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xi Preface The history of African Americans begins in West Africa. When their ancestors left its shores during the transatlantic slave trade beginning in the early sixteenth ­ century, the area was inhabited by dif­fer­ent ethnic groups who spoke dif­fer­ent languages and had dif­fer­ent belief systems. Some groups believed in many gods while ­ others adhered to the tenets of Islam. Slavery and other forms of servitude existed in Africa with the vast majority of slaves in West Africa being prisoners of war. By the time the En­glish began settlement in the Chesapeake region of ­ Virginia in 1619, the slave trade had become a complex, exploitative triangular trade between the New World (which provided raw materials like cotton, tobacco, sugar, and rice), Eu­rope (which provided finished products), and Africa (which provided slaves). The largest number of enslaved Africans arrived in Brazil. The second-­largest number ­ were bound for the Ca­rib­bean Islands. Roughly 500,000 enslaved Africans arrived in what came known to be the United States. Their numbers increased by importation and natu­ral increase as the North American En­glish colonies became more dependent on forced ­ labor in the late seventeenth and early eigh­teenth centu- ries. Throughout the 1700s and 1800s, through interactions with Eu­ ro ­ pe­ans and Native Americans, the descendants of West Africans became African Americans with their distinctive culture, religion, worldview, and re­sis­tance to slavery, racism, and white supremacy. African American history is as diverse as black ­people’s skin color and accents and as rich and complicated as jazz. ­ These two volumes do not cover ­every single event in the past that has been significant to the history of African Americans in the United States ­ today. Certainly, ­ there ­ were difficult choices to make, and not all the pivotal moments of this collective past have made it into ­these pages. Nonetheless, we have tried to capture at least some of the most noteworthy happenings over the past seven centuries.