奴隷にされたアフリカ人のジェームズタウンへの入植（1619年）から、動産奴隷制、それを血で血を洗う戦いで解体した南北戦争(1861-65年）。奴隷解放から150年以上経った今なおブラック・ライブズ・マター（BLM）運動が起き現在までを概観し、黒人解放運動家のアンナ・ジュリア・クーパーが「自由の大義」と呼んだもののために、アフリカ系米国人が何世紀にもわたって続けている戦いを概括します。人種差別による奴隷制の原罪を認め、補償する義務について政治的議論が交わされる今、「全ての人間は平等に作られている」という建国文書に記された理想を実現しようとする米国市民の能力と意欲を検討します。
 

• Traces the complex history of African Americans, from the arrival of enslaved Africans at Jamestown to the Black Lives Matter movement
• Highlights the contributions of such notable African Americans as David Walker, Harriet Tubman, Marian Anderson, Nina Simone, and Barack Obama
• Highlights African Americans' active role in making this nation and in articulating their own past

    
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 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. This Very Short Introduction 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, author Jonathan Scott Holloway tells a story about American citizens' capacity and willingness to realize the ideal articulated in America's founding document, namely, that all people were created equal.