This book is based on a formerly published book as retold through the research of Henry Louis Gates Jr., the famous Black historian and genealogist. There are a hundred profiles of famous Negro people and unfortunately for the original author and Gates, very very few were female.
What I find most valuable in the book is the information that may sway us to facing reality while researching family. I take an interest in ALL U.S. research (i.e. American History and Genealogy) and that, of course, includes the ancestry of present day Americans who consider themselves Black or think or know they have some Black ancestry. I'm also interested in busting myths because untruths often mean a lot of frustration and wasted time.
Some interesting excerpts:
Chapter 2 : How many Africans were taken to the United States during the entire history of the slave trade?
Excerpt page 9 : The most comprehensive analysis of shipping records over the course of the slave trade is the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. While the editors are careful to say that all their figures are estimates, they are the proverbial gold standard in the study of the slave trade. According to the database, between 1525 and 1866, 12.5 million Africans were shipped to the New World. Some 10.7 million survived the dreaded Middle Passage, disembarking in North America, the Caribbean, and South American.
How many of these 10.7 million Africans were shipped directly to North American? Only about 388,000 ...
Chapter 13: Where was the first black town in what is now the United States?
Excerpt page 10 : In the late 1600's, Spanish Florida exercised a powerful draw on the collective imagination of slaves to the north in Carolina. It was their first Promised Land. At east since 1687, if slaves made it down to Florida and professed believe in "the True Faith " - Roman Catholicism - they were declared to be free. News of this haven spread through the slave grapevine.
Sometime between March and November 1738, Spanish settlers in Florida formed a town named Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose, two miles to the north of St. Augustine... (It got to be called Fort Mose.)
Chapter 16 : Where was the first underground railroad? (Spanish American history here!)
Excerpt page 44 : After 1830 slaves in the southern states fled north to gain their freedom. (After previously fleeing south.)
Excerpt cage 45 : .... in 1693, the Spanish King, Charles II, attempting to systematically undermine the economy of the Carolinas, decreed that Florida would be a religious sanctuary for fugitive slaves seeking "the true faith."....(men and women slaves included).
Chapter 19 "How much African ancestry does the average African American have? (autosomal DNA tests)
Excerpt pages 52-53 : ... According to 23and Me.com the average African American is 73.2 percent sub-Saharan African 24 percent European, and only 0.8 percent Native American.
For African American males, still another astonishing fact ha been revealed about their paternal ancestry - their father's father's father's line through their Y-DNA: a whopping 35 percent of all African- American men descend from a white male ancestor who fathered a mulatto child sometime in the slavery era,...
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