Africans Away from Home / John Henrik Clarke.

Africans who were brought across the Atlantic as slaves never fully adjusted to slavery or accepted its inevitability. Resistance began on board the slave ships, where many jumped overboard or committed suicide. African slaves in South America led the first revolts against tyranny in the New World. The first slave revolt in the Caribbean occurred in Cuba, but the most organized revolts occurred in Haiti and Jamaica. The South American and Caribbean revolts were successful because of geography and, most importantly, because of African cultural continuity. In the United States, the African pursuit of liberty differed in various parts of the country, depending on the following factors: (1) conditions at the respective plantations; (2) relationships forged with American Indians; (3) the impact of the weather; and (4) contacts with Africans from the Caribbean. The emerging radical Black ministry set in motion several slave revolts in the first half of the nineteenth century. During the Civil War, many blacks fought on the side of the North. Following the Emancipation Proclamation and the "pseudo-racial democracy" of the Reconstructionist period, educator Booker T. Washington and intellectual leader W. E. B. Dubois emerged as prominent black spokesmen. A brief bibliography is included. (FMW)

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