The Northern African American Community

This chapter provides the background necessary for an examination of the values of African Americans as they developed prior to the Civil War. It describes the Northern African American community, the types of individuals who made up that community and the social, economic and political conditions they faced. Signs of organized community life for African Americans can be detected in the largest cities at least from the Revolutionary War period. The rise of modern historiography in America found historians such as James Ford Rhodes generally upholding a Northern viewpoint on slavery while commiserating with the South for the "evils" of Reconstruction. Prejudice against African Americans was the force underlying legal iniquities and the extra-legal discrimination that dogged them in their social, political and economic life in the North. The African American community began in the North in the seventeenth century with the introduction of slavery into the middle and New England colonies.