The study of Africa began long before African studies in America. In the United States today the words ‘African studies’ imply a formalized, academic structure of centres, programmes, institutes, postgraduate theses, publications, professional associations, conferences, finances from the foundations, grants from the government, etc., etc. Three and a half centuries ago, when the first blacks came to the New World, the study of Africa in America was outrageously informal: the cherishing of the memories of the ancestral continent from which the slaves had been forced.

The period of Reconstruction in the South was marred by frequent outbreaks of racial violence and South Carolina undoubtedly achieved a certain notoriety in this respect. Yet this phenomenon of recurring violence – even in its best known manifestation, the Ku Klux Klan – has not really received much intensive study from either the ‘revisionist’ school of Reconstruction historians or any local historians of the South. There is still a great deal of uncertainty about the questions of why the Ku Klux Klan came into existence in the Southern states, and who organized and participated in its vigilante activities. These questions can be easily posed but, largely because of the lack of source materials which bear directly upon them, they have proved to be extremely difficult to answer satisfactorily.

The scope of the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, which celebrated, albeit a year late, the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus's discovery of America, ranged over many centuries, numerous nations and almost every type of human achievement. The 27 million people who came to the five months long Fair were able to see Grace Darling's boat or Spanish galleons of Columbus's time; they could follow the history of transport from coracles to cars; they could see the latest in Krupp's cannon and Bell's telephone in a classically styled Machinery Hall six times the size of the Coliseum. With the exception of Louis Sullivan's golden Transportation Pavilion, the buildings which housed the Fair, covered uniformly with staff, composed a classical ‘White City’, grouped round a complex of lagoons and fountains on Chicago's Lake Front.

At the end of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Nigger Jim is a free man. ‘Nothing More to Write’ Huck calls that final chapter. But for Jim, surely, it could only have been a beginning. Jim was now free to purchase his wife from off that neighbouring plantation, as he had planned all along ‘saying how the first thing he would do when he got to a free state he would go to saving up money and never spend a single cent…’ Now even Miss Watson's Jim could claim ‘a new name’, in token courtesy to that wayward spinster; and as Mr Watson maybe, if he could not buy his own two children, he might even yet have to ‘get an Ab'litionist to go and steal them’. Was not that a more likely outcome for Jim than more ‘howling adventures amongst the Injuns’ as planned by those youngsters, Huck and Tom?

Towards the end of his life, Langston Hughes wrote an article about Harlem during the 1920s. In his narration, he paused fondly over memories of Sugar Hill. At 409 Edgecombe, the address of the ‘tallest apartment house’ on the hill, lived Walter and Gladys White, who gave frequent parties for their friends; Aaron and Alta Douglas, who ‘ always had a bottle of ginger ale in the ice box for those who brought along refreshments’ Elmer Anderson Carter, who succeeded Charles S. Johnson to the editorship of Opportunity; and actor Ivan Sharpe and his wife Evie. Just below the hill, in the Dunbar Apartments, lived W. E. B. Du Bois as well as E. Simms Campbell, the cartoonist. Nearby was Dan Burley, a black journalist and a boogie-woogie piano player. Hughes recalled the excitement of those days: ‘Artists and writers were always running into each other on Sugar Hill and talking over their problems and wondering how they could get’ fellowships and grants from benevolent organizations. One evening, Hughes and six of his compatriots gathered in the Aaron Douglas apartment and decided to start a literary magazine,‘the better to express ourselves freely and independently – without interference from old heads, white or Negro.’ From that initial discussion at 409 Edgecombe came Fire in its one and only issue of November 1926. Two years later, some of the same persons began another literary magazine, this time called Harlem.

Writing in 1853 Harriet Beecher Stowe, defending the veracity of her famous novel, declared:

The worst abuse of slavery is its outrage upon the family; and as this writer views the subject it is one which is more notorious and undeniable than any other.