Why Do Standard Textbooks Hide the True Story of How Black Americans Built the Economy?

What Myths About the Founding Fathers Does Michael Harriot Challenge in Black AF History?

Explore the un-whitewashed reality of the United States in this summary of Michael Harriot’s Black AF History. Discover how Black Americans drove the national economy, led their own emancipation during the Civil War, and shaped democracy despite centuries of systemic erasure.

Ready to learn the history that your teachers missed? Click here to read the full summary and explore the resilience, genius, and true origins of the Black heroes who founded America.

Genres

History, Education, Society, Culture

Discover the stories of American history your teacher never taught – the revolutionaries, activists, inventors, and game-changers who got whitewashed out.

Black AF History (2025) offers an in-depth look at the documented stories of American history that reveal it through the perspectives of the Black Americans who built the original colonies, the national economy, and the country’s infrastructure long before the United States was even a country. It also tells the tale of the centuries that followed, through Civil War, Reconstruction, backlash, and progress to uncover the resilience and self determination of Black Americans.

The legendary stories about America are many: from midnight rides and a Boston tea party to the declaration of independence with the immortal words “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.” But to many who lived and worked on American soil at the time, those words rang hollow at best, and at worst were downright hypocritical.

That’s because there are other true American tales, like the arrival of the White Lion, or the founding of America’s first democracy by Ashanti warriors on the barrier islands off the shores of the Carolinas. There are stories of mighty heroes like Toussaint Louverture, the intellectual and revolutionary who sought to free the Haitian people from French colonialism, and forever shaped the culture of Louisiana in the process. And , the enslaved African in the household of Cotton Mather – yes, that Cotton Mather – who knew how to prevent smallpox, and who saved the struggling Massachusetts colonies during an outbreak that could have wiped them out.

You’ve likely not heard these stories because American history has been whitewashed to preserve only those tales that further the idea of white supremacy and enshrine it into law. The stories and perspectives of Black Americans have been systematically erased from the textbooks, and those who fought against slavery and equality were demonized, re-enslaved, or killed in mob violence on a national scale.

This summary illuminates the stories of some of those Americans. The ones whose knowledge, skills, and labor built the country from the ground up, but who were denied the fundamental humanity that would see them benefit from the fruits of their hard work. Because true history is a multi-hued tapestry, and the history of America has far more color than the textbooks ever let on.

Myth-busting some origin stories

From Columbus’s fateful voyage through to the Continental Congress, the founding of America has been a story about Europeans conquering a new land, bringing the brilliance of their culture to a new continent, and shedding liberty on everything they touched. But the real story isn’t that.

Like Jamestown in Virginia – argued to be the first British colony in the so-called New World. The English were in a hurry to get there ahead of the French, who might spread more Catholicism. But on April 26, 1607, when 104 Englishmen stumbled up to the gates of Tsenacommacah, in the territory known today as eastern Virginia, and declared it as their own – despite it being the home of 31 separately governed tribes – the locals thought they were nuts.

First, these invaders arrived too late in the season to plant any food, so chief Wahunsenacah and his people knew there would be trouble. The English didn’t know the land was experiencing a 700-year drought, either. Their leader, Captain John Smith, was a famous mercenary with no experience or skills besides making war.

Worse, the laborers that the English brought with them couldn’t live off the land. No skills to forage, fish, hunt – those basics that provided so well for the people of Tsenacommacah. But the passenger who brought tobacco seeds soon discovered that this cash crop loved Virginia soil. But with no one to plant or tend the crop, this discovery was useless.

Just three years after arriving, the colonists were starving to death, eating first their pets and then each other to stay alive. They had found no gold, no riches, and had failed to make a life for themselves. The colony’s private investors in England were screaming for their money back. Then something happened that turned the tide for Jamestown, and Britain’s entire colonial experiment.

In July 1619, a crew of 25 English privateers attacked the Spanish ship, San Juan Bautista, which was carrying more than 350 kidnapped Africans to Vera Cruz, Mexico. Stealing the cargo, they split them between two ships, the Treasurer and the White Lion. The latter headed for Virginia and landed at Point Comfort in August. The captain quickly negotiated cheap rates for the stolen people, and sold 20 living souls to the Jamestown supply officer, Abraham Piersey. In that moment, the fate of Jamestown, and the British colonies, was saved.

The story of Jamestown almost never includes the cannibalism, ignorance, and the complete dependence on indigenous cooperation for success. It never mentions the colony survived through theft, piracy, and enslaved Africans. And if you think that these Africans were stolen for their brute strength alone, think again. Because the human beings who arrived on the White Lion and Treasurer brought far more with them than just their bodies. They carried the skills and intellectual capital of generations. It was this that saved the fragile colonies.

Knowledge and power

With the almost overnight success of the Virginia colonies through kidnapped African knowledge and labor, the Governor got an idea. Instead of luring new English settlers by promising them riches, he could promise them a generous plot of farmland for every laborer they brought with them. The enterprising English worked out that bringing enslaved labor with them could lead to enormous grants of free property. America’s first get-rich-quick scheme was a smashing success – for white people.

