Description

What does it mean to be an American The story of the African American past demonstrates the difficulty of answering this seemingly simple question This book illuminates the USs core paradoxes inviting profound questions about what it means to be an American a citizen and a human being

This book considers how for centuries African Americans have fought for what the black feminist intellectual Anna Julia Cooper called the cause of freedom It begins in Jamestown in 1619 when the first shipment of enslaved Africans arrived in that settlement It narrates the creation of a system of racialized chattel slavery the eventual dismantling of that system in the national bloodletting of the Civil War and the ways that civil rights disputes have continued to erupt in the more than 150 years since Emancipation This Very Short Introduction carries forward to the Black Lives Matter movement a grassroots activist convulsion that declared that African Americans present and past have value and meaning At a moment when political debates grapple with the nations obligation to acknowledge and perhaps even repair its original sin of racialized slavery author Jonathan Scott Holloway tells a story about American citizens capacity and willingness to realize the ideal articulated in Americas founding document namely that all people were created equal