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The Black History Book

by DK (various), 2021

Published: 2022.04.12

Home > Book Reviews > Black History > The Black History Book

 

Photo by Wil C. Fry.

★★★ (of 5)

(* 315 pages does not include a Directory of influential Black people and movements [316-325], Index [326-334], Quote Attributions [335], or Acknowledgements [336], but DOES include [unusually] two title pages, the copyright page, a list of contributors, the Table Of Contents [6-8], Foreword [9], and Introduction [10-13].)

 

If you’ve been following my book reviews, you know I’ve absorbed a bit of Black History (see the list here) over the past couple of years. I read W.E.B. Du Bois’s classic The Souls Of Black Folk from 1903, more modern history books on subjects ranging from the Great Migration to the over-policing of Black communities, a biography of a runaway slave, a history of the Tulsa Race Massacre, and others. All of them have been informative and eye-opening. (Note: all of this has been in an attempt to fill in the gaps in my education, left there intentionally by white people who designed history courses to rarely see things from anyone else’s point of view.) But, while some of these books tried to throw in a little context or background (the best at this was Revolution In Our Time, a history of the Black Panthers), none of them were all-encompassing of Black History — each was about a specific topic or era or person or movement or organization.

DK’s The Black History Book is the first one (and only one I’ve heard of so far) that makes an attempt to cover simply Black History, from the beginning to now. It begins deep in pre-history, when the earliest known Homo sapiens emerged in Africa, and notes that all humans — all over the planet — are descended from African ancestors. Then it moves on to the dawn of civilization, covering the early civilizations in places now known as Egypt, Sudan, Tunisia, Ethiopia, and so on. (Anecdote: I first heard of these places and peoples, not in public school, but in church — studying the Bible and its contextual times.) It covers the migrations of peoples and language groups, the rise and fall of various kingdoms, the pre-colonial slave-trade (often war spoils), the spread of first Christianity and then Islam across (mostly) northern and northeastern Africa, the first contacts with Europeans, the Atlantic slave trade, the invention of “race”, colonization, the Diaspora, and more — right up to the modern day: Black Lives Matter protests, ongoing civil rights battles for Black people around the globe, the exclusion (and later inclusion) of LGBTQ+ Black people in these matters, and the state of Africa and the Diaspora today.

It was a Herculean effort — impressive in scope and the research that must have been involved. The (at least 10) contributors are professors of history at universities around the world, journalists, and anthropologists, all accomplished in their fields — which either focus primarily on or interact heavily with Black history.

First the good: The sheer amount of information I was never taught (and haven’t read elsewhere in my ongoing self-education) was enormous. Even if my schoolday history books never said it outright (and I’m sure some of them did), we were left with the impression that most of Africa (excepting the Mediterranean coast) was hunter-gather tribes in mud huts with bows and arrows — up to the time that European colonists arrived. Instead, the history of the continent is rich with a multitude of varied kingdoms and empires, civilizations, coinage, written languages, metalwork, complex religious and political constructs, etc. — dating back into antiquity many rivaling or surpassing the civilizations we were taught about. I think this is what stuck with me the most.

Just as an example of the above, the Ethiopian churches carved out of the bedrock are so impressive (created around 1200 CE) that photos of them should be shown to any school child learning world history, alongside the things we did see. Made from “scoriaceous basalt”, these structures are below ground level because the people who built them first chiseled away the trenches around giant blocks of solid rock and then carefully carved up the cubical or rectangular prism rocks into windows, doors, rooms, and other features. And they connected the eleven churches with tunnels and trenches. The site remains in use to this day by the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, making them some of the oldest continuously used religious buildings in the world. I’d never heard of them before.

Another thing emphasized in the book (which I have read before, but again it was in church and not in public school) is that “slavery” as practiced in Africa before Europeans invaded was not inheritable like the slavery instituted in the Americas.

I also liked that the compilers of this book worked to tie the threads together from beginning to end. One example is the overwhelming numbers of worldwide protestors that came out in 2020 in support of Black Lives Matter — the largest single-issue protest in the history of the planet — with the increasing awareness of anti-Black government structures and personal attitudes in many nations.

But the overall effort wasn’t entirely successful for me. For one thing, no sources are listed. Yes, occasionally the text will refer to a specific government document such as the Emancipation Proclamation, but the vast majority of facts in the book are simply stated. (I’m confident most are actually facts, based on the few checks I ran, and the parts that agreed with previous studies of mine.) Any nonfiction book of this magnitude and importance needs a source list, a bibliography, or at least a “further reading” section. As an editorial choice, deciding not to list sources is always a mistake. For this alone, I remove a full point.

Other, far less significant problems arose too. The layout is distracting — it’s the standard DK layout, which is easy to see if comparing with another DK book (which I did, because my daughter has a DK science book), and it’s not good. It’s attractive, from a visual standpoint, but makes reading difficult. Where the actual text squeezes between graphs, photos, maps, timelines, pullout quotes, and more, it can be hard to follow. Pullout quotes were another issue. Many pages have them, but they’re not actually pulled from the text on that page — they’re just related quotations stuck in with large print (probably for the purpose of taking up space). Most pages have a shaded/colored section with more related text: usually expanding some theme or biography from the main text, but often repeating quite a bit. And every section has an “In Context” column that’s very nearly pointless. It lists a few historical “Before” incidents and a few related “After” events. But both are at the beginning of each section, before the reader even knows what the chapter is really about. And often the “related” incidents are hundreds of years earlier or hundreds of years afterward, rather than things leading directly to the events in question. (And often the “In Context” information is repeated in the text — which leads me to believe this was another space-filler, serving only to crowd the already bursting pages.)

One last thing that bugged me through the portions on slavery in the Americas was the editorial choice to use “required”, as in the following sentence from page 138: “Brazil’s farms and mines required large numbers of enslaved workers.” First, it just isn’t true. It was the business model that required slavery, the plan to increase profits by using enslaved workers instead of paid workers, and the greed of the owners and operators. Neither the farms nor the mines required slavery — both would work just fine with paid labor from willing participants, with the only change being that those actually doing the work would see some benefit from it, while those who set up the business would see lower profits and be forced to have a more humane business model. (Like many minimum wage jobs today, perhaps. As the saying goes, “If you can’t afford to pay your employees a living wage, maybe you’re not fit to run a business.”) The book did make an effort to use modern language (“enslaved persons” rather than “slaves”, for example) and ideology throughout, this one oversight was fairly glaring.

 

Conclusion

I think I would give this book five stars if (1) sources were listed and (2) the layout wasn’t so much like a USA Today newspaper. And the massive amount of information here that I never heard in public schools suggests a need for books like this. (Though I know from having children currently in school that history classes today pay a lot more attention to Black History, they could probably still stand to do better.)

 





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