Before the Mayflower: A History of Black America; Sixth Revised Edition 6th (sixth) Revised by Bennett, Lerone (1993) Hardcover

Great book. Awesome read.

I loved this book. It was very informative. I am going to buy them and give as gifts to my family and friends.

I could not find my original hard copy which I needed for a class I am teaching. Excellent information provided. The paperback was more expensive than expected but I was in need.

Excellent!!!! Every Black American should read this book. The book tells the history that African Americans have been denied for, much to long.

Great Product!

I owned this wonderful book in 1965 (paperback). I lost it years ago and I am so happy to have it back (hard cover)! Now, I can share it with my children who are in their 20’s and 30’s. This book should be read or referenced in middle school, high school, and/orcollege history courses.

Also met the standard I was looking from it.

This book tells American History from the perspective of a people whose story is constantly overwritten and distorted. It’s very informative on the effort black Americans have to make generation after generation just to live within a world that don’t want to acknowledge their presence or influence in the world.

Excellent book

Lerone Bennett Jr. (1928-2018) was an African-American scholar, author and social historian who worked for JET magazine, and was the long-time executive editor of Ebony magazine. He also served as a visiting professor of history at Northwestern University.He wrote in the Preface of this 1962 book, “This book grew out of a series of articles which were published originally in Ebony magazine. The book… deals with the trials and triumphs of a group of Americans whose roots in the American soil are deeper than those of the Puritans who arrived on the celebrated Mayflower a year after a Dutch ‘man of war’ deposited twenty Negroes at Jamestown. This is a history of ‘the other Americans’ and how they came to North America and what happened to them when they got here. The story begins in Africa with the great empires of the Sudan and Nile Valley and ends with the Second Reconstruction which Martin Luther King, Jr. and the ‘sit-in’ generation are fashioning in the North and South. The story deals with the rise and growth of slavery and segregation and the continuing efforts of Negro Americans to answer the segregation and the continuing efforts of Negro Americans to answer the question of the Jewish poet of captivity: ‘How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?’ This history is founded on the work of scholars and specialists and is designed for the average reader.”He recounts in the first chapter, “When the human drama opened, Africans were on the scene and acting. For a long time, in fact, the only people on the scene were Africans. For some 600,000 years, Africa and Africans led the world. Were these people who gave the world fire and tools and cultivated grain—were they Negroes? The ancient bones are silent. It is possible, indeed, probable that they were dark-skinned. More than that cannot be said at this time. Civilization started in the great river valleys of Africa and Asia… In the Nile Valley, that beginning was an African as well as an Asian achievement. Negroes, or people who would be considered Negroes today, were among the first people to use tools, paint pictures, plant seeds and worship gods.” (Pg. 5)He explains, “How did the Egyptians see themselves? They painted themselves in three colors: black, reddish-brown, yellow. The color white was available to them, but they used it to portray blue-eyed, white-skinned foreigners. One of the great murals of Egyptian art is the procession from a tomb of Thebes … The Egyptians and Ethiopians in the procession are painted in the usual brown and black colors. Thirty-seven whites in the procession are rendered in white tones. Who were they? G.A. Hoskins said they were probably ‘white slaves of the king of Ethiopia sent to the Egyptian king …’ Great Negro scholars… have insisted that the ancient Egyptians… were a mixed race which presented the same physical types and color ranges as American Negroes… Most scholars deny that the Egyptians were Negroes, despite the testimony of an eyewitness. Herodotus, the Greek historian visited the country some 500 years before Bethlehem. The Egyptians, he said, were ‘black and curly-haired.’ … it is clear from the record that a large portion of the ancient Egyptians—at least one-third—were undoubted Negroes. Many, perhaps most, of the soldiers were Negroes.” (Pg. 7)He reports, “The development of large-scale sugar planting gave the slave trade a cruel twist. In a few years, droves of Negroes were crossing the Atlantic each year and the soil of Africa, America and Europe was drenched with their blood.. An estimated million of these Negroes found their way to the land that became the United States of America. But the first black immigrants… were not slaves… They came… under duress and pressure. They found a system (indentured servitude) which enabled poor white men to come to America and sell their services for a stipulated number of years to planters.” (Pg. 36)He continues, “Where did these people come from? … Most of the Negro slaves from an area … on the West Coast of Africa… Some slaves were captured in native wars and sold to … black slave merchants who sold them to Europeans. Some were kidnaped by Europeans and Africans. Some were sold into slavery for infractions of native laws… Africans as well as Europeans were involved in the slave trade. There has been a systematic attempt, however, to overemphasize the degree of African involvement. The picture of a whole continent of Africans kidnapping