African American history before the Civil War

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Eighteenth century and before

Ivan van Sertima, They Came before Columbus
A Review by Femi Akomolafe, 19 January 1995. Contrary to the scholarly consensus, van Sertima argues for presence of Blacks in America prior to Columbus. [This thesis was never broadly accepted].
Blacks Also Owned Miles of US Pre-Columbian Lands
By Paul Barton, editorial, TOMRIC Agency (Dar es Salaam), 25 May 2001. [An example of the van Sertima thesis that Africans travelled to the New World before Columbus. The thesis is not widely supported. Note that there was extensive cohabitation between African Americans and Native Americans, so that some tribes are primarily African in genetic terms, but politically Native American.]
Chicago Historical Information: 1779 Jean Baptiste Point du Sable
From the Municipal Reference Collection, Chicago Public Library, rev. March 1995. In 1779, the pioneer settler of Chicago, Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, an African American from Santo Domingo, appears to have been a man of good taste and refinement, a husbandman, a carpenter, a cooper, a miller, and probably a distiller.
African Reburial Rite Planned in NYC
By Richard Pyle, Associated Press, [ca. 1991]. More than 400 slaves and free blacks will be reinterred next month in the Manhattan graveyard where their bones previously lay unknown for 200 years or more. The African Burial Ground project.
Bury our Ancestors with DIGNITY!
By Michael O. Allen, Daily News, 15 November 2001. Another casualty of the World Trade Center terror attacks has emerged: the controversial African Burial Ground project. Some 100 boxes of burial ground artifacts were recovered from a laboratory in the basement of 6 World Trade Center, which was destroyed in the attacks, but it is unknown how many more relics are missing.

The nineteenth century to the Civil War

The Gabriel Prosser slave revolt
By Herbert Aptheker, People's Weekly World, 21 February 2002. About the Gabriel Prosser slave revolt of 1800 in Virginia. A biography of the author, Herbert Aptheker.
Richmond program to honor ‘Gabriel's Rebellion’
By Phil Wilayto, Richmond Va., Workers World, 14 October 2004. On 30 August 1800, thousands of enslaved Black people, led by a 24-year-old blacksmith named Gabriel, had planned to march into Richmond and seize the capitol and governor in a bid to end slavery in Virginia.
Gabriel's Rebellion: Richard honors slave uprising of 1800
Special to Workers World, Workers World. 23 October 2003. Death or Liberty! was to have been the rallying cry of Gabriel's Rebellion, a carefully planned but tragically aborted mass uprising against slavery in Virginia in the summer of 1800.
Monticello Group Accepts Hemings Connection
By Leef Smith, The Washington Post, 27 January 2000. The keepers of Thomas Jefferson's Monticello plantation announced yesterday that they have concluded that he probably fathered at least one and perhaps all of his slave Sally Hemings's six children.
Black Women Abolitionists, A Study in Activism, 1828–1860, by Shirley J. Yee (1992)
Reviewed by Dave Silver, 6 January 1998. An excellent resource on the lives and struggles of lesser known Black Women Abolitionists in addition to Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth.
Survivors of the Christiana Revolt
New York Publlic Library, n.d. On September 11, 1851, near the Quaker village of Christiana, DE, Maryland slaveholder, his friends and three U.S. marshals confront a hundred slaves.