ancient civilization, called itself Kemet, which means “Land of the Blacks.” Nevertheless, well into the twentieth century it was widely believed in the Western world that black people had no history or culture. Twentieth-century scholarship has largely refuted these myths, but Americans have not been introduced to the facts.
Indeed, most Americans—including far too many Americans of African descent—have little or no knowledge of the central role that people of African descent have played in the making of history both here in the United States and throughout the western hemisphere. Even less is known about the presence and role of African peoples in the history of all humankind. And except for an occasional televised documentary film or serious movie on black themes, the majority of American people have had few opportunities to discover the richness and diversity of the black experience in America or compare it with the black experience in other parts of the world.
Too often, the telling of the story of African Americans begins with the transatlantic slave trade, and the whole of our history has too frequently been organized around our victimization during the eras of slavery and racial segregation. The triumphs of the civil rights movement, especially the role of Martin Luther King Jr., are chronicled, as are the recent challenges facing blacks in urban America. The centrality of blacks’ self-initiated activities in the making of African-American history is not always apparent, and their active role over the last two hundred plus years in defining and redefining the very concept of America and Americans is usually not fully appreciated.
Becoming American: The African-American Journey offers a unique chronological approach that affords readers an opportunity to begin discovering the active, generative role blacks have played in the making of America as we know it today. It also reveals the ways in which blacks’ attempts to make America live up to its founding creed have kept them on the path to “Becoming American.”
Chronologies like timelines are useful devices for locating specific people, events, and activities in their proper contexts. African-American history, which traces its roots back to Africa, has unfolded within the context of the formation, development, and underdevelopment of the American (USA) nation-state as well as the broader African and global world. While there is not always a causal relationship among events, people, and activities, there are frequently associational ones. Events in Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean, for instance, frequently resonate with, if not draw some inspiration from, events and movements in the United States. And vice versa. The anticolonial struggles in Africa during the 1950s and 1960s inspired the civil rights movement in the United States. And the civil rights movement was a catalyst for the antiapartheid struggle in South Africa.
Of equal significance, the victories won by African Americans in their civil and human rights struggles encouraged the development of the women’s and gay rights movements among others. Reading Becoming American helps us see and understand the ways in which the African-American experience relates to and at times interacts with things that are happening in the United States and the wider world.
The African-American journey to becoming American is not simply a chronicling of black involvement in the major events of what we have come to know as American history. Rather, Becoming American is a chronicle of black Americans’ day-to-day wrestling with the contradictions between America’s ideals of freedom, justice, and equality and the constant, blatant violation of those ideals and principles vis-à-vis black people. African Americans’ firm belief in America—our unwavering faith in its founding ideals and principles—is what has kept us struggling for full rights as Americans, even as the nation’s policies and practices frustrated our ambitions and challenged our faith. African Americans’ insistence on enjoying the rights promised by the nation’s founding creed has, in turn, constantly challenged America to live up to its ideals and principles and make their imagined, idealized America real.
Becoming American: The African-American Journey is designed to offer readers a brief introduction to some seminal moments, events, and personalities in African-American history as well as to major documents and voices that have defined and shaped the black historical, political, social, and cultural presence on the American landscape.
This book is organized into two sections. In Part One, we present a chronology of major events in African-American history, compared with major events in world history, with emphasis on African and African diasporan history. Quotes from major historic documents and figures are interspersed throughout and linked to critical moments in the chronology. Longer selections from historic documents that have shaped the African-American experience, as well as critical documents in African Americans’ own words, make up Part Two of the book, providing further evidence of the role of black people in American and world history.
This brief survey is not meant to be exhaustive in any way. Rather, its purpose is to lead and encourage readers to explore these events and personalities in greater depth. Becoming American: The African-American Journey is your passport to the extraordinary African-American presence in American and world history.
—Howard Dodson, Director,
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
Detail of a c. 1874 lithograph depicting South Carolina representative Robert B. Elliott delivering his famous speech in favor of the Civil Rights Act to the House of Representatives, January 6, 1874.