“ Until the lions have their own historians,” the African proverb says,“ tales of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.”
This year, our nation will celebrate the 250th anniversary of its founding. There will be much talk about how people like Thomas Jefferson, Francis Scott Key, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and Ronald Reagan moved this nation closer to becoming“ a more perfect union.”
But you can also expect that this great celebration, which is being planned by the congressionally created U. S. Semiquicentennial Commission and the White House’ s Task Force 250, will give short shrift to the inextricable role that people of African descent played in shaping this nation.
They might ignore them, but we won’ t. In this issue of the Morgan Global Journalism Review, we have divided the 250 years of the United States’ existence into five 50-year blocks of time and assigned a gifted Black journalist or academic to write an essay about those years from a Black perspective.
This cover story, which we have titled“ America at 250 – A Black Retrospective,” will tell you about the people, places and events that challenged the hypocrisy of Thomas Jefferson writing in the Declaration of Independence that“ all men are created equal” while owning more than 600 slaves over his lifetime, one of whom he started sleeping with when she was just 14 years old.
More than a parallel telling of this country’ s 250-year history, our cover story is an interwoven account of how slavery, the Jim Crow era, lynchings and Black resistance to these things strengthened the claim of Black people to the full rights of U. S. citizenship.
In our exploration of the two and one-half centuries of this nation’ s existence, we examine events like Reconstruction, the Harlem Renaissance, the civil rights movement and repeated demonstrations of Black patriotism in wartime.
We tell you this and much, much more in this issue of the Morgan Global Journalism Review. I hope you’ ll enjoy it – and I hope you will share this publication with others who have not yet discovered our digital magazine.
This book is our history, as told by us.
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