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Introduction

This ebook cannot, by definition, be comprehensive. Even as a summary there is much that has to be excluded and such exclusions are naturally subjective. However, this book aims to provide the reader with an introduction to the powerful and dramatic history that is loosely termed ‘Black History’. The study of Black History in the West has to be seen primarily in the context of American history. It was in the USA, where all men are created equal, that slavery and the fight for civil rights had its most profound effect.

Freedom and the rights of the individual formed the basis of the Declaration of Independence. But Thomas Jefferson, the composer of the Declaration, was himself an owner of slaves, 200 of them at any one time, and 600 over the course of his life. George Washington, the first president of the United States, likewise owned slaves, as did most of his immediate successors. The thirteen British colonies of North America that had fought for and won their freedom in 1776 had felt enslaved by the British but saw no contradiction that at the point of independence no less than 18 per cent of their number were slaves.

The anti-slavery voice of the Northern states grew stronger and in 1780 Pennsylvania became the first state to abolish slavery within its borders. More Northern states were to follow, but the Southerners, dependent as they were on slavery, held their position. So polarized were the North and South, so divided on this one central, fundamental issue, that the country went to war with itself. The result, the American Civil War (1861–1865), brought about the end of slavery and the emancipation of America’s vast African-American population.

But the end of the American Civil War in 1865 and the liberation of the slaves, although a triumph, was merely the end of the first chapter in American Black History.

Ahead lay a struggle of epic proportions as African-Americans fought deep-seated discrimination, violence and intimidation to assert their political, cultural and economic identity – a story that, for many, concluded with the election, in 2008, of America’s first black president.

This, in an hour, is the story of Black History.