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We were not actors but acted upon. We were not contributors, just recipients. White people enslaved us, and white people freed us. Black people could choose either to take advantage of that freedom or to squander it, as our depictions in the media seemed to suggest so many of us were doing.
African people had lived here, on the land that in 1776 would form the United States, since the White Lion dropped anchor in the year 1619.
2018 report by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) called Teaching Hard History found that in 2017 just 8 percent of U.S. high school seniors named slavery as the central cause of the Civil War, and less than one-third knew that it had taken a constitutional amendment to abolish
“Our preference for nostalgia and for a history that never happened is not without consequence,” Jeffries writes.
I wanted to do for other Americans what reading Lerone Bennett’s book, and absorbing decades of scholarship on Black American history, had done for me.
“We were the founding fathers. We put so much into the U.S. and we made the foundation.”
“Our memory of the past is often managed and manipulated,” according to the historian Gary B. Nash.30 The
“History is the fruit of power,” writes Michel-Rolph Trouillot in Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, and “the ultimate mark of power may be its invisibility; the ultimate challenge, the exposition of its roots.”
white Americans desire to be free of a past they do not want to remember, while Black Americans remain bound to a past they can never forget.
With this project, we work toward a country that, in the words of Douglass, “shall not brand the Declaration of Independence as a lie.”38 If we are a truly great nation, the truth cannot destroy us.
Our history is still optional: it remains an elective.
White residents in Mississippi lynched more Black people than those in any other state in the country,
My father knew exactly what he was doing when he raised that flag. He knew that our people’s contributions to building the richest and most powerful nation in the world were indelible, that the United States simply would not exist without
They built vast fortunes for white people in both the North and the South—at one time, the second-richest man in the nation was a Rhode Island “slave trader.”
James dewolf
In every war this nation has waged since that first one, Black Americans have fought—today we are the most likely of all racial groups to serve in the United States military.
Over the course of the war, thousands of enslaved people would join the British—far outnumbering those who joined the Patriot cause.
As Samuel Johnson, an English writer opposed to American independence, quipped, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?”
At the time of the Revolution, Virginia stood as the oldest, largest, wealthiest, and most influential of the colonies.
Virginia tobacco, cultivated and harvested by enslaved workers, that
In 1776, Virginia held 40 percent of all enslaved people in the mainland colonies.
Whiteness proved a powerful unifying elixir for the burgeoning nation. Whether laborer or elite planter, “neither was a slave. And both were equal in not being slaves.”
ten of this nation’s first twelve presidents were enslavers.
slavery was antithetical to the Constitution
The domestic human trade tore apart about one-third of all first marriages between the enslaved and, over time, ripped millions of children from their parents.
American democracy had been created on the backs of unfree Black labor.
Blackness came to define whiteness—and whiteness defined American democracy prior to the Civil
This belief, that Black people were not merely enslaved but a slave race, is the root of the endemic racism we cannot purge from this nation to this day.
some abolitionists—Black and white—did not think free Black people would ever know real freedom here.
Lincoln told his visitors. “You and we are different races…. Your race suffers very greatly, many of them, by living among us, while ours suffer from your presence. In a word, we suffer on each side.”
fight for their freedom. Eventually, some two hundred thousand Black Americans would serve in the Union, accounting for one in ten Union soldiers.
“This is our home, and this our country. Beneath its sod lie the bones of our fathers…. Here we were born, and here we will die.”
A year after Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment, outlawing slavery, Black Americans, exerting their new political power, lobbied white legislators to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the nation’s first such law and one of the greatest pieces of civil rights legislation in American history.
Hiram Revels of Mississippi, who became the first Black man elected to the U.S. Senate
Revels and Blanche Bruce, who was elected four years later, would go from being the first Black men elected to the last for nearly a hundred years, until Edward Brooke of Massachusetts took office in 1967.)
Public education effectively did not exist in the South before Reconstruction. The white elite sent their children to private schools, while poor white children went without an education.
In some states, like Louisiana and South Carolina, small numbers of Black and white children, briefly, attended schools together.
The systemic white suppression of Black life proved so severe that this period between the 1880s and the early twentieth century became known as the second slavery or the Great Nadir, a phrase taken from the work of the historian and public intellectual Rayford W. Logan.
constructing a savagely enforced system of racial apartheid that excluded Black people almost entirely from mainstream American life—a system so grotesque that Nazi Germany would later take inspiration from it for its own racist policies.
Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896 declared the racial segregation of Black Americans constitutional.
Many white Americans saw Black men in the uniforms of America’s armed services not as patriotic but as exhibiting a dangerous pride.
The extremity of the violence was a symptom of the psychological mechanism necessary to absolve white Americans of their country’s original sin.
how they could prize liberty abroad while simultaneously denying liberty to an entire race back home, white Americans resorted to the same racist ideology that Jefferson and the framers had used at the nation’s founding: that Black people were an inferior race whose degraded status justified their treatment.
And so the inhumanity visited on Black people by every generation of white America justified the inhumanity of the past and the inequality of the present.
But the laws born out of Black resistance guarantee the franchise for all and ban discrimination based not just on race but on gender, nationality, religion, and ability.
It is truly an American irony that some Asian Americans, among the groups able to immigrate to the United States in large numbers because of the Black civil rights struggle, have sued universities to end programs designed to help the descendants of the enslaved.
The truth is that as much democracy as this nation has today, it has been borne on the backs of Black resistance and visions for equality.
instead of erasing identity, served an opposite purpose: in the void, we forged a new culture all our own.
Out of our unique isolation, both from our native cultures and from white America, we forged this nation’s most significant original culture.
But crucially, you cannot view those statistics while ignoring another: that Black people were enslaved here longer than we have been free.
What if America understood, finally, now, at the dawn of its fifth century, that we have never been the problem, but the solution?
