The Shaping of Black America

Front Cover
Johnson Publishing Company, 1975 - History - 356 pages
"What forces transformed Africans into African-Americans? How did they sustain themselves during centuries of captivity and oppression? In what way did their presence shape the attitudes--and fortunes--of white America? How did black people become a nation within a nation? And what are the prospects for that nation in the 1990s?" "These are among the questions that Lerone Bennett, Jr., addresses in this triumphant companion volume to his epochal Before the Mayflower. Where that book rendered the African-American experience chronologically, The Shaping of Black America tells its story from a developmental perspective. Its first section, "Foundations," encompasses black slaves and white indentured servants, the black founding fathers, and the relationship between African-Americans and Indians. In the second section, "Directions," Bennett traces the growth of black labor and black capital and the development of a system that unites and separates blacks and whites. The result is a bald and literate work that persuasively demonstrates its author's notion that "blacks lived a different time and a different reality in this country." Book jacket."--Jacket.

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Contents

The First Generation
5
White Servitude
39
System
207
Copyright

1 other sections not shown

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About the author (1975)

Lerone Bennett Jr. was born in Clarksdale, Mississippi on October 17, 1928. By the age of 12, he was writing for the black newspaper The Mississippi Enterprise. He graduated from Morehouse College in 1949 and went to work at the black newspaper Atlanta Daily World. In 1953, he became an associate editor at Jet magazine. He moved to Ebony a year later and became the senior editor there in 1958. He eventually became an executive editor and worked for the magazine into his 80s. He wrote several books including Before the Mayflower, Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's White Dream, What Manner of Man: A Biography of Martin Luther King Jr., The Shaping of Black America, and Black Power U.S.A.: The Human Side of Reconstruction, 1867-1877. He died from advanced vascular dementia on February 14, 2018 at the age of 89.

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