Cause of Freedom

What does it mean to be an American? The story of the African American past demonstrates the difficulty of answering this seemingly simple question.What does it mean to be an American? The story of the African American past demonstrates the difficulty of answering this seemingly simple question. If being "American" means living in a land of freedom and opportunity, what are we to make of those Americans who were enslaved and who have suffered from the limitations of second-class citizenship throughout their lives? African American history illuminates the United States' core paradoxes, inviting profound questions about what it means to bean American, a citizen, and a human being. This book considers how, for centuries, African Americans have fought for what the black feminist intellectual Anna Julia Cooper called "the cause of freedom." It begins in Jamestown in 1619, when the first shipment of enslaved Africans arrived in that settlement. It narrates the creation of a system of racialized chattel slavery, the eventual dismantling of that system in the national bloodletting of the Civil War, and the ways that civil rights disputes have continued to erupt in the morethan 150 years since Emancipation. The Cause of Freedom carries forward to the Black Lives Matter movement, a grass-roots activist convulsion that declared that African Americans' present and past have value and meaning. At a moment when political debates grapple with the nation's obligation toacknowledge and perhaps even repair its original sin of racialized slavery, The Cause of Freedom tells a story about our capacity and willingness to realize the ideal articulated in the country's founding document, namely, that all people were created equal.

The Cause of Freedom demands careful consideration by all Americans to ensure everyone clearly understands how Black people have struggled to achieve racial justice, so far with only limited success...The Cause of Freedom will help all readers understand the pressing need to finally achieve this lofty goal.

Jonathan Scott Holloway is president of Rutgers University. He was formerly provost at Northwestern University and Dean of Yale College. He specializes in intellectual and social history, with an emphasis on post-emancipation United States history. His books include Jim Crow Wisdom: Memory and Identity in Black America Since 1940 and Confronting the Veil: Abram Harris Jr, E. Franklin Frazier, and Ralph Bunche,1919-1941.