and selling each other for rum, guns, and gew-gaws is wide of the mark. It is true that some Africans, corrupted by Europe’s insatiable desire for human flesh, sold their countrymen. But many Africans … loathed the whole business and forbade their subjects to take part in it.” (Pg. 38-39)He explains that in the 1770s, “Slavery died in the north as a direct result of forces set in motion by the Rights of Man movement. By legislative decrees and by court action, Negro slaves were decreed free men. In some states, legislative emancipation was a gradual process extending over several years… It seemed for a time that slavery would die in the South, but the invention of the cotton gin and other mechanical devices cooled the Revolutionary ardor of Southern patriots.” (Pg. 63) Later, he adds, “Not all Negroes were slaves (there was a substantial free population, even in the South); nor did all slaves work on plantations. (Some 500,000 worked in cities as domestics, skilled artisans and factory hands.) Some Negroes even owned slaves.” (Pg. 72)He asks, “Why didn’t they revolt? Commit suicide? Or stand like a man and be cut down? Slaves did all these things and more. They did them so often that it is nothing short of amazing that the myth of the docile Negro persists. There were repeated insurrections and there is solid evidence that the South lived in constant fear of the ‘docile’ slaves.” (Pg. 91)During the Civil War, “fourteen hundred free Negroes … had organized a regiment of free black Confederate soldiers. [Union General Ben] Butler sent for the leaders of the regiment… He wanted to know if Negroes would fight. ‘General,’ the spokesman said, ‘we come of a fighting race. Our fathers were brought here because they were captured in war, and in hand to hand fights, too. We are willing to fight… the only cowardly blood we have got in our veins is the white blood.’” (Pg. 169)In the early days of Reconstruction, “Negroes and whites were going to school together, riding on street cars together and cohabiting, in and out of wedlock, (Negro men were marrying white women in the South, but it was fashionable, investigators reported, for white man to marry Negro women.) An interracial board was running the University of South Carolina where a Negro professor … was teaching white and black youth metaphysics and logic.” (Pg. 184)But then he recounts the fall of Reconstruction: “To justify the revolutionary methods by which these governments were overthrown, Southerners manufactured and perpetuated the twin myths of corruption and ignorance. Negro politicians, so the myths run, were corrupt or ignorant. So many Negroes stole so much that it was necessary to cheat and kill in order to restore ‘honest’ governments. Not only historians but Negroes accepted the myths… But, say the critics, Negro leaders were corrupt. The evidence on this subject is so confusing as to be almost worthless. Nine-tenths of the evidence is hearsay, innuendo… Most of the rest would not be admissible in the meanest police court…“The conclusion is inescapable. The monstrous crime of Reconstruction was equality… It would be a mistake, however, to imply that no Negroes stole… Only the naïve, or… the cynical are horrified when some Negroes do what some white men are doing… There were Negro scoundrels. There were Negro reformers. And there were negro wheelers and dealers whose morals were no better—and no worse—than the morals of politicians in contemporary Chicago… Not corruption but honesty, not ignorance but brilliance horrified racists during the Reconstruction era. If there was anything Southern whites feared more than bad Negro government, it was good Negro government.” (Pg. 200-202)Of Booker T. Washington’s 1895 ‘Atlanta Compromise’ speech, he comments, “The speech… made Washington famous and set the tone for Negro leadership for some twenty years. Washington renounced social and political equality, temporarily anyway. What did he expect in return? Support for Negro education., Washingtonians say, and end to the maiming and killings and a square deal in the economic field. It didn’t turn out that way.” (Pg. 229) But later, “the tide changed. Booker T. Washington himself seemed to be aware that the sun had set on submission. Before his death in … 1915, he had moved considerably toward the position of his early critics. His final magazine article, printed after his death, was an open attack on segregation.” (Pg. 287)Of the Civil Rights era, he states, “Creative leadership creates a climate in which other men some forward to lead. In the wake of Booker T. Washington came lesser men, who lacked his skills but saw very well indeed that collaboration paid off (within certain narrow limits). For a generation or more, the bended knee and the bowed head were accepted techniques of leadership in some circles. In the wake of [Martin Luther] King same men and women who saw very well indeed that the masses would respond if only someone would lead.” (Pg. 317)He concludes, “On the eve of the 100th anniversary of the… Emancipation Proclamation, America was again at the turning of the fork… as in the days of Lincoln, the Negro was at the center of a crucial national debate. The terms of the debate were being dictated by a brooding militance on the part of the vast majority of Negroes, by anger, pessimism and despair on the part of a growing minority; by a realization on the part of an increasing number of whites that the salvation not only of the America city but also of American civilization depends, to a great extent, on a genuine confrontation with Thomas Jefferson’s massive ALL.” (Pg. 325-326)This book will be “must reading” for anyone studying the history of African Americans in this country.

