The Cause of Freedom A Concise History of African Americans by Jonathan Scott Holloway

Jonathan Scott Holloway is president of Rutgers University. He was formerly provost at Northwestern University and Dean of Yale College. He specializes in intellectual and social history, with an emphasis on post-emancipation United States history. His books include Jim Crow Wisdom: Memory and Identity in Black America Since 1940 and Confronting the Veil: Abram Harris Jr, E. Franklin Frazier, and Ralph Bunche, 1919-1941.

“In this engagingly written volume, Jonathan Holloway has penned the perfect short history of African Americans, beginning his sweeping narrative with the arrival of Africans on the shore of Jamestown in 1619 and ending with the emergence of Black Lives Matter. Throughout this compelling history, Holloway challenges the reader to consider what it means to be an American, a citizen, and, most importantly, a human being. The Cause of Freedom is both a wonderful introduction to African American history for those new to the topic and a handy reference for those who are well-versed in the field.” — Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University
“In this meditation on what is meant by American, Jonathan Holloway manages to identify critical questions that excavate the relationship between the past and the present. This is an important read for both newcomers and old-timers who want to know more about African American history.” — Earl Lewis, Thomas C. Holt Distinguished University Professor of History, Afroamerican and African Studies and Public Policy

Introduction Chapter 1: Race, Slavery, and Ideology in Colonial North America
Chapter 2: Resistance and African American Identity Before the Civil War
Chapter 3: War, Freedom, and a Nation Reconsidered
Chapter 4: Civilization, Race, and the Politics of Uplift
Chapter 5: The Making of the Modern Civil Rights Movement(s)
Chapter 6: The Paradoxes of Post-Civil Rights America
Epilogue: Stony the Road We Trod Notes
Further Reading
Index

“In telling the story of the African American past The Cause of Freedom demonstrates how difficult it is to answer this question. Even if we somehow ignore for a moment that the history of the African American presence in North America predates the establishment of this country by over 150 years, we are left with the puzzle: the United States of America takes great pride in its commitment to freedom and yet somehow accepted the preservation of slavery in its founding documents. Similarly, in a country that places so much rhetorical importance on the equality of opportunity, we have reconciled ourselves too easily to the sense that there’s little more to be done to make accommodations for the structural inequalities that were birthed by racialized slavery and that remain with us in the present day. Answering what it means to be American, however, does not go far enough in terms of capturing the totality of the African American past. Other deceptively brief questions speak to similarly complicated answers. For example, because the African American past predates the founding of the United States, and because that pre-Declaration history is overwhelmingly defined by the daily brutalities associated with racialized slavery, it is useful to pose the broader question, “What does it mean to be human?” Asking this question helps us gain insight into English settlers’ mindset as they justified creating a system of racialized chattel slavery in colonial Virginia to replace the system of indentured servitude that they brought with them when they initially crossed the Atlantic”–

What does it mean to be an American? The story of the African American past demonstrates the difficulty of answering this seemingly simple question. What does it mean to be an American? The story of the African American past demonstrates the difficulty of answering this seemingly simple question. If being “American” means living in a land of freedom and opportunity, what are we to make of those Americans who were enslaved and who have suffered from the limitations of second-class citizenship throughout their lives? African American history illuminates the United States’ core paradoxes, inviting profound questions about what it means to be an American, a citizen, and a human being.
This book considers how, for centuries, African Americans have fought for what the black feminist intellectual Anna Julia Cooper called “the cause of freedom.” It begins in Jamestown in 1619, when the first shipment of enslaved Africans arrived in that settlement. It narrates the creation of a system of racialized chattel slavery, the eventual dismantling of that system in the national bloodletting of the Civil War, and the ways that civil rights disputes have continued to erupt in the more than 150 years since Emancipation. The Cause of Freedom carries forward to the Black Lives Matter movement, a grass-roots activist convulsion that declared that African Americans’ present and past have value and meaning. At a moment when political debates grapple with the nation’s obligation to acknowledge and perhaps even repair its original sin of racialized slavery, The Cause of Freedom tells a story about our capacity and willingness to realize the ideal articulated in the country’s founding document, namely, that all people were created equal.