Introduction xxxvquest for freedom and equality certainly refl ects a universal
human desire, the African American battle for these ideals
has been particularly fraught with tension because at the
core of American society lies a crucial contradiction: the
United States was founded as a country that championed
liberty, justice, and equality, but the nation consistently
failed to apply these values to African Americans. As one
group of African American leaders in the 1850s lamented,
A heavy and cruel hand has been laid upon us. As a people,
we feel ourselves to be not only deeply injured, but grossly
misunderstood. Our white countrymen do not know us. Th ey
are strangers to our character, ignorant of our capacity, oblivi-
ous to our history and progress, and are misinformed as to
the principles and ideas that control and guide us, as a people.
Th e great mass of American citizens estimate us as being a
characterless and purposeless people; and hence we hold up
our heads, if at all, against the withering infl uence of a nation’s
scorn and contempt.^4Even so, the black liberation movement persisted,
transformed, thrived, and never surrendered. Th us, the
story of Africans in America is, in its essence, a chronicle of
a continuous, impassioned crusade to force America to live
up to its founding principles: freedom, justice, and equal-
ity for all. As such, African American history is American
history; the two are inextricably linked, and it is impossible
to understand one without the other. Yet it is also a history
of Africa, since the culture and values that fueled the Afri-
can American freedom struggle were also deeply rooted in
their African heritage. It is this complexity—the contested
juxtaposition of African and American—that this volume
seeks to explore.Notes- Vincent Harding, Th ere Is a River: Th e Black Struggle for
Freedom in America (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1981), xix. - Ibid., xi.
- While Sterling Stuckey and Margaret Washington are cer-
tainly not the only scholars to advance intellectual arguments of
this sort, they served as mentors to the editors of this project. As
such, their ideas uniquely shaped the ideology of this project and
therefore their contributions are being highlighted here. Sterling
Stuckey and Margaret Washington’s most infl uential works include
the following: Sterling Stuckey, Th e Ideological Origins of Black
Nationalism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972); Sterling Stuckey, Slave
Culture: Nationalist Th eory and the Foundations of Black Amer-
ica (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Sterling Stuckey,
Going through the Storm: Th e Infl uence of African American Art
in History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Margaret
Washington Creel, ‘A Peculiar People’: Slave Religion and Commu-
nity-Culture among the Gullahs (New York: New York University
Press, 1988); Margaret Washington, Sojourner Truth’s America
(Urbana and Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2009). - Proceedings of the Colored National Convention, held in
Rochester, July 6th, 7 th, and 8 th, 1853 (Rochester: Printed at the
offi ce of Frederick Douglass’s Paper, 1853), 16. Th is quote was
also reprinted in James McCune Smith, James P. Miller, and
John J. Zuille, “Th e Suff rage Question,” in A Documentary His-
tory of the Negro People in the United States, ed. Herbert Aptheker
(New York: Citadel Press, 1951), 1:455.