By 1662, Virginia made it official: enslaved people’s children would also be enslaved from birth. For the first time in history, slavery was a race-based, multi-generational institution. Colonies further south in the Carolinas adopted this model too. Like the Virginia Colony, the Carolina territory faced a problem: they couldn’t seem to grow anything.

The colony had relied on indentured Irish laborers and English farmers to work the land – but they’d never seen soil like this. The brackish water meant that vegetables, tobacco, and most fruit wouldn’t grow. The region where the Atlantic ocean met the Ashley and Stono Rivers could really only grow one thing, but none of the English knew how.

Rice is a difficult crop. It needs water management from dams and levies. Mosquito-borne disease and backbreaking labor in the hot sun made it difficult and dangerous to cultivate. But Africans knew how – so the wealthy landowners hatched a plan. They sent ships to the “Rice Coast” of West Africa, to start kidnapping the experts and profit from growing rice on an industrial scale.

Of course, they got a few things wrong. While the West African region contained many with agricultural knowledge, not everyone was a specialist. And the microclimates in West Africa meant that individual cultures knew how to grow rice in their climates, not the humid Carolinas. There were entire rice cultures in West Africa, with specialized knowledge from generations built around the topographic and geographic features of each region. This was not directly transferable to a climate half a world away.

While wealthy landowners of the Carolinas did profit from their theft for generations, it took decades to realize that it was the women who held the specialized knowledge needed for growing rice. The number of enslaved women on plantations ballooned, and with them the possibility of creating more humans to enslave in the process.

By the time the first shots were fired in the American revolution a century later, Carolina had become the largest exporter of rice to England, the largest exporter of salted beef to the Caribbean, and was the richest of the British colonies in North America. It was also the biggest importer of enslaved humans in the colonies. White-owned farms like the Magnolia Plantation had grown to almost 2,000 acres, expanding entirely through the agricultural knowledge of the enslaved. And the work stayed deadly: plantation owners didn’t expect their workers to live beyond 19 years of age, but the wealth they accumulated in the process helped them feel just fine about it.

The Black American revolution

Long before the first shots were fired in the Revolutionary War, individuals enslaved in the colonies were fighting their own war for independence. Because there was no America yet, just a patchwork of colonies with different laws and governments, there were vast differences between the states that enterprising individuals could exploit.

In 1771 James Somerset, an enslaved African, escaped during a customs inspection while traveling through Massachusetts. When he was recaptured, he applied to the British court system there for relief. In Somerset v. Stewart, it was found that laws concerning slavery were not enforceable under British law, and Somerset was re-released. Immediately after, a dozen enslaved individuals applied to the courts for the same relief. Dozens more just took off before the court could change their minds.

When George Washington was named the commander of the fledgling Continental Army in 1775, he declared that despite many free black individuals fighting in state militias, his new army would be only white. Spotting an opportunity, Virginia’s loyalist Governor did the opposite – he offered any enslaved individual freedom if they joined the British army and fought the colonial insurrectionists.

Between a few hundred and a few thousand individuals responded. The numbers were somewhat skewed by those who declared they were off to join a regiment but then failed to show up for duty. But those who didn’t take the hasty exit from the revolutionary stage went on to play a starring role.

Like Colonel Titus Cornelius, who walked away from enslavement at the age of 21 to join Lord Dunmore’s regiment. Dunmore had realized that the sight of formerly enslaved soldiers with weapons could strike fear into the heart of the colonials, so he founded the Ethiopian Regiment, a British unit with uniforms emblazoned with sashes that declared “Liberty to Slaves.”

Titus had been recognized for his strategy in early skirmishes, and was soon promoted to an elite regiment in New Jersey known as the Black Brigade. There, he targeted military leaders and slave owners in the area with guerilla-style raids. They stole cattle and weapons – while rescuing the enslaved individuals – before burning the properties to the ground. His priorities meant that Cornelius was growing a network of newly-freed allies.

Further south in Charleston, more than 20,000 individuals un-enslaved themselves to join British Regiments. Many became part of the Black Pioneers, an all-black military unit. It was this success that caused Washington to reconsider his decision about an all-white Continental Army by 1777. Already wealthy landowners were sending their enslaved workers to fight in their stead. This, in turn, led states like Rhode Island to guarantee freedom for any enslaved individual who fought in the Revolutionary Army, leading to the first American all-Black military unit there. This move was followed quickly by other states, including Virginia.

In total, more than 100,000 enslaved individuals emancipated themselves in America’s war of Independence.

A Black emancipation proclamation

By 1860, near the start of the Civil war, over one million enslaved Americans represented the most powerful force in the nation. They were the producers of America’s largest exports, from rice to cotton, and drove the country’s GDP. But nations across Europe, as well as Canada and Mexico, had abolished slavery. In public opinion, slavery had gone from a “necessary” evil to a source of international shame.

