The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross

The earliest Africans, both slave and free; the emergence of plantation slavery in the American South; freedom movements abound in the late 18th-century.

Black lives change dramatically following the American Revolution; individuals including Harriet Tubman, Richard Allen and Frederick Douglass push the issue of slavery to the forefront of national politics.

Blacks flee plantations to serve in the United States Colored Troops; after emancipation, blacks seek economic, political and civil rights.

Blacks search for opportunities in the North and the West; black arts and culture grow in spite of Jim Crow.

Blacks returning from World War II continue to face racial violence on the home front; Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat on a city bus in 1955; Martin Luther King Jr. promotes a nonviolent approach to integrate blacks and whites.

Class disparity threatens to split the black community in the late 1960s; economic and political forces isolate the black urban poor; many issues remain unresolved, despite the election of America's first black president in 2008.