Freedom on My Mind, Volume 2: A History of African Americans, with Documents – 2nd Edition (Ebook PDF)

Chapter 08: Reconstruction: The Making and Unmaking of a Revolution, 1865–1885

Chapter 09: Black Life and Culture during the Nadir, 1880–1915

Chapter 10: The New Negro Comes of Age, 1915–1940

Chapter 11: Fighting for a Double Victory in the World War II Era, 1939–1948

Chapter 12: The Early Civil Rights Movement, 1945–1963

Chapter 13: Multiple Meanings of Freedom: The Movement Broadens,1961–1976

Chapter 14: Racial Progress in an Era of Backlash and Change, 1967–2000

Chapter 15: African Americans and the New Century, 2000–Present

Why This Book This Way

“Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed,” wrote Martin Luther King Jr. in his “Letter from Birmingham City Jail.” Written in April 1963 while he was incarcerated for participating in a  onviolent protest against racial segregation, King’s letter was a rebuttal to white religious leaders who condemned such protests as unwise and untimely.

King’s understanding of freedom also summarizes the remarkable history of the many generations of African Americans whose experiences are chronicled in this book. Involuntary migrants to America, the Africans who became African Americans achieved freedom from slavery only after centuries of struggle, protest, and outright revolt. Prior to the Civil War, most were unfree inhabitants of a democratic republic that took shape around the ideals of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Although largely exempted from these ideals, African Americans fought for them.

Writing of these enslaved noncitizens in the first chapter of The Souls of Black Folk (1903), black historian W. E. B. Du Bois proclaimed, “Few men ever worshipped Freedom with half such unquestioning faith as did the American Negro.” Du Bois saw a similar spirit among his contemporaries: He was certain that “there are to-day no truer exponents of the pure human spirit of the Declaration of Independence than the American Negroes.” Yet Du Bois lived in an era when freedom was still the “unattained ideal.”

Segregated and disfranchised in the South, and subject to racial exploitation and discrimination throughout the nation, black people still sought “the freedom of life and limb, the freedom to work and think, the freedom to love and aspire.” Moreover, as long as black people were not free, America could not be the world’s beacon of liberty. The black freedom struggle would continue, remaking the nation as a whole.

Our Approach
Like Du Bois, we, the authors of Freedom on My Mind, take African Americans’ quest for freedom as the central theme of African American history and explore all dimensions of that quest, situated as it must be in the context of American history. Our perspective is that African American history complicates American history rather than diverging from it. This idea is woven into our narrative, which records the paradoxical experiences of a group of people at once the most American of Americans — in terms of their long history in America, their vital role in the American economy, and their enormous impact on American culture — and at the same time the Americans most consistently excluded from the American dream. Juxtaposed against American history as a whole, this is a study of a group of Americans who have had to fight too hard for freedom yet have been systematically excluded from many of the opportunities that allowed other groups to
experience the United States as a land of opportunity. This text encourages students to think critically and analytically about African American history and the historical realities behind the American dream.