Creating Black Americans African American History and Its Meanings, 1619 to the Present

by Painter, Nell Irvin

• ISBN13: 9780195137552
• ISBN10: 0195137558
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-11-01
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Here is a magnificent account of a past rich in beauty and creativity, but also in tragedy and trauma. Eminent historian Nell Irvin Painter blends a vivid narrative based on the latest research with a wonderful array of artwork by African American artists, works which add a new depth to ourunderstanding of black history. Painter offers a history written for a new generation of African Americans, stretching from life in Africa before slavery to today's hip-hop culture. The book describes the staggering number of Africans--over ten million--forcibly transported to the New World, most doomed to brutal servitudein Brazil and the Caribbean. Painter looks at the free black population, numbering close to half a million by 1860 (compared to almost four million slaves), and provides a gripping account of the horrible conditions of slavery itself. The book examines the Civil War, revealing that it only slowlybecame a war to end slavery, and shows how Reconstruction, after a promising start, was shut down by terrorism by white supremacists. Painter traces how through the long Jim Crow decades, blacks succeeded against enormous odds, creating schools and businesses and laying the foundations of ourpopular culture. We read about the glorious outburst of artistic creativity of the Harlem Renaissance, the courageous struggles for Civil Rights in the 1960s, the rise and fall of Black Power, the modern hip-hop movement, and two black Secretaries of State. Painter concludes that African Americanstoday are wealthier and better educated, but the disadvantaged are as vulnerable as ever. Painter deeply enriches her narrative with a series of striking works of art--more than 150 in total, most in full color--works that profoundly engage with black history and that add a vital dimension to the story, a new form of witness that testifies to the passion and creativity of theAfrican-American experience. * Among the dozens of artists featured are Romare Bearden, Elizabeth Catlett, Beauford Delaney, Jacob Lawrence, and Kara Walker * Filled with sharp portraits of important African Americans, from Olaudah Equiano (one of the first African slaves to leave a record of his captivity) and Toussaint L'Ouverture (who led the Haitian revolution), to Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth, to Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X

Author Biography

Nell Irvin Painter is the Edward Professor of American History at Princeton. A former Director of Princeton's Program in African-American Studies, she is the author of Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol and Standing at Armageddon: The United States 1877-1919.

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
Acknowledgments	xv
Africa and Black Americans	3	(18)
Captives Transported, 1619--ca. 1850	21	(22)
A Diasporic People, 1630--ca. 1850	43	(20)
Those Who Were Free, ca. 1770--1859	63	(20)
Those Who Were Enslaved, ca. 1770--1859	83	(22)
Civil War and Emancipation, 1859--1865	105	(24)
The Larger Reconstruction, 1864--1896	129	(18)
Hard-Working People in the Depths of Segregation, 1896--ca. 1919	147	(26)
The New Negro, 1915--1932	173	(24)
Radicals and Democrats, 1930--1940	197	(22)
The Second World War and the Promise of Internationalism, 1940--1948	219	(20)
Cold War Civil Rights, 1948--1960	239	(26)
Protest Makes a Civil Rights Revolution, 1960--1967	265	(26)
Black Power, 1966--1980	291	(30)
Authenticity and Diversity in the Era of Hip-Hop, 1980--2005	321	(24)
Epilogue: A Snapshot of African Americans in the Early Twenty-First Century	345	(16)
Timelines	361	(10)
Notes	371	(40)
Further Reading	411	(6)
Artists Whose Work Appears in Creating Black Americans	417	(22)
Picture Credits	439	(6)
Index	445