These falsifiers deliver a version of the past without class struggle, the very force that drives history. The great Black abolitionist Frederick Douglass had a fitting answer. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.
Power concedes nothing without a demand.
It never did and it never will. African American History Month is an effort to reclaim this buried past and specifically to uncover the element of struggle that propels history. It is an anthology compiled by Manning Marable, professor of history at Columbia University, and Leith Mullings, professor of anthropology at City University of New York. It consists of essays, polemics, speeches, letters, poems and other primary source materials by Black writers covering 300 years. Beginning as enslaved Africans from various locations and ethnic and language groups across the continent of Africa, within several generations they found their voice, meaning, and consciousness as a special people.