From "From Slavery to Freedom" by John Hope Franklin ****

This basic history of the African American from pre-enslavement to the late 1960s is a classic on par with Lerone Bennett's. That one is arguably slightly easier reading, but this one at times has a certain poetry to it and also covers even more history. I chose to read the 1967 version (the third edition) rather than one of the many later editions that continue to come out every few years because the 1967 version would have been one the Black Panthers would have actually assigned in their later years.

Items that stood about regarding this book, as opposed to Bennett's: Franklin puts the Black United States in the context of Black America in general, so there are chapters on the Caribbean and Brazil. This gives one a better sense of the slave trade overall. Of note is the fact that in many of these other areas, the same sort of racism that became paramount to the continuation of slavery in the United States wasn't always present in some of these other colonies/nations. It's like we had to run a certain class of people down in order to continue to justify the manner in which we treated them--not so much in some other locales. A freedperson was just as much a citizen no matter the color of skin. That said, evidence doesn't always match up with such a claim. Some freedpeople joined with slaves in indepedence causes; some joined with the colonizers. It just depended. And likewise, darker skin, unfortunately, sometimes leads to racist impulses even elsewhere. In that sense, I think of the C. L. R. James book I read and how he puts African-descended people everywhere into a similar struggle.

As with Bennett's book, I also particularly enjoyed the portion of the work about Reconstruction. Bennett made clear many of the gains that were made during that period after the Civil War. Franklin doesn't seem as keen on those temporal improvements, focusing more on how short of ideal that were. What's more, he also writes a bit of the initial couple of years after the Civil War, which really in a way precede Reconstruction. It's like the South went right back to doing what it had been doing before, though with enslavement having a different name (many Confederates returned to government). The abuse heaped on former slaves is part of the reason the federal government ended up taking a firmer stand and even banning former Confederate officeholders for a time. But I hadn't ever really thought of that short gap between the war and Reconstruction; it really isn't talked about much.

The sections on the civil rights movement were interesting insofar as Franklin puts so much of that history together. I have read a lot about this period, but I realized I've rarely read about the various parts of the movement in the larger context--how sit-ins fit alongside marches alongside Freedom Bus Rides and so on. One thing I found interesting was the way that the state government tried to stop the Montgomery Bus Boycott by claiming the people were illegally interfering with business (seems utterly ridiculous: you MUST shop at/eat at/use this business--what kind of law is that?).