Unlike Kierkegaard and Job, however, blacks often refused to down into that “loathsome void,” that “torment of despair,” where one “struggles with death but cannot die.” No matter what trouble they encountered, they kept on believing and hoping that “a change gonna come.” (The Cross and the Lynching Tree, by James Cone)

They sang the blues. They went to juke joints. They expressed joy in the midst of unbearable sorrow. Trouble followed Blacks everywhere in the Jim Crow South and North. There was no place to go. But out of all of it came the determination to refuse to be defeated by tragedy.

Black history IS American history.