Black History Month - Voices from Slavery

The theme for the 35th anniversary of Black History Month, "African Americans and the Civil War," was chosen by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History to commemorate "the efforts of people of African descent to destroy slavery and inaugurate universal freedom in the United States." By the end of the Civil War, African American soldiers comprised about 10% of the Union Army and had participated in dozens of major battles. Nearly 40,000 died throughout the course of the war. Sixteen were awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, and many others carried out unheralded acts of bravery that led to the eventual downfall of the Confederacy.

 Notably, the experiences of many African Americans during this period were documented by the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). This New Deal program recruited unemployed writers to conduct interviews with thousands of former slaves, several of whom witnessed the events and consequences of the Civil War firsthand. An estimated 100,000 former slaves were still living in the United States during this period and the federal government employed mostly white writers to write down, and in some cases make audio recordings of, former slaves' oral histories. Many of the interview subjects were in their eighties and nineties when the WPA Slave Narrative Collection of the FWP was conducted. While many of their memoirs discussed their myriad experiences under the Civil War, many of them also discussed their folk beliefs, emancipation, Reconstruction, and the establishment of the Jim Crow South.

Decades later, these WPA narratives were compiled for the first time by scholar George P. Rawick, which resulted in the definitive 41-volume work The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, published by Greenwood Press during 1972–1979. The series' introductory volume, From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community, was groundbreaking in that it was one of the first books to show that slaves did not play passive roles during the era of slavery and the Civil War, but rather functioned as primary actors in shaping their own history.

Find out more about African Americans during the Civil War and browse through more than 1,000 newly added WPA slave narratives on ABC-CLIO's African American Experience database. If you are not already a subscriber, click here for a free trial.


Excerpted from "Black History Month Marks 35th Anniversary: Background." The American Mosaic: The African American Experience. ABC-CLIO, 2011. Web. 7 Feb. 2011.

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Additional Resources

World of a Slave: Encyclopedia of the Material Life of Slaves in the United States

Martha B. Katz-Hyman and Kym S. Rice, Editors
Greenwood, 2010

World of a Slave was recently featured in The New York Times in an article titled "The Everyday Lives of American Slaves". Read the article here.

What the Slaves Ate: Recollections of African American Foods and Foodways from the Slave Narratives

Herbert C. Covey and Dwight Eisnach

Greenwood, 2009

The powerful, long-neglected testimony of former slaves places African American slave foods and foodways at the center of the complex social dynamics of the plantation South.

Kwanzaa: A Brief Overview

For many people throughout the world, the month of December is focused around the celebration of Christmas. Others celebrate Hanukkah. Another observance also takes place during the seven days from December 26 to January 1. Established in 1966 by Dr. Maulana Karenga, Kwanzaa is an African American celebration that focuses on culture, community, and family.

Karenga's Idea: Sprung from the Ashes

Karenga, currently a Black studies professor at California State University, Long Beach, founded Kwanzaa to be a nonreligious observance to encourage African Americans to connect with their African heritage and its traditions and to strengthen and deepen the bonds of family and community.

A defining moment in Karenga's founding of the Kwanzaa holiday was the Watts riots on August 11, 1965. The riot that broke out in an African American ghetto of South Central Los Angeles shocked the country; for many, it marked the first time the depth of African American anger toward social injustice became palpable. Further, its extent and ferocity swept across the country into other riots like the Chicago Race Riot of 1966. It was those events that convinced Karenga that a malaise had taken hold of black culture and that the rootlessness could be solved only by reconnecting African Americans with the African traditions lost since the transatlantic slave trade. He formed a movement called US (in opposition to "them") to promote black pride, and a year later, he established the cultural holiday that became Kwanzaa.

The word kwanza means "first" in the Pan-African language of Swahili and is a reference to the traditional African harvest ("first fruits") celebrations that date as far back as ancient Egypt. Because seven children wanted to represent the celebration in its earliest days, Karenga added the final "a" so the name would have seven letters. Seven also became an important number in the holiday's ideals: during the seven-day celebration, seven principles, known by the Swahili phrase Nguzo Saba, are emphasized. Those principles include umoja (unity), kujichagulia (self-determination), ujima (collective work and responsibility), ujamaa (cooperative economics), nia (purpose), kuumba (creativity), and imani (faith).

"I created Kwanzaa in the context of the black freedom movement," Karenga said later in an Ebony magazine interview. "We wanted to speak our own cultural truth to the world." Kwanzaa, he explained, reaffirms "our rootedness in Africa. It's stepping back to black! That was a strong push in the 1960s, getting back to roots."

Kwanzaa Controversy

In the more than four decades it has been celebrated, Kwanzaa has been the source of some great controversy, which primarily revolves around its meaning and its participants. While Kwanzaa was established to refocus thought on community and cultural values (rather than material gift giving), concerns about its overcommercialization have long been a topic of debate among those who celebrate Kwanzaa.

Especially since the 1990s, when Kwanzaa's popularity soared within the African American community, books about Kwanzaa have abounded, as have Web sites that feature Kwanzaa items for sale. Many retail stores throughout the United States prepare Kwanzaa displays for the holidays in an attempt to "mine" the Kwanzaa market. Since one of the seven principles of Kwanzaa is cooperative economics—meaning, in part, support within the African American community for African American businesses and products—the apparent "co-opting" of Kwanzaa by white-owned businesses has been particularly criticized.

The Spread of Kwanzaa

In the years after the holiday was established, Karenga traveled around the United States to promote the celebration of the holiday to African Americans. He was joined by Amiri Baraka, who promoted Kwanzaa at meetings of the Congress of African Peoples. Over the years, Kwanzaa has spread to various Caribbean nations and other countries by individuals of African descent as well as to millions of Africans throughout the diaspora. People in such diverse nation-states as Canada, the United Kingdom, India, and Turkey now observe Kwanzaa, and by the end of the 20th century, an estimated 15-20 million people in various countries celebrated the holiday.

Though it has expanded and changed throughout the years, Kwanzaa has remained focused on the remembrance of black heritage and civil rights.

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"Kwanzaa: From Civil Rights to Spiritual Rites: Background." The American Mosaic: The African American Experience. ABC-CLIO, 2010. Web. 15 Dec. 2010.

For more information on Kwanzaa check out the African American Experience database.