Books: Non-Fiction

Before the Mayflower: A History of Black America

Book — Non-fiction. By Lerone Bennett Jr. 2016 (originally published in 1962). 736 pages.
A detailed history and analysis of African American history in the United States.

Time Periods: All US History
Themes: African American

A detailed history and analysis of African American history in the United States.

The Black experience in America — starting from its origins in western Africa up to the present day — is examined in this seminal study by Lerone Bennett Jr. The entire historical timeline of African Americans is addressed, from the Colonial period through the civil rights upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s.

Before the Mayflower grew out of a series of articles Bennett published in Ebony magazine regarding “the trials and triumphs of a group of Americans whose roots in the American soil are deeper than the roots of the Puritans who arrived on the celebrated Mayflower a year after a ‘Dutch man of war’ deposited twenty Negroes at Jamestown.” Bennett’s history is infused with a desire to set the record straight about Black contributions to the Americas and about the powerful Africans of antiquity. [Description by publisher.]

ISBN: 9780874850079 | Johnson Publishing Company