Customer Reviews

Black Saga: The African American Experience: A Chronology

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Black Saga is a book I turn to constantly when doing research for my books. I imagine I would cherish this book even if I weren't a writer. It is intelligent, compelling, and so comprehensive. It should be in every home and in every school--wherever there are learners and lovers of history.

A 600+ page chronology, year by year, of the black experience in America - from the first records of Africans on the continent onwards. If you have more than a passing interest in Black Studies, then this is an enriching resource. The entries are dense with information and well-written enough to be compelling to the casual peruser.

The book is one of the most rigorous and comprehensive presentations of the African American experience published. Arranged chronologically with social, economic, political, and demographic overviews for each decade, the book is the most unintimidating resources for learning about the African American experience. Black Saga is more than Black history; it is the African American experience. It is more than a chronology; it is more than 600 pages of compelling presentation of a rich part of American history. A "Must Read" for any person who wants to know about the African American experience. It, too, is essential reading for all students of the African American experience. The richness of Black Saga has spawned a "Black Saga Competition" which engages elementary and middle school students to learn more about the African American experience and to compete as teams to determine who knows most about the African American experience. Your web experience will expose you to the many testimonials by teachers, principals, parents, and students, and you will see what Henry Louis Gates, Jr. at Harvard University and Gregory Kane of the Baltimore Sun says about Black Saga. There is a quiz in the webpage that might help you understand how much you know about the African American experience. Dr. Christian says the book and the competition is all about educating the American population about the African American experience, and helping to ensure that this rich part is included in our American history.

Black Saga is an excellent book to assist young people to become more productive, contributing adults. It is important for young people to learn and understand their complete history. As a teacher, I found this book to be an excellent reference source, and an important part of any history class.

Black Saga is a must have for every African American family. It is a comprehensive approach to the African American Experience. It is easy to read and I enjoyed reading it. I love it, and I think you will too.

There are a lot of good aspects to this "feel good" version of African American history. For instance, it begins at the beginning with the three great empires of Africa: Ghana, Mali, and Songhai. It touches on slavery in all of the Americas, not just in North America proper, and it deals extensively with the Atlantic slave trade. This is all essential contextual background.

However, once the European Settlers come to America, an interesting shift takes place, the black experience fades into the background. It becomes little more than a footnote to the larger European reality. It is not even as much as a subtext of that larger struggle. From this point onwards, until the turn of the 19th Century that is, American history becomes seamlessly fragmented into slave history and European or white history. Thereafter, it is "the black struggle" against an "unnamed" imaginary enemy. The contextualization is constantly readjusted in the background so as to constantly present a sanitized version of the constant stream of brutal events that make up frontier life, then post-Reconstruction life and most of the rest of American history, including contemporary American history. Beyond the overly stigmatized South, there are no villains, only heroes.

An important question the shaping of history in this way raised for me is this: Does it make sense to present American History as bifurcated or split into "Black History" and "White (or European) History" when the reality of every fact is that they are but one seamless historical reality? Have we not yet reached the point where the black experience cannot (and should not) be seen as being separate and distinct from the white experience? What use does this partitioning of history into separate parts really serve other than avoiding pointing the fingers at those responsible for the darker side of our history? Don't we want to know the name of the villains as well as the heroes?

I do not pretend to know the answers to these questions, but I do believe that the time has come for the two separate "split-off black and white negatives" to be merged into one single integrated picture.

Constantly readjusting the contextual background so as to present a continuously "pretty profile" of black history, and omitting the negative side of white history altogether, further confuses both, rather than clarifys either history. Neither white nor black history is just a collection of "pretty deeds" tuck away in the national archives to be trotted out and celebrated as part of the patriot spirit whenever it is deemed convenient. Most history is decidedly dirty and decidedly inconvenient. All history, is brutal and without sentimentality. It is the narrative that always rises out of, but always above the ashes that are the facts.

Yet, in history, as in law there is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. And then there is the disjointed, fragmented, disconnected, embellished and compromised truth.

Perhaps unintentionally, this book fits into the latter box. It has two not so transparent motives always stalking the text in the background. The first and most obvious one is the pathological need to always celebrate the black experience by telling an uplifting story. The second is to avoid blaming anyone (meaning of course white Americans) for the mess that black history represents. No matter what the facts on the ground say, we must find an uplifting way to twist and eventually produce a "pretty story."

All of these crushing psychological needs to twist the story, place a heavy burden on the historian. He or she must choose to yield or overthrow this burden. I am afraid this author yielded in both instances.

Three Stars.

I'm proofing a lesson on African American History and our writer quoted the South Carolina Slave code from this book p. 105 (year 1830). However, the list there is NOT the Carolina Slave Code and in fact contradicts it. The author(s) used a list from Stroud's 1827 Sketch of the Laws Relating to Slavery. See Stroud's second edition p. 39 for how he contrasts his list of "corollaries" with the real laws in each of the states. God help us if other students, educators, and writers use this book for their own research.