CHAPTER I.

FIRST NOTIONS of AFRICA
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     SOME years ago, in a book called "Up From Slavery," I tried to tell the story of my own life.  While I was at work upon that book the thought frequently occurred to me that nearly all that I was writing about myself might just as well have been written of hundreds of others, who began their life, as I did mine, in slavery.  The difficulties I had experienced and the opportunities I had discovered, all that I had learned, felt and done, others likewise had experienced and others had done.  In short, it seemed to me, that what I had put into the book, "Up From Slavery," was, in a very definite way, an epitome of the history of my race, at least in the early stages of its awakening and in the evolution through which it is now passing.
     This thought suggested another, and I asked myself why it would not be possible to sketch the history of hte Negro people in America in much the same way that I had tried to write the story of my

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own life, telling mostly the things that I knew of my own personal knowledge or through my acquaintance with persons and events, and adding to that what I have been able to learn form tradition and form books.  In a certain way the second book, if I were able to carry out my design, might be regarded as the sequel of the first, telling the story of a struggle through two and one-half centuries of slavery, and during a period of something more than forty years of freedom, which had elsewhere been condensed into the limits of a single lifetime.  This is, then, the task which I have set myself in the pages which follow.
     There comes a time, I imagine,

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