Negro people in American history

Written by one of America's great proletarian leaders, this book is unique since it accepts as a basis the identity of Afro-Americans and recounts their his tory, while at the same time relating their experience to the main phases of U.S. history as a whole.

African background, Abolitionists, Re construction, early people's conventions, the NAACP, Garveyism, the alliance with labor as well as other progressive movements are but a few of the areas covered. This is the only work now avail able which presents a Marxist interpreta tion of the entire course of Afro-American history.

The author accomplished a task which has not yet been undertaken successfully by other historians. Basic to his approach is the recognition of Afro-Americans as a people, created in the course of their experience in the United States, both as victims of and as fighters against national oppression aggravated by racism. He relates their history as a people not in the abstract, but in class and national terms to the evolution of American capitalism and the entire U.S. population. "The long and heroic struggle of the Negro people against the outrages to which they have been subjected is the greatest epic in our nation's history," Foster writes in his preface, "This struggle, carried on in the face of heart breaking difficulties, has brought the Negro people to real heights of heroism and splendid achievement. During the course of their long bitter uphill struggle, the American Negro people have welded themselves literally into a nation."

First published in 1954, some of the programmatic approaches discussed by Foster as of that time are necessarily modified by the new upsurge in the black liberation struggle since then, as well as by further struggle and economic and social changes. Nevertheless, the book is just as valuable today as when it first appeared as a guide to the interpretation of Afro-American history