The nation faced a crisis. If foreign enemies could mobilize enslaved individuals with no more than the promise of freedom, the country was at risk. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which allowed property owners to chase their escaped workers – even in Abolitionist states – fanned the flames. Any person of color could be grabbed off the street in Massachusetts or New York City and re-enslaved. Northern Abolitionists were outraged, southern enslavers were indignant at the world’s condemnation.

It was white abolitionist John Brown who kicked things off. Many consider his October 1859 attack on the US Armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, alongside 20 other freedom fighters attempting to spark an uprising, as the first skirmish of the Civil War. The uprising was quickly put down by a company of Marines. The participants were tried and hanged.

But two key figures, Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglas, had been quietly lending their support to John Brown. Both were self-emancipated through the Underground Railroad. Tubman became one of its most famous conductors. Yet there’s much more to that story.

Tubman had actively recruited for Brown’s uprising, providing both support and reconnaissance. If she hadn’t been ill at the time of the raid, she might have been arrested too. Instead, when the Southern States chose secession rather than give up their enslaved workforce, her networks helped thousands escape to enlist in the Union Army.

Major General David Hunter, just a few months into the war, ordered that anyone in the Confederacy committed to national unity could enlist in his regiment and be guaranteed freedom. Though Lincoln himself quickly rescinded the order, it was too late. While Tubman’s efforts in the Underground Railroad are infamous, few know that it was during her time with the military that she freed more individuals than the Railroad ever did. Freedom camps of Black soldiers popped up all over, and these freedom fighters were such a strategic advantage that the military took them seriously.

General Hunter certainly did. He often consulted with Tubman, whom he’d come to rely on as a skilled nurse, scout, and spy. It was these skills that caused her to become the first woman of any race to lead a US military operation. She led the assault known as the Combahee Ferry Raid in South Carolina in June, 1863. She managed to flee with an extra 150 self-emancipating new recruits in the process.

Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation didn’t free enslaved people – enslaved people were already emancipating themselves. Through large and small acts of rebellion, defiance, resistance. and bravery, the work was being done.

Reconstruction, interrupted

After the civil war, things were looking up. Southern landowners had forfeited their property with their treasonous secession, and their formerly enslaved workers were being granted plots of land on these plantations as payment for their services fighting the war. Education programs were introduced in Congress, to integrate the new citizens into society through a process known as Reconstruction. Then, a shot rang out.

When Lincoln was assassinated by white supremacist actor John Wilkes Booth, his Southern, former slave-owning vice president, Andrew Johnson, was sworn in. Instead of proceeding with reconstruction and prosecuting Southerners for treason, Johnson gave them their land back, and compensated them for their losses.

With this monumental backslide, southern states were emboldened to pass restrictive laws targeting only formerly enslaved populations. Grandfather clauses became law, which stated that only those whose grandfathers could vote before the civil war were now eligible to vote. Hard-won freedoms were unraveling into something much worse.

Allowed to propagate in the post-war decades, white supremacy became the unspoken theme of Confederate revisionist historians. A group of white southern women, the Daughters of the Confederacy, re-wrote Southern history about slavery, and erected monuments to the Confederacy across the country.

Black citizens faced the backlash of emboldened white supemacy in the form of lynching. Individuals who’d emancipated themselves now faced mob violence on an epic scale. Just a rumor that a Black man spoke with a white woman in the street could lead to him being dragged from his home, tied over a metal barrel, and roasted alive in front of cheering crowds. Or skinned alive and then hanged and dismembered. White people brought their families to lynchings for a day out and bought postcards as souvenirs of the experience.

Even with the passage of the first Civil Rights Act in 1875, no one paid any attention. President Ulysses Grant never enforced it, nor did the states. Jim Crow, the southern system of race segregation – so-called “separate but equal” – kept white supremacists emboldened for more than a century.

But that didn’t stop the momentum. Consider Ella Josephine Baker. Born in 1903, by 1930, she was already a powerful advocate for Black civil liberties. Named the Director of Branches for the NAACP in 1943, by 1952 she’d become the first female president of the New York chapter. After she helped to organize the Montgomery Bus Boycott, she moved to Atlanta, where she helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Coalition, or SCLC. But her leadership efforts were often squashed by the more prominent, patriarchal civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King. But she was far from cowed.

Recognizing the potential in the growing student movement, Baker invited students to an SCLC Conference headlined by Dr. King. But when it was her turn to speak, she urged more direct action and personal responsibility than Dr. King. Her words and efforts inspired the formation of a new organization: The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, one of the most successful civil rights organizations in US history.

Conclusion

In this summary to Black AF History by Michael Harriot, you’ve learned that the history of Black Americans has been conspicuously suppressed and erased from textbooks, mainstream histories, and the public record.

From the theft of the White Lion and Treasurer until long past the twentieth-century fight for civil rights, Black Americans have been instrumental in forging their own self-determination, survival, resilience, and success. Willing to fight on any side that would grant them basic human dignity, they emancipated themselves in massive numbers during the Revolutionary and Civil Wars.

Even when Reconstruction was abandoned and they faced lynching and mob violence, Black Americans mounted both individual and collective resistence. This lead to the downfall of Jim Crow segregation and the birth of the modern Civil Rights Movement.