African American History: A Very Short Introduction by Jonathan Scott Holloway (review)

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• African American History: A Very Short Introduction by Jonathan Scott Holloway
• William D. Jones

African American History: A Very Short Introduction. By Jonathan Scott Holloway. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023. Pp. xxiv, 152. Paper, $12.99, ISBN 978-0-19-091515-5.)

It is no simple task to write a short and comprehensive narrative of more than four hundred years of history, but Jonathan Scott Holloway has delivered in African American History: A Very Short Introduction. In telling the story of Black people in the United States, Holloway identifies struggle as a central theme. For four centuries, African Americans have struggled to be considered human and civilized, and they have struggled to be considered Americans and citizens. In his first chapter, on colonial slavery, the Atlantic slave trade, and the birth of the United States, Holloway explains the contradictions at the heart of the United States—how a nation founded with the rhetoric of freedom allowed enslavement. Holloway hits his stride in the second chapter, which focuses on resistance to enslavement, including the Black abolitionist movement. Here he uses many stories of well-known individuals (Frederick Douglass, David Walker, Denmark Vesey, Maria Stewart, Harriet Jacobs, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Tubman, to name a few) to illustrate his points and larger themes. Holloway employs this effective tactic throughout the book, except in his section on Reconstruction, which reads most like a traditional textbook.

Not only does focusing on a central theme allow Holloway to synthesize a complex and lengthy history, but it also allows him to weave together different strands of Black history that he might otherwise have addressed on their own. For instance, Holloway’s chapters on the twentieth century blend the stories of political activists with those of artists and musicians, allowing him to tell the story of the Great Migration, the Red Summer, and Marcus Garvey alongside Alain Locke and the Harlem Renaissance without the narrative feeling strained or disjointed. The result is a brief but comprehensive account that also illustrates historical complexity and contingency.

Because Holloway has chosen to understand African American history through the struggle for rights and equal recognition, he never allows the reader to become complacent over victories and satisfied with progress. This is no Whig history. Holloway includes the backlash to progress—from the Redeemers who designed Jim Crow laws to the so-called silent majority and anti–affirmative action activists who sought to repulse the advancements of the civil rights movement. This choice provides great dividends at the end of the book, when Holloway discusses Barack Obama’s election and presidency and the opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, as well as the murders of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, the massacre at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the birth of the Black Lives Matter movement. The COVID-19 pandemic and the national protests over police brutality after George Floyd’s murder in the summer of 2020 are absent, but it is not difficult to connect Holloway’s narrative of African American history to these and even more recent events. Hopefully, skilled teachers will help students who read this slim volume do just that. [End Page 406]

William D. Jones Sam Houston State University Copyright © 2024 The Southern Historical Association ...