Before the Mayflower

First published more than 40 years ago, Lerone Bennett's Before the Mayflower (1962), now in its sixth printing, stands as one of the most important texts exploring the African experience in the United States. Bennett's classic work begins in antiquity with Ethiopia and Egypt. The author traces the origins of Africans from West Africa through the horrors of the Middle Passage to the Americas, and then through the enslavement, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and civil rights eras.

Bennett's narrative of the African experience is in a poetic voice, which adds to the value of this monumental text. Indeed, the author's writing style creates an enjoyable reading experience. Bennett turns this history into an epic journey that is neither a story of victimization nor an exaggeratedly triumphant documentary. It is a superb synthesis of the challenges Africans faced, their mistakes, their victories, their successes, and their failures. Before the Mayflower is a book about both tragedy and victory. While not romanticizing African resistance and resilience, Bennett most certainly displays a consciousness of Africans' victories and perseverance in the face of the failed and broken promises of a society that enslaved and oppressed their people for centuries.

The book is comprised of the following twelve chapters: (1) “The African Past,” (2) “Before the Mayflower,” (3) “The Founding of Black America,” (4) “Behind the Cotton Curtain,” (5) “Blood on the Leaves: Revolts and Conspiracies,” (6) “The Generation of Crisis,” (7) “The Jubilee War,” (8) “Black Power in the Old South,” (9) “The Life and Times of Jim Crow,” (10) “Red, White and Black: Race and Sex,” (11) “From Booker T. Washington to Martin Luther King, Jr.,” and (12) “The Time of the Whale.”

In the first chapter, “The African Past,” Bennett reveals to the reader that human civilization began in Africa, and that Ethiopia and Egypt were two of the greatest civilizations of antiquity. He also documents the power and prestige of the empires of Ghana, Mali, and Songhay during the golden age of West Africa. The second chapter, “Before the Mayflower,” documents the first Africans to arrive in the British colonies at Jamestown in 1619, as well as the legal and political process that transformed them from indentured servants, similar to others in the colony, into enslaved beings throughout the colonies.

The next two chapters, “The Founding of Black America” and “Behind the Cotton Curtain,” highlight how free Africans helped shape the United States through their political, economic, creative, and social activities while under the restrictions imposed upon them by an enslaving society. The fifth chapter, “Blood on the Leaves: Revolts and Conspiracies,” draws attention to the most well-known plots and rebellions formed by Africans resisting the evil of enslavement. The next chapter, “The Generation of Crisis,” revisits the activities of free Africans and their opposition to racism and enslavement. It highlights important individuals, organizations, and events in U.S. history that directly affected the institution of enslavement—in particular, both African and white abolitionists, the Compromise of 1850, and the Dred Scott case. In the seventh chapter, “The Jubilee War,” Bennett charts the path to the Civil War and Africans' support of and participation in it. He also reveals Abraham Lincoln's reluctance to challenge the institution of slavery and to allow Africans to fight for their own liberation.

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