African Americans: The First 250 Years
INTRODUCTION
When the United States declared its independence on July 4, 1776, approximately 500,000 people of African descent lived within its borders. They were not celebrating. Most were enslaved across the tobacco fields of Virginia and Maryland, the rice plantations of South Carolina and Georgia, the indigo farms of the lowcountry, and the households of the very men who were, at that precise moment, writing documents about liberty and self-evident truths. The irony has been noted so many times it risks becoming merely rhetorical. But there is something more specific, more historically consequential, and far less frequently told than the irony of slavery amid the language of freedom.
Those 500,000 people had not arrived in the Americas as blank slates. They had come, taken, dragged, survived, from specific places: from the Senegambia coast and the Kingdom of Dahomey, from the Igbo and Yoruba nations of West Africa, from the Bakongo people of Central Africa, from the Gold Coast and the Niger Delta and the Windward Coast. They brought languages, religions, agricultural knowledge, musical systems, cosmologies, culinary traditions, and ways of understanding the relationship between the living and the dead. They brought, in other words, entire civilizations, carried in memory, in practice, in the body, in song.
