Jonathan Scott Holloway

"Being American is, in part, an act of declaration, rooted in the principles that guided the establishment of this country and that have been rearticulated at different moments in its history: a faith in the idea of freedom and a pledge to respect liberty and justice for all. Relatedly, being American means, for many, membership in a community of citizens who believe in the rights of assembly, speech, and unfettered access to the ballot box. With an unsettling consistency, however, being American has also been defined in a negative way: not being black."

Dr Jonathan Scott Holloway, the current president of Rutgers University, my undergraduate alma mater, and the first African American to serve in that capacity in the school's 255 year history, is a U.S. historian and university administrator who was educated at Stanford and Yale, and taught and served as dean of Yale College and provost of Northwestern University before being chosen to lead Rutgers last summer.

in 'The Cause of Freedom', Dr Holloway provides a compelling and very readable account of the story of this country's Black residents, dating from the first known arrival of a Black man to this country in 1528, when Estevanico, a Moroccan member of the Spanish Narváez expedition, was one of four survivors who landed on the west coast of Florida, to the initial importation of slaves to Jamestown in August 1619, through to the Black Lives Matter movement. His primary aim is to determine what it means to be an American, a question that can have different answers depending on the respondent's ethnic and religious background and personal and family history in this country.

The book highlights the historical moments, themes and individuals, White and Black, who played major roles in the history of people of African descent in this country, with a particular focus on the Civil Rights Movement and the post-Civil Rights era, along with the Harlem Renaissance and the two most important public intellectuals in early 20th century America, Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois. From my past reading I was familiar with most of the information in this book, but there was also plenty that I didn't know, both about the people within it and information about those who I thought I knew.

'The Cause of Freedom' is an absolutely superb and essential addition to the written history of African Americans, which has 150 pages of text and can easily be read in one day. It would be an outstanding book for high school and college students to read, along with anyone else within and outside of the United States who desires a primer and a start off point to learn more about this perpetually timely and important topic.… (mehr)