400 years after slavery began, African Americans still lack identity | Opinion

Ben Crump
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Tallahassee attorney Ben Crump, center, recently returned from a trip with his fraternity to Africa.

If there is a common thread that unifies African Americans, it’s not just the color of our skin. Actually, it’s not the presence of anything at all, but the absence of something – our history, our understanding of where we come from, our story as a people.

The Atlantic slave trade robbed African Americans of more than our freedom. It robbed us of our identity, our deep knowing of who we are.

As Malcolm X said, “Just as a tree without roots is dead, a people without history or cultural roots also becomes a dead people.”

So for me, traveling to Africa on the 400th anniversary of the first slave ship’s arrival on the coast of Virginia was a potent and emotional milestone on the journey to recover our identity as a people.

Gazing out the Door of No Return from the House of Slaves on Goree Island, Senegal, I could vividly imagine what my long-ago ancestor felt as he or she was dragged from the place of their birth against their will, stripped away from everyone they loved and everything they knew.

Tallahassee attorney Ben Crump, with head in hands, recently returned from a trip with his fraternity to Africa.

The graphic inhumanity of the slave trade was revealed to me in excruciating detail, picturing 300 men stacked on top of each other in a room smaller than my guest room for an agonizing three-month journey across the ocean – the infamous Middle Passage.

If I had to reduce this remarkable journey to one life-changing epiphany, it was my respect for the profound strength and survival abilities of our ancestors who became the foundation of our nation’s African American population.

Virtually every woman was raped. If they resisted, they were put in a cage with no food or water, told they would “submit or die.” Of the estimated 60 million slaves transported through the Middle Passage, only about 12 million survived – our great grandfathers and grandmothers.

If not for the strength of our people, we would not have survived nearly 250 years of slavery, Jim Crow laws, poverty, mass incarceration, social injustice, inadequate schools, police brutality and an irrefutable devaluation of black lives.

I find it ironic that guns played an instrumental role in the ability of white people to subject Africans to their rule. Yet today, despite the second amendment protections of the U.S. Constitution, black people who lawfully carry a gun with appropriate documentation disproportionately wind up dead in encounters with police, even when they do everything right. And their deaths are met with no justice in criminal or civil courts – and no defense by the NRA.


It was enlightening and moving to encounter Africa as the motherland. I experienced something like familial bonds when my Omega Psi Phi brothers and I built and dedicated water wells that will transform the lives of our brothers and sisters in several villages for generations.

Unlike white Americans, who can trace their ancestry through genealogical records, whose European history is replete with Irish songs and folktales, Italian food and family traditions, or Greek dances and wedding rituals, the African American history is largely a blank slate.

It is time to write on that tablet, to redeem and rewrite African American history going forward.

America is built on lofty ideals that it has failed to live up to. If we can admit that, and acknowledge the injustices that are still replete among us, the possibility exists for a better future, a redemption.

Four hundred years is a long enough shadow. The time to write a different ending to our story is now.

Ben Crump is founder and principal of Ben Crump Law, BenCrump.com and is known for representing the parents of Trayvon Martin.

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