Four Hundred Years of African American History
At some point in 1619 or 1620 (the date question arises because of England’s use at the time of the Julian calendar), John Rolfe, an Englishman who had ventured to the Virginia colony (and who married a young native woman known as Pocahontas), wrote a letter to Sir Edwin Sandys in which he mentioned the arrival of blacks to the colony:
“He brought not anything but 20 and odd Negroes, which the Governor and Cape Merchant bought for victuals (whereof he was in great need as he pretended) at the best and easiest rate they could.”
These “20 and odd Negroes,” all black Africans, were indentured servants, not slaves. But their mention in Rolfe’s letter is significant, because it represents the first documented case of Africans sold into servitude in British North America. Some 400 years later, an African American would be elected president of the United States.
This 400-year history is chronicled in fascinating form in our newly published reference set, Milestone Documents in African American History, which is arriving in libraries around the country this week. The 4-volume set opens with the full text and in-depth expert analysis of Rolfe’s letter, and it ends with several documents from the first year of Barack Obama’s presidency, including a 2009 U.S. Senate resolution apologizing for the “enslavement and racial segregation of African Americans.” In between are some 125 other primary sources that serve as a documentary history of African Americans and remind us that, in the end, the great sweep of African American history IS American history. To give you just a taste of what I mean, consider some of the documents the set explores:
- Slavery Clauses in the U.S. Constitution
- United States v. Amistad
- Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman?”
- Emancipation Proclamation
- Ku Klux Klan Act
- Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s “Lynch Law in America”
- W. E. B. Du Bois: The Souls of Black Folk
- Walter F. White: “The Eruption of Tulsa”
- Alain Locke’s “Enter the New Negro”
- Marian Anderson’s My Lord, What a Morning
- Martin Luther King, Jr.: “I Have a Dream”
- Stokely Carmichael’s “Black Power”
- Final Report of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study Panel
- Louis Farrakhan’s Million Man March Pledge
- Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address
The Constitution, slavery, emancipation and the Civil War, Reconstruction and Jim Crow, lynching, the Harlem Renaissance, the civil rights movement, black power, scientific discrimination, economic disparity, 21st-century presidential politics–it’s all here, in compelling documentary form and analyzed and explained by a wonderful team of some 65 historians.
Like all sets in our “Milestone Documents” series, this one is a great value: purchase of the print set brings free access for an entire school or library to the same content online via Salem History. We hope African American History will be greeted with the same positive reception as the previous three sets in the series: American History (multiple-award winner), American Leaders (ditto), and World History (called an “essential purchase” in a starred Library Journal review just hitting stands today). If you are a librarian or educator, I hope you’ll consider buying the set for your institution.