This book by Dr. Jonathan Holloway, who is the President of Rutgers University, not only is, as its subtitle says, “A Concise History of African Americans,” but it also considers some fundamental questions. First, “What does it mean to be American?” [p. 1] “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 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 a 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.” [p. 1]
The second question is, “What does it mean to be human? Asking this question helps us gain insight into the 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.” [p. 2]
Question Three is, “What does it mean to be a citizen? This question, still being asked today, guides us toward an understanding of how the presence of enslaved Africans created an existential crisis for those who disagreed about the boundaries of freedom. Even for abolitionists who believed that slavery was a sin, the breadth of what was meant by freedom for enslaved Africans was a deeply contested idea. That contest was a conceptual one as much as it was literal. The increasing ideological tension between northern and southern states regarding the role of a slave system in the nation’s economic and political spheres turned into the national bloodletting of the early 1860s.” [p. 2]
Finally, the last question is, “What does it mean to be civilized? This question, born in the early years of this country’s industrial age and its dawning global ambitions, invited the most mean-spirited answers that were deployed to justify denying African Americans the fruits of American citizenship. In more instances than historians have been able to count, answers to this question came in the form of domestic terrorism that was designed to ensure that African Americans remained perpetually insecure and unable to assert their claims to their national birthright without risking their jobs, their homes, and even their lives.” [pp. 2-3]
This is a short book. You can read it in one sitting, yet it takes us from 1619 and the arrival of Africans in Jamestown to the Obama presidency and Donald Trump’s election. Its short length precludes any in-depth examination of different areas of African American history, but it does an excellent job hitting the most important parts and giving us terrific information in each chapter. It’s a terrific primer and a wonderful first stop for anyone interested in learning about African American history. The tight narrative is very well written, and the book is an excellent synthesis of the current scholarship on African American history. I can highly recommend it for students of the war and for students of American history.
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