African Americans

African American history, a relatively recent field, has since the 1960s become integral to our understanding of U.S. history. From the colonial era through the 21st century, even as slavery and racism relegated it to the margins of official history, African American history has been inextricably linked to the U.S. (American) past. African Americans made defining and profound contributions to U.S. society and culture from the earliest colonial settlements through the 21st century. As both a labor and sociocultural force, black slaves helped build the British colonies in North America into the society that in 1776 would proclaim its national identity as the United States of America.

African American slaves formed the labor force upon which early American society depended, contributing the labor that made possible the great agricultural empire of the antebellum south. As recent research has shown, slave labor was also essential to the establishment and early development of regional centers such as New York and Washington, D.C., including the construction of monuments in our capital that are today synonymous with American history and identity, such as the Capitol and the White House.

Though the African American legacy was, until the post-1960s era, largely dismissed by mainstream historians, today African Americans have been recognized not only for their material contributions to the founding of the country but also for their defining role in the emergence of what are regarded today as quintessentially American cultural practices. Jazz, blues, rock and roll, spirituals, and rap music, whose origins lie deep in the African American past, are some of the better-known and popular American cultural practices with African American origins.

Less known within mainstream U.S. society, but equally influential on U.S. history and culture, are the great literary works written by African Americans from the slave era to the present, and particularly the distinctive perspective on American history and culture expressed in these works. The prophetic voice in African American writing, which, according to many scholars, has for centuries articulated the moral conscience of American society, shaped both black and white American literature and culture in innumerable ways. This influence helped determine the progression of U.S. history from the slave era through the 20th century.

From the poetry of the slave author Phillis Wheatley and the autobiography of the former slave Olaudah Equiano in the late 18th century to the great slave narratives of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs in the 19th century, language and writing, as the scholar Henry Louis Gates has famously asserted, became for many blacks synonymous with the quest for freedom, equality, and justice. These democratic ideals, proclaimed in the founding U.S. national documents, were both critically scrutinized and renewed by black writers who called for the nation to live up to its foundational ideology.

One can trace later classic African American literary works—such as W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Richard Wright's Native Son (1940), Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952), or Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon (1978)—directly to these early slave writers. Scholars agree that the modern African American literary tradition rests upon the foundation of slave narratives of the 19th century and earlier. But slave narratives, which number in the thousands, were not only among the first literary works written by African Americans; they were also the first historical narratives produced by blacks and therefore also form the foundation of the field of African American history. Equally important, one can also trace the famous prophetic sermons and speeches by civil rights–era leaders as different as Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X back to a slave society within which the black church formed the most influential social institution.

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