30.3.15

African American History is Filled with Triumph and Tragedy

When I was in college, I had the opportunity to take an African American history course that went back to the beginnings of the United State... thumbnail 1 summary


When I was in college, I had the opportunity to take an African American history course that went back to the beginnings of the United States, when it was not even a republic yet, all the way to the modern era. What I ultimately discovered reinforced something I had known for a long time; African American history is filled with triumph and tragedy.

The class began with the story of the Middle Passage and the horrific conditions to which African slaves were subjected on their journey to the Americas. It addressed slavery itself in Colonial America and during the Revolutionary and Civil War eras.

We learned about African American soldiers that served during the American Revolution and the Civil War, and about such figures as Frederick Douglass and other abolitionists, both African American and Caucasian, who fought to bring an end to slavery.

I knew a lot about African American history before I took the course, but this shed light on some of the lesser-known historical figures that helped shape American history. Men like Vernon Johns, a preacher and predecessor of Martin Luther King, Jr., and John Chavis, a free black man who actually advocated slavery.

We learned about Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver, as well as W.E.B. Dubois and the founding of the NAACP. You started to see how African American history was really the history of all of America.

One of the more interesting aspects of the class for me was learning about African American literary figures and the Harlem Renaissance. I have read such writers as Langston Hughes and Zora Neal Hurston, and to see them in an historical light was pretty interesting.

The African American history course taught us a lot about the Civil Rights movement, with such figures as Stokely Carmichael, Medgar Evers and Rosa Parks, and how much sacrifice was made on the part of Americans of all races to make this a better and more tolerant country.

Because the class was more than a decade ago, and Barack Obama was not even a Senator at that point, we did not get to hear about the first African American president in U.S. history, but I think that just goes to show how African American history, like all history, is ever evolving.

What I took away most from the African American history is that it is a history of triumph and tragedy. African Americans have struggled for equality in the United States and made great strides as well. What struck me the most about the course is how, in spite of our differences as Americans, there is far more that we have in common.