acy.
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African Americans
A1988 New York Times editorial suggests an appropriate introductory focus to the following collection of articles about an ethnic group that traces its American ancestry to initial participation as  three-fifths  persons in the U.S. Constitution and to its later exclusion from the polity altogether by the U.S. Supreme Court s Dred Scott decision. The editors of the Times write in the article  Negro, Black and African American  (December 22,1988):
The archaeology is dramatically plain to older adults who, in one lifetime, have already heard preferred usage shift from colored to Negro to black. The four lingual layers provide an abbreviated history of civil rights in this century.
Perhaps the fact of renaming this ethnic group  African ^merican  may produce fresh vision needed to understand and transcend the deep racism that infects society. The following glimpses of the African American reality, its struggles for freedom, its tradition and community, its ichievements, and the stresses of building bridges be-ween worlds reveal a dense set of problems. More
importantly, they suggest pieces of authentic identity i ather than stereotype. Becoming a healthy ethnic society i wolves more than the end of ethnic stereotyping. The basis of ethnic identity are sustained by authentic por-t -ayal of positive personal and group identity. The cultiva-t on of ethnicity that does not encourage disdain against c nd self-hatred among members and groups is an impor-t mt psychological and social artifice.
Progress or lack of progress on issues of race involves e xamination of a complex of historical, social, cultural, and e conomic factors. Analysis of this sort requires assessment of the existence of deep racism in the American
mentality that is, the cultural consciousness and the
ir stitutions that transmit images and practices that shape the foundations and configurations of social reality.
Discrimination and prejudice based on skin color are
E
issues rarely broached in mainstream journals of opinion. Ehnic and racial intermarriage and the influence and
impact of skin hue within the African American community re ise attendant issues of discrimination and consciousness of color. This concern is ultimately traced to the eighteenth and nineteenth century its origins in laws arid practices of defining race that shaped the ongoing m entalities of color consciousness, prejudice, and racism
in America. Other dimensions of the African experience can be found in this section s ac African American traditions and experiences o and the family, in addition to the African roots of i have been incorporated into the general cultur
Obviously, what some see as strengths an contributions, others argue are merely romai sions from more compelling social, economic, cal issues. Though this debate continues, p change within African American populations f pelled discussion of the emerging black middle' purpose and influence of the historically black and the reopening of the discussion of separate in the courts and in the renewed attention to Z education are clear evidence of the ambival ambiguity inherent in the challenges of a n al society. Earlier dichotomies slave/free, bl poor/rich are still evident, but a variety of groui based on historical and regional as well as ir agendas to preserve cultural and racial cons have complicated the simple hope for liberty   that was shared by many Americans. Issues o class are openly addressed by several articl section as are the ideological and psychologic of the complicated journey of African Americe full participation in the promises of liberty and well as the enjoyment of cultural freedom in a r America.
Looking Ahead: Challenge Questions
What are the most compelling issues that fa American communities?
What social, economic, and political condi supported the expansion of an African Americ class?
What explains the persistence of an African underclass?
What effect does the media have on st consciousness of ethnic group identity?
In what respect is attention to pluralism dim the economic and social plight and isolation Americans?
Does the name  African Americans  augm< velopment of pluralism?
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Article 29
10 Most Dramatic Events
African-American Histon
Lerone Bennett Jr.
1.	The Black Coming
A YEAR before the arrival of the celebrated Mayflower, 244 years before the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, 335 years before Brown vs. Board of Education, a big, bluff-bowed ship sailed up the river James and landed the first generation of African-Americans at Jamestown, Va.
Nobody knows the hour or the date of the official Black coming. But there is not the slightest doubt about the month. John Rolfe, who betrayed Pochohontas and experimented with tobacco, was there, and he said in a letter that the ship arrived  about the latter end of August  in 1619 and that it  brought not anything but 20 and odd Negroes.  Concerning which the most charitable thing to say is that John Rolfe was probably pulling his boss  leg. For no ship ever called at an American port with a more important cargo. In the hold of that ship, in a manner of speaking, was the whole gorgeous panorama of Black America, was jazz and the spirituals and the black gold that made American capitalism possible.* Bird was there and Bigger and King and Malcolm and millions of other Xs and crosses, along with Mahalia singing, Duke Ellington composing, Gwendolyn Brooks rhyming and Michael Jordan slam-dunking. It was all there, illegible and inevitable, on that day. A man with eyes would have seen it and would have announced to his contemporaries that this ship heralds the beginning of the first Civil War and the second.
