Download In Search of Our Roots: How 19 Extraordinary African Americans Reclaimed Their Past AudioBook Free
Unlike most white Us citizens who, if they are so inclined, can search their ancestral files, identifying who among their forebears was the first ever to set foot upon this country’s shores, most African Us citizens, in tracing their family’s previous, encounter some daunting obstructions. Slavery was a brutally effective nullifier of personality, willfully denying black men and women even their labels. Yet, from that legacy of slavery, there have sprung generations who’ve battled, thrived, and lived outstanding lives.
For too long, African Us citizens’ family trees and shrubs have been barren of branches, but, very recently, advanced genetic examining techniques, coupled with archival research, have begun to fill in the gaps. Here, scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., supported by at the very top team of geneticists and research workers, takes nineteen outstanding African Americans on a once unimaginable trip, tracing family sagas through U.S. history and back again to Africa.
Those whose recovered pasts collectively form an African American “people’s history” of the United States include superstars such as Oprah Winfrey, Whoopi Goldberg, Chris Rock, Don Cheadle, Chris Tucker, Morgan Freeman, Tina Turner, and Quincy Jones; authors such as Maya Angelou and Bliss Broyard; leading thinkers such as Harvard divinity professor Peter Gomes, the Reverend T. D. Jakes, neurosurgeon Ben Carson, and sociologist Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot; and famous achievers such as astronaut Mae Jemison, advertising personality Tom Joyner, decathlete Jackie Joyner-Kersee, and Ebony and Aircraft publisher Linda Johnson Rice.
More than a work of history, In Search in our Roots is a publication of revelatory importance that, for the very first time, brings to light the lives of common men and women who, by courageous example, blazed a journey for his or her famous descendants. To get a reader, there is the stirring pleasure of witnessing long-forgotten challenges and triumphs–but there’s an long lasting incentive as well. In associated the nineteen contemporary achievers on their journey in to the past and meeting their amazing forebears, we come to know ourselves.
