I purchased this book on a visit to the National Museum of African-American History and Culture in October 2018, a few years after this museum opened.  Our visit to the museum was short because of time constraints, only about four hours, and all the rest of the family moved through the entire museum during those few hours and saw at least something of every exhibit and floor.  I, however, always having to read everything in order to understand, in those hours, I almost made it through the bottom-most floor of the three lower floors presenting the chronological history of the African-American experience.  However, even with just the small segment of the museum I managed to view, I was stunned by the coherency and detail of the historical narrative of the exhibits.  Even more absolutely stunning, was the revelation of what I – a college history major – really did not know about the African-American experience, about this overwhelmingly important historical past of the nation I was born into, a history that still insistently reverberates today within the mind and soul of the nation.  I used the last half-hour of our quickly diminishing time in the museum to run up to the bookstore to look for a book on the museum to take home – finding this book – and then ran through the rest of the museum to at least get a glimpse of everything I will have to see on my next visit to DC.

This book consists of four chapters:

1. Slavery and Freedom,

2. The Struggle for Freedom,

3. Making a Way Out of No Way,

4. The African American Influence on American Culture.

In these four chapters, the book faithfully follows and illustrates the narrative of the entire museum.  The museum and the book describes the origins of the slave trade, the voyage from Africa and enslavement in the New World and the American colonies which were to eventually become the United States, the civil war, reconstruction, the struggle for justice and civil rights through the 20^th Century to the election of President Obama, with the last chapter highlighting the significant contribution of the African-American community and individuals to the overall American culture.

This book, an essential read for anyone wanting to have a good overall-plus foundation in understanding the experience of the African-American in our country’s history, presents a history that cannot be separated and isolated by itself, as the entire history of the United States is grounded essentially in the history of the black experience upon our soil.  There is no history about the United States, or of justice within our nation, apart from the history of the African-American (and the Native-American) and their treatment upon the North American continent.  Their history, at times, as actively suppressed as the African-Americans themselves have been as a people, is one of the historical bedrocks of our history, of our nation and culture.

The book illustrates the cruelties of slavery and the depths to which our economy and political and social systems were rooted in the importation, control, and lasting oppression and exploitation of black labor, both as slaves and long after emancipation.  It explains in plain and yet eloquent language, the horrors potentially always surrounding the African-American, and chronicles not just the struggles of the black community, but also the overwhelming contributions of the African-American community to the essential culture of the United States as a whole. 

After reading the book, my deepest thought is that I am not reading the history of a separate people, but that I am reading of my own history, of my nation, as the history of the African-American resides within every thread of the historic fabric of our nation, the history of us all.  This is our history.

This book – Dream A World Anew – fills in the gaps – huge gaps for most of us – of our nation’s history, and offers a wide opportunity to learn and grow within our minds and conscience.  Its pages open many historical windows and doors, assisting us to appreciate, and therefore appropriate, the contributions of the African-American to the still on-going struggle for justice and equality for us all.  This book – well written and intelligent, and wonderfully illustrated – is a book gifted with knowledge within its words helping us to expand and deepen our understanding of the history of oppression of the African-American within our land, a knowledge, also encouraging within its song, a desire of our hearts to step, however tentative, towards the healing of the fracturing racial divisions of our beleaguered nation, if we will be so moved.

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Books Read, Thoughts Upon Them – Writing In The Shade Of Trees