We Need to Know African American History to Know American History

Everywhere you turn in American history, African American history is embedded in the story. Black History Month is not enough; we need to learn how Black history is intertwined with all of American history.

Monument outside the Legacy Museum, Montgomery, AL. Photo taken by the author, 15 Feb. 2025.

Black History Month gives us an opportunity to celebrate the accomplishments of African Americans.  But too often we treat it as separate from the rest of American History.  The two can’t be segregated from each other.  Our nation’s treatment of Black people pops up everywhere in American history.  That is the first major conclusion I drew from the 12-day trip my wife and I took to see Civil Rights memorial sites and museums in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana.  Let me explain why.

What does a typical American learn about the history of Black Americans?  Here are some of the things they might know: The transatlantic slave trade brought enslaved people to America.  The slave ships were awful.  The Southern states were slave states.  The Northern states won the Civil War and ended slavery.  After the Civil War, Black people continued to be treated as second-class citizens and were sometimes lynched.  Brown vs. Board of Education ended segregation in schools.  Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus, setting off the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which was led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  (How did it end?  Hmm.)  College students protested and brought an end to lunch counter segregation.  John Lewis and others were badly beaten on the Selma bridge in the fight for voting rights.  Lyndon Johnson signed a civil rights bill into law.

That simplistic history focuses on a few details in a way that misses the big picture.

First, it leaves out the vast number of people who were part of the story.  I have told a few of their stories in these articles: Find a Need and Fill It – Civil Rights Leader A.G. Gaston, Foot Soldiers for Justice, and Nonviolence – Effective Methods Inspired by Christ.  But thousands of individuals played important roles, for good and ill.  Political and social institutions also played key roles.

Second, that summary fails to show how embedded Black history is in all of American history.  Read on to see how.

African American history is central to American history

The story of America is a story of Black and White intertwined.  They are connected like our two lungs or the chambers of our heart.  If we treat African American history as a separate thing that we can ponder occasionally and then set aside as we focus on the rest of American history, we don’t understand our history.  Here are some examples:

The “free” North profited from slavery

• Slavery was not just practiced in the South.  Slavery was allowed and protected by law in almost every colony prior to American independence, and in 1776, slavery was still permitted in some Northern states.

• The trans-Atlantic slave trade was not driven solely by Europe.  This trafficking in humans was welcomed and promoted by businessmen in the American North.  For example, human traffickers from Rhode Island embarked on dozens of voyages to Africa, where they kidnapped slaves, chained them and confined them in deadly holding pens in the bowels of their ships, and sold them for profit in the Western Hemisphere.

• Slaves were bought and sold in the North.  New York City was a prolific site for the sale of slaves until 1827.  This trafficking in humans was conducted right out in the open, under the protection of the laws of the state, and New Yorkers got rich from it.

National laws supported slavery

• The federal (national) government, which included the Northern states, facilitated the expansion of slavery into new territories.  In Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, the government offered federal land (land that was torn away from Native Americans) to White men who could prove that they had enough slaves to run a successful plantation.  The more slaves they had, the more federal land they got.

• The Northern states also cooperated in efforts to hunt down former slaves who had successfully escaped to the North, allowing them to be dragged back to torturous punishment and continued bondage.  They were complicit in slavery.

Enslaved Black people built key infrastructure that benefitted the entire nation

• Enslaved Black Americans built many of the monuments we take pride in, including the Capitol and the White House, as well as state capitol buildings.

• Enslaved Black Americans built rail lines, including the tracks for the very trains that would bring trafficked Black slaves from the upper South to Montgomery, AL, in a system of internal human trafficking that forced one million enslaved people from the upper South to the lower South.

• Enslaved Black Americans were forced to help build their enslavers’ cities: digging sewage lines and harbors and building homes.

After the Civil War, the national government allowed Black Americans to endure another 100+ years of discrimination

• The federal (national) government imposed segregation and unequal treatment in places where it did not exist in 1865, including the segregation of the federal civil service in 1913.

• Federal programs that are touted in history books for having helped millions of Americans move into the middle class were administered in ways that often excluded Black Americans, including federal housing programs, mortgage loan programs, GI education and housing benefits, and agricultural programs.

• Despite the clear language and intent of the Civil Rights Amendments in the Constitution, the federal government allowed Southern states to enforce laws prohibiting Black people from marrying White people, going to school with White people, eating with White people, going to the theater with White people, using the same bathrooms and drinking fountains as White people, and even playing cards with White people – all as part of a broader system of White domination that was explicitly defended and ferociously enforced by White supremacist politicians.

• Southern states were allowed to enact laws that disproportionately imprisoned Black people and then rented them out as, essentially, slave labor for the benefit of White people and the state treasury.  Several states have prisons that were notorious for this practice.

• For more than 150 years after the Civil War, Congress considered and refused to pass anti-lynching laws more than 200 times.

Northern states also practiced segregation

• Northern states passed laws treating Black people as second-class citizens.  For example, they enforced policies preventing Black people from living in so-called “White” neighborhoods in San Francisco, Seattle, Detroit, Chicago, Baltimore, and many other cities.

• Northern cities enforced “Whites only” policies in business establishments and theaters and mandated segregated schools.  The Brown vs. Board of Education decision ordering the desegregation of schools included segregation cases from Kansas (not a former slave state) and Delaware (not a Southern state).

• Many cities throughout the North, Midwest, and West had sundown laws prohibiting Black people from staying in their towns overnight. 

• Northern governments did little to stop White riots that killed Black people and destroyed Black neighborhoods in Tulsa, St. Louis, Chicago, and many other cities.  They also did little to prevent or prosecute lynchings while these acts of racial terror were perpetrated in almost every state in the nation – including Northern and Western states.

Honesty in telling your nation’s history is a Biblical value

Whenever people in the Bible talked about their history, they frankly told the whole truth – the good, the bad, and the ugly.  They included the glorious moments when their heroes did mighty deeds and God saved them, and they included the shameful times when the people and their leaders disobeyed God’s laws and ignored God’s consistent demand for justice.

We see this honesty in the telling of their history all over the Bible – for example, in Nehemiah 9, Jeremiah 2, Ezekiel 20, Daniel 9, and Psalms 78 and 106.

The Jewish people preserved in their Scriptures – as a history of their people – the stories where their ancestors got it right and the stories where they got it wrong.  They didn’t push the stories of their nation’s misdeeds into a separate section.  They didn’t minimize the wrongdoing as an aberration or pretend that it was only a minor part of their nation’s history.  They preserved the whole story, and passed it on to us as a unified whole.

We should do the same in telling our own history.

Black history and White history are all part of one American history

You can’t tell an accurate history of the United States if you segregate the stories of people of color as though those stories are not central to the telling of our nation’s history.  The question of how to treat Black people has been a central part of the American story throughout our history, and any attempt to sidebar that story creates a false history.

White city councils, White state officials, White members of Congress, White presidents, and White judges spent an inordinate amount of time writing and enforcing discriminatory laws to shape what Black people could and could not do in this country for hundreds of years.  The volume of laws they passed and enforced shows that Black Americans have been a primary concern (some would say an obsessive concern) of White Americans throughout our nation’s history.

You can’t tell a truthful American history if you don’t tell African American history every step of the way.

In short: You don’t really know America’s history if you don’t know its Black history.

That is the first major conclusion I reached from my Civil Rights trip.  My second major conclusion, which is covered in my next post, is: Unless you’re an African American history scholar, Black history in America is even uglier than you’ve been told – and more ennobling.