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STRIVING TO MAKE IT MY HOME by Marion L. Starkey

STRIVING TO MAKE IT MY HOME

By

Publisher: Norton

This ancestral history of the American Negro chronicles the days of the Guinea Coast slave trade through the era of emancipation and has amazingly little to do with current polemics on Civil Rights. It is instead a straightforward narrative in simple, almost naive, storytelling of the seventeenth century slave market, partially told from the firsthand accounts of Mungo Part, a Scottish adventurer along the Niger, and of Gustavus Vassa, a slave-boy from Benin who later paid and made his own way as a literate freedman. The often compassionately fair and seldom antagonistically foul treatment of slaves in Colonial America is only the background for the later extremes of dignified citizenship and bloody rebellion that the Southern Negroes pursued as their consciousness of themselves as Americans found faith in the Jeffersonian credos. The biblical ""Slave, Obey your Master"" became the spiritual ""Let My People Go"", and the most sophisticated plans for bloodthirsty revolt were formulated by a respected Negro freedman in Charleston (Vesey's Rebellion), while the venerable Free African Society in Philadelphia graciously declined to aid in perpetrating a mass return of freedmen to Liberia. Negro sedition and African Colonization went out of style with Lincoln-- the end of slavery but the beginning of the battle. History readers will find it most accessible, and so will young people-- and there's not a mention of Birmingham.