INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR
Molefi Kete Asante
I clearly remember the time I first met Malcolm X. It
was August 1963. It was after I had met Martin Luther King, Jr. The setting
was a small 
restaurant
in Washington, D.C., and the great man walked into the crowded space and
waited like everyone else to be served. Looking over at my table, he pointed
his finger at me and said, "Don't you forget your history."
Not forgetting my history is the reason that I found this book, African American History, A Journey of Liberation, to be the most exciting project I have ever undertaken. It flows from my belief that the records regarding African Americans must be examined from the inside, from the standpoint of African people being active agents of history, not objects on the fringes of Europe. This book is a new history or historiography, a new way of writing about history.
I
have not forgotten my history but, instead, have worked on ways to improve
the transmission of that history to others. African American history is
not static, but dynamic, moving us through time transgenerationally and
transcontinentally. Students who read this book are introduced to the origins
of the African American population, its many cultural streams, and its
rich legacy of resistance to injustice and inequality. They find themselves
in the presence of the authentic voices of the African people and, for
the first time, see the honest achievements, failures, and victories of
a people who were transported across the sea to the Americas and the Caribbean.
There is true nobility here. In the United States, that nobility is woven
into the tapestry of our nation, stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to
the Pacific across a land in which African people have embedded their own
designs.
My task in writing this book was to capture the African
agency, the action, the excitement of this marvelous history- Too often,
when I conduct workshops for schoolteachers and we talk about the significant
events in our nation's history, the first events that come to teachers'
minds are ones created by Europeans rather than Africans or African Americans.
After we discuss the need to view African American history from an African
center and then rethink and retalk our knowledge of history, focusing now
on an African center, the joy that inevitably swells up is amazing to 
me.
It shouldn't be, I suppose, for it is the joy of ownership, of seeing oneself
and one's ancestors as active agents creating and changing the history
of this nation, that overflows and stimulates a hunger to know more. It
is the same joy your students will know when they see that the ownership
of this history belongs to them. It is a strong American voice that has
been left out of the other histories that students have experienced; it
is a history written from inside an African center, in an African-centered
voice, praise-singing the ancestors whose lives are the substance of our
present and our future as it tells the honest story of the African American
in this country.
No, I have not forgotten my history. Join me now on a journey of great anguish and great joy. We have persevered on this journey of liberation, and I hope that, in the telling of this story from an African-centered voice, the journey will come alive in all its nobility and majesty and will be a liberating experience for every reader.