What does it mean to be American?
In telling the story of the African American past, The Cause of Freedom demonstrates how difficult it is to answer this question. Even if we ignore for a moment that the history of the African American presence in North America predates the establishment of this country by over 150 years, we are left with a puzzle: the United States of America takes great pride in its commitment to freedom and yet somehow accepted the preservation of slavery in its founding documents. Similarly, in a country that places so much rhetorical importance on the equality of opportunity, we have reconciled ourselves too easily to the sense that there’s little more to be done to make accommodations for the structural inequalities that were birthed by racialized slavery and that remain with us in the present day.
Deciding what it means to be American, however, does not go far enough in terms of capturing the totality of the African American past. Other deceptively brief questions invite similarly complicated answers. For example, because the African American past predates the founding of the United States, and because that pre-Declaration history is overwhelmingly defined by the daily brutalities associated with racialized slavery, it is useful to pose the broader question What does it mean to be human? Asking this question helps us gain insight into the English settlers’ mindset as they justified creating a system of racialized chattel slavery in colonial Virginia to replace the system of indentured servitude that they brought with them when they initially crossed the Atlantic.
Connecting the question about humanity and Americanness—and in so doing linking the English settlers in Jamestown, Virginia, to the newly self-declared Americans in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, some 150 years later—is another conjecture: What does it mean to be a citizen? This question, still being asked today, guides us toward an understanding of how the presence of enslaved Africans created an existential crisis for those who disagreed about the boundaries of freedom. Even for abolitionists who believed that slavery was a sin, the breadth of what was meant by freedom for enslaved Africans was a deeply contested idea. That contest was a conceptual one as much as it was literal. The increasing ideological tension between northern and southern states regarding the role of a slave system in the nation’s economic and political spheres turned into the national bloodletting of the early 1860s. Roughly 750,000 Americans would die in the Civil War, a dispute, at its core, about who could be considered human, a citizen, and an American.
The issue of American citizenship, of belonging, is at the beating heart of the civil rights disputes that have erupted regularly in the more than 150 years since the end of the Civil War. While these disputes were made manifest over questions like equal access to transportation, high-quality education, healthcare and housing, and the ballot box, soon after the Civil War ended a different question began to be asked that echoed the debates about enslaved Africans’ humanity: What does it mean to be civilized? This question, born in the early years of this country’s industrial age and its dawning global ambitions, invited the most mean-spirited answers that were deployed to justify denying African Americans the fruits of American citizenship. In more instances than historians have been able to count, answers to this question came in the form of domestic terrorism that was designed to ensure that African Americans remained perpetually insecure and unable to assert their claims to their national birthright without risking their jobs, their homes, and even their lives.
While all of the questions listed here beg long and nuanced answers that travel beyond the boundaries of this short history, there is one thing that is unambiguously clear: when one ventures into even a concise history of the African American past, one discovers that African Americans have always wanted to be considered human, citizens, American, and civilized. Further, they have wanted all the rights, responsibilities, and privileges associated with these recognitions.
One of the great challenges in meeting these desires has been the abiding failure to acknowledge African Americans’ active role in making this nation and in articulating their own past. This failure to recognize African Americans’ contributions has come at a great existential cost. The writer James Baldwin understood as much when, in 1965, he soberly declared, “It comes as a great shock to discover the country which is your birthplace and to which you owe your life and your identity has not in its whole system of reality evolved any place for you.”1
It is worth noting that the very idea of a history of the African American past is complicated ideological terrain that resonates with the questions that guide this book. At the center of this undulating landscape is the question “Who merits a history?” It may seem strange to ask this now, but it was not long ago that scholars believed a true record of the black past was unobtainable, insisting that there weren’t any written records relating to the enslaved past and that any cultural ties that could connect enslaved Africans to the African continent did not survive the brutalities of slavery. These claims have been proven wrong.
One of the earliest proponents of a discernible African American past was Carter G. Woodson, founder of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History in 1915 and publisher of the Journal of Negro History. In 1926, Woodson established “Negro History Week,” an effort to call attention to figures of the black past who played critical roles in the shaping of the nation. (Negro History Week would be rechristened “Black History Week” and then, in 1976, recognized by the federal government as “Black History Month.”) Woodson fought many lonely battles, but he was undaunted in his life’s work. Before he died in 1950, he began to see a slow but steady rise in the number of scholars studying the African American past. That growth has continued, and researching and teaching black history are familiar (but not ubiquitous) in primary, secondary, and higher education.
The title of this short history is drawn from a remark by Anna Julia Cooper, the educator and feminist who wrote the landmark 1892 book A Voice from the South. She observed, “The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class—it is the cause of human kind, the very birthright of humanity.”2 Because African Americans were so often denied access to the benefits of the nation’s founding principles, they had a special ability, something scholar-activist W.E.B. Du Bois called a “second-sight,” to understand the contradictions baked into the nation’s rhetoric.3 They could see that their fight for freedom may have had special implications for their day-to-day existence, but that it was a fight for every American because once African Americans secured that true freedom, it would mean that people of all backgrounds, immigrants, the poor, and the uneducated would have won theirs as well.
The history that follows opens on the shores of Jamestown in 1619 when the first group of Africans arrived in that settlement. It carries forward to the Black Lives Matter movement, a grassroots activist convulsion that declared in many ways that African Americans’ present and past have value and meaning. I am writing this introduction during the four hundredth anniversary of that particular Jamestown arrival and at a moment when political debates have been rekindled about the nation’s obligation to acknowledge and perhaps even repair its original sin of racialized slavery.
In 1965, Baldwin asked, “If one has got to prove one’s title to the land, isn’t 400 years enough?”4 This question, along with the others that are central to this history, seems so simple, but is laden with a complexity that tells a story about our own capacity and willingness to ever realize the ideal articulated in the country’s founding document, namely that all people were created equal.