African-American Culture and History

It would be a great mistake to begin a discussion of Black  Culture with the arrival of twenty enslaved Africans who were chained to a Dutch man o' war that landed in Viginia in 1619.

It would also be a great mistake to say that the inhumanity of slavery succeeded in obliterating any traces of African culture. Never forget that despite bitter yearnings for what was lost the "song of (an) atavistic land"endured.
(Afro-American Fragments, Langston Hughes)

In The Slave Community in the Antebellum South; A Story of Survival, John Blassingame writes:

The sophisticated research of ethno-musicologists, anthropologists, and folklorists, coupled with the evidence in a large amount of primary sources, suggests that African culture was more resistant to the bludgeon that was slavery than historians have hitherto suspected.  Sometimes retention was facilitated by the adoption of a hands-off policy by planters with African-born slaves.
 

Africa lies several thousand miles southeast of North American shores.  In ignorance  Europeans referred to this land of immense size and geographical diversity as the "Dark Continent", but in reality the land was the home of a diverse people with well established  political, economic, and military systems. A majority of the Africans brought to North America belonged to the Ibo, Ewe, Biafada, Bakang, Wolof, Bambara, Idibio, Serer and Arada peoples.
Members of the larger, well-organized African States like the Yoruba, Dahomey, Ashanti, Fulani, Mandingo and Hausa had centralized, fast-moving cavalries and well-disciplioned armies that rarely fell into slave traders' hands.  It took the British, even with modern weapons, until the early 1900s to conquer these states

 Arthur Schomburg's  collection began as a  response to a shallow comment that Africa had made no great contributions to civilization.  Nothing could be further from the truth. Just as historical revisions now reveal that the so called Dark Ages often preserved and embellished the Greco-Roman Culture which was so dramatically revitalized in the Renaissance,the New Negro Movement, or the Harlem Renaissance, articulated by Alain Locke in 1925 must be seen as a phenomena that was nurtured in older movements which shaped and defined the Black experience.

Information about Africa's involvment in Pre-Columbian America can be found in:

They Came Before Columbus, by  Ivan Van Sertima

History of the Conquest of Mexico, by Orozco y Berra

The Art of Terracotta Pottery in Pre-Columbian South and Central America, by Alexander Von Wuthenau
 

Key Ideas about early African Culture can be found by researching information on:

Olmec Stone heads found in Mexico (800-7770 BC)

Abubakari the Second (circa 1311) and Trans-Atlantic Voyages

The establishmnet of Monasteries in Ireland by Egyptian monks
 
 

Students of African-American History can  embark on this more expansive study to  avoid the trap of waiting until February's "African Heritage Month."to understand that Africa's story weaves  through American History from the earliest times.