Publisher's Synopsis
The story recounting the history of African Americans has been told by griots (African storytellers), historians, participants, and observers. This writer has continued the tradition by relating the experiences of African Americans from their cultural roots in West Africa and accompanying them on their journey across the Atlantic Ocean to the sugarcane plantations in the Americas, the fishing towns of New England, and the tobacco farms in the Chesapeake. The story embraces the variety of experiences of these Africans in the Americas: their organized resistance in the runaway camps of the Palmares in Brazil, their individual successes such as Philadelphia sailmaker James Forten, New England poet Lucy Terry, soldier Peter Salem, astronomer/mathematician Benjamin Banneker, evangelist Jarena Lee, conductor on the Underground Railroad Harriet Tubman, and fugitive slave and newspaper editor Frederick Douglass.