As befitting a herald of fate, the ship was nameless, and mystery surrounds it to this day. Where did this ship come from? From the high seas, where the
 The Shaping of Black America
134
Reprin,ed by	Lerone Bennett, Jr., and Ebony
crew robbed a Spanish vessel of a cargo of Africans bound for the West Indies. The captain  ptended, John Rolfe noted, that he needed food, and he offered to exchange his cargo for  vic-tualle.  The deal was arranged. An-toney, Pedro, Isabella and 17 other Africans with Spanish names stepped ashore, and the history of Africans in America began.
And it began, contrary to what almost all texts say, not in slavery but in freedom. For there is indisputable evidence that most of the first Black immigrants, like most of the first White immigrants, were held in indentured servitude for a number of years and then freed. During a transitional period of some 40 years, the first Black immigrants held real property, sued in court and accumulated pounds and plantations.
This changed drastically in the sixth decade of the century when the White founding fathers, spurred on by greed and the unprotected status of African immigrants, enacted laws that reduced most Africans to slavery. And so, some 40 years after the Black coming, Black and White crossed a fatal threshold, and the echo of that decision will reverberate in the corridors of Black and White history forever.
2.	The Founding of Black America
TITHEN, on a Sunday in November   V 1786, the little band of Black Christians arrived at Philadelphia s St. George s Methodist Episcopal Church, the sexton pointed to the gallery. The Blacks paused and then started up the rickety stairs with downcast eyes and heavy hearts. To the leaders of this group, Richard Allen and Absalom
Jones, this was the ultimate to be shunted from the first gallery in a church Blacl helped build.
The group had barely rea< of the stairs when a voice fro, said,  Let us pray.  Withoi the men plopped down ' were in the front of the g; was praying as hard as he co, heard loud voices. He oper and saw a white sexton trying salom Jones from his knees.
 You must get up; you mi down here!  the White sexi
 Wait until the prayer is replied.
The voices echoed tl church, and people looked held the incredible scene Christian and a White Chi tling in the house of the L color of God s word.
 Get up!  the sexton saic
 Wait until the prayer is replied wearily,  and I will you any more. 
Four or five White Chris to the sexton s aid, and 1 spread over the gallery. Bel was resolved, the prayer Black men stood up then ai word, streamed out of the < first mass demonstration in ican history.
Richard Allen added a m script:
.. And they were no n by us in the church. 
They were no more plagi in a lot of places. For the demonstration was the fix national movement that foundations of Black Amer 12, 1787, Richard Allen t
roated the Free African Society ^DuBois called  the first wavering 5apeoPle toward a m re iS'societies were formed in most ^Northern cities. And onAh.s foun-S arose an intricate structure of im indent Black churches, schools and Organizations. The movement S^the^^^ fouI^g of Freedom s Journal, the first Black newspaper, and the convening of first national Black convention.
3,	Nat Turner's War
COD was speaking, Nat Turner said later.
There was, he remembered, thunder and lightning and a  loud voice" in the sky. And the voice spoke to him, telling him to take up the yoke and fight against the serpent  for the time was fast approaching when the first should be last and the last should be first.  
Nat Turner was numbered among the last. And although hi' was a slave in Southampton County, Va., it would be saidofhim later that he "made an impact upon the people of his section its great as that of John C. Calhoun or Jefferson Davis.  A mystic with blood on his mind and a preacher with vengeance on his lips, he was an implacable foe of slaveholders. He had believed since he wits a child that God had set him aside for some great purpose. And he decided wwthat God was calling him to rise up   day my enemies with their own weapons. 
To this end, Turner, who wits alxmt 30 Wold, chose four disciples and set his towards Jerusalem, the county seat 0 Southampton.
^Sunday morning, Aug. 21, 1S31,  , ls^ples gathered on the banks of Irak	property of Joseph
Tump  "1^  maH'fod the widow of fotpZt^Stn?aster an(l who had there-whoiented Turner an(l  ^ ^h. Nat, and dr/the value of a delayed
hte10 e.n?rance  aPPpared sud-noimced thl afterno n antl an  night hsm a would strike that ferandnwv/1 j?at	home of his mas-
fe)|. P^eding^ house to house, ^everyman woman chi|d ^PtthJ?  i^.at burner and his army
Woods t0 the home of ^menS  SePh Travis. They were ^toadax with one hatchet and
1WenWbur hours later, they
29. Dramatic would be seventy and at least fifty-seven Whites would be dead.
When, on Monday morning, the first bodies were discovered, a nameless dread seized the citizens. Men, women and children fled to the woods and hid under the leaves until soldiers and sailors arrived from Richmond and Norfolk. Some Whites left the county; others left the state.
Defeated in an engagement near Jerusalem, Turner went into hiding and was not captured until six weeks later. On Nov. 11, 1831, the short Black man called the Prophet was hanged in a f