Mr. Lerone Bennett, Jr. took me there with this body of work. I first encountered this book in 1999, and I was floored because school history books are flat out lies, this book took me on a trip back in time to the coasts of Africa, a few islands in between then to the cotton gins of the south. This is the most invasive description of black history ever depicted in a book. This book should be used as historical reference to show students truth in the history of America and its founding fathers.

great for historians and those that are interested in history

Life Changing – Knowledge is POWER

For my home library.

This book is very informational.

This is just a great book in understanding the history of blacks before the Mayflower came to America. I would recommend this book for classroom education, because of its educational content. I first read this book many years ago and really enjoyed it. I ordered this book as a gift so this person could read this great book. Again, I think that this book should be part of our educational system required reading.

The book was right on time. this was a gift. I was very please.

Mr. Lerone Bennett, Jr. took me there with this body of work. I first encountered this book in 1999, and I was floored because school history books are flat out lies, this book took me on a trip back in time to the coasts of Africa, a few islands in between then to the cotton gins of the south. This is the most invasive description of black history ever depicted in a book. This book should be used as historical reference to show students truth in the history of America and its founding fathers.

Mr. Lerone Bennett, Jr. took me there with this body of work. I first encountered this book in 1999, and I was floored because school history books are flat out lies, this book took me on a trip back in time to the coasts of Africa, a few islands in between then to the cotton gins of the south. This is the most invasive description of black history ever depicted in a book. This book should be used as historical reference to show students truth in the history of America and its founding fathers.

Thankful for the e-book version. I read this in the summer before my freshman year of high school (almost 25 years ago). Superb then superb now. We are more than Alex Haley’s Roots.

I strongly disagree with the reviewer who said this book should be read by all Black Americans. Yes they should read it, but Black Americans aren’t the only ones. White Americans, probably Whites in all parts of the world, need to read it even more. The unjust treatment Whites have been accorded and continue to accord to Blacks should be known and understood by every White. I am White and have not felt prejudice against Blacks. I try to convince people, that blacks are people too! Most whites still do not believe this, even today. They frequently will accept a single Black or a Black couple. They do not as easily accept Blacks as a whole group.

A must for your library.

As Described

great for historians and those that are interested in history

I read this book forty years ago when I was in high school. It was an engaging book and it set the tone for my academic work for years, from getting me a “5” on my US History AP exam to Fulbright work on Immigration in Europe. It was a staple on my parents’ bookshelf and was lent to their students as well.

I want to thank you. I was looking for this book and I found it at Good Will.

Wonderful book! Read origin over 30 years ago. Greatly appreciate being able to replace a lost volume.

A must read for everyone. A great reference book.

Excellent history and reference information. Lerone Bennett is an excellent historian. I own a copy, and this copy was a gift for a friend who is a history buff.

Thankful for the e-book version. I read this in the summer before my freshman year of high school (almost 25 years ago). Superb then superb now. We are more than Alex Haley’s Roots.

Before the Mayflower: A History pf Black America-This book exceeded my expectations. I taught me many things I did not know.

Good book, very informative.

love it , love it

A must have.

A good Description of the past lives of Black Americans up until the 20th and 21st century. Very informative and exciting to read.

Even though this was written in the early 1960’s, it’s fundamental reframing of the history of slavery in America from 1619 forward goes a long way to correcting the historical record.

I used this book to clarify life in America as to what American is supposed to be.

The truth thru clear understanding…never cared to know history bc it was always negative…nut this explans the truth behind the story