Jo Freeman Reviews: American Founders by Christina Proenza-Coles

American Founders: How People of African Descent Established Freedom in the New World

By Christina Proenza-Coles

Published by Montgomery AL: NewSouth Books, 2019; 384 pages

American Founders is not about the United States. It’s about the New World named after Amerigo Vespucci. In chapters covering the Fifteenth Century through the Twentieth, the author identifies the myriad of places Americans with at least some African ancestry were to be found.

There were Africans in Columbus’ crew. They traveled with the Spanish Conquistadors. They founded Los Angeles. They formed the first free republic in the Americas. They headed Argentina and Mexico. They trekked with Lewis and Clark. They explored the North Pole. And of course they were in every major event in the USA. You only read about a few of them in your history courses; read this book and you will be overwhelmed.

Illustrating that descendants of Africa were everywhere in the Americas is one of the book’s major themes. There are lots of names in this book. Lots and lots and lots of names. We can only imagine the years it took the author to compile all these names on 3x5 cards or their digital equivalent before putting them together in rough chronological order.

It’s common to identify African-Americans with slavery, but that is a modern merger. As the author says repeatedly, not all black people were slaves, or even the descendants of slaves.

Slavery is as old as civilization; almost every people have been both enslaved and practiced slavery at some point in time. Indeed the word slave comes from slav, dating from a time when Arabs were purchasing peoples from eastern Europe to work on their plantations. It was in the Americas that slavery became identified with race. That identification made it hard to remove the stigma of slavery long after legal slavery was abolished.

American Founders attacks that stigma by showing that African-Americans were everywhere in American history, on both continents and all the islands. They were key protagonists in all the democratic struggles. They contributed to America history at every level. Most were of mixed race. Americans might talk about racial purity (for a few decades in the 19th and early 20th centuries) but they never practiced it.

This book is more of a reference book than a sit-down-and-read book. It’s full of facts and people, but doesn’t tell stories longer than a few sentences. It has a point of view, which reference books rarely do. Keep it handy to dip into when you want to expand your knowledge. It’s full of information that you never knew you didn’t know.

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Jo Freeman Reviews: American Founders by Christina Proenza-Coles

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