by St. Clair Drake
Professor Drake's Black Folk Here and There is essential reading for anyone concerned with the history and legacy of slavery and race in the contemporary world. This book provides the best review of the specialized literature on race and slavery, making available a great deal of knowledge heretofore confined to university libraries. St. Clair Drake was one of the deans of Black Studies as well as American Sociology, and he applied that rare background to an analysis and evaluation of modern theories of race and racism. His main targets are the theory of black inferiority and the theory of universal black contemptability. Did every civilization develop racism against "blacks"? In order to challenge that idea presented by some psychologists and historians, including the prize winning Professor Carl Degler, Drake reviews the history of Egypt, Ethiopia, Europe and Christianity in the Middle Ages, slavery and Islam, and the rise of the Atlantic Slave Trade. And he finds that there was no universal contempt for blacks. The evaluation of blacks throughout the ages, depended on their status in various civilizations. The high point of black social and cultural status was in ancient Egypt and Ethiopia as well as during the Middle Ages as revealed in such folklore as Prester John and the Black Madonna. However, with the emergence of the Atlantic slave trade as the modern world took shape, Black Africans took on a distinct ly degraded social and cultural status that was spread by modern communications throughout the world. In terms of encyclopedic knowledge on this subject and hard hitting analysis, Drake's study is unrivaled! As a professor of history, I use it as the best introduction to the global problems of race and racism left behind by modern slavery and the Atlantic slave trade. No one knew this subject or wrote with the scope as did Professor Drake.
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