"Undeniably there": rethinking Black presence in the American past

Abstract

UNTIL RELATIVELY RECENTLY, OUR ANTEBELLUM, AFRICAN AMERICAN ancestors have been stereotyped as a monolithic mass: according to the narrative outlined in most high school American history classes, before the Civil War all black people in the United States were enslaved, illiterate and without significant distinctions in background, attitudes, experience, power or culture. In the past three decades, the fiction of this perspective has been exposed repeatedly as scholars of African American history, literature and culture have uncovered archival sources that allow new and different stories to be told about the lives of early African Americans in the United States. In the 1970s, studies of slave communities in the rural South such as John W. Blassingame's The Slave Community (1972), Eugene D. Genovese's Roll Jordan Roll (1974) and Herbert Gutman's The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom (1976) offered powerful evidence of the great diversity that existed even within the common experience of slavery. These have been