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The African-American Century
How Black Americans Have Shaped Our Century
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by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Simon & Schuster Trade
Due/Published
November 2000, 414 pages,
cloth
ISBN
0684864142
At the start of the twentieth century, few could predict the remarkable political, social, and economic achievements that African Americans would make over the next hundred years. Fewer still could imagine that American culture as we know it would be so dramatically shaped by the descendants of Africa...and of slavery. Here, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Cornel West document those contributions in an amazing historical narrative of the years they've dubbed "the African-American century."
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Review
"This book is a tribute to the historical contributions of people of African descent in the United States...here in this colossal American empire and past American century lived a great people who strove with much dignity and discernible effect to be true to themselves and their ideals of freedom against overwhelming odds and adverse circumstances." -- From the Introduction
Too often these types of group biographies fail to retain a cohesiveness. They include several interesting individual selections but lack a strong guiding narrative. Gates and West however, have managed to include a wide representation of prominent African Americans from the worlds of the arts, politics, literature, entertainment, and sports whose lives reflect the richness and diversity of a people and their courage as well as the promise and limitations of American democracy. From Martin Luther King, Jr. to Muhammad Ali to Toni Morrison to Louis Armstrong and many others, African Americans fundamentally changed the way the nation and the world thought about politics, culture, history, and the dignity of the individual. The stories included in this work exemplify the potential for the individual within American democrcacy but also expose the racism, cruelty, and failures of the nation.
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