Nate Shaw and the Arc of History

Blog overview

This blog defines the contours of African American history and its global consequences, from 1619 through the present. It highlights the revelatory power of ‘All God’s Dangers’, now translated as ‘De kleur van katoen’, the oral biography of Nate Shaw, an eighty-four-year-old unlettered but brilliant cotton farmer from the American South. Shaw’s plain-spoken, often poetic narrative bears witness to the wrenching changes in the lives of Southern Blacks during the century between the end of Reconstruction in the 1870s and the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. These short essays link his story with current developments, both in the US and the Netherlands, that affect Black lives everywhere.

‘I, too, sing America’

By Ted Rosengarten

October 26, 2023

Children’s picture and chapter books make up thirty percent of banned books. In one fell swoop, a school district in Pennsylvania banished fifty books from lower and middle school grades on the grounds that the books’ donor “uses Marxist critical race theory.” A parent demurred, saying he had read some of the books and found …...

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Critical Race Theory under Scrutiny

By Ted Rosengarten

October 19, 2023

Not only were African people enslaved, their history has been enslaved as well. Books by Black authors that espouse a Black perspective on history and current events are being ferociously targeted for removal from American schools and libraries. Allied with and even led by governors and legislatures in states that in the past resisted integrating …...

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“Bring Me the Cotton!”

By Ted Rosengarten

October 12, 2023

Following the American Civil War, landowners in the deep South did not want to pay for what they had always had for free—the labor of the people they had held in slavery. In cotton-growing states like Alabama, hundreds of thousands of freed people agreed to work on the land owned by their former masters in …...

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1619 – No Going Back

By Ted Rosengarten

October 5, 2023

We will never know which ancestors of Nate Shaw were kidnapped in Africa and forcibly taken across the Atlantic, and when. But the first episode of enslavement in North America has been widely acknowledged in recent years. It was an English privateer, The White Lion, under a Dutch contract and sailing under a Dutch flag, …...

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From ‘All God’s Dangers’ to ‘De kleur van katoen’

By Frans Kooymans

September 28, 2023

In the spring of 1975, while visiting a bookstore in Miami, I found myself drawn to the self-assured look of a Black man on the cover of a book entitled All God’s Dangers. I bought the book and over the next couple of weeks I was struck by the narrator’s unique language and the succession …...

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The Origin of ‘All God’s Dangers’

By Frans Kooymans

September 21, 2023

All God’s Dangers, in translation De kleur van katoen, is the autobiography of Nate Shaw, an illiterate Black tenant farmer from Alabama, who grew up in the society of former slaves and slaveholders and reached maturity during the advent of Jim Crow, the segregation laws that held the Deep South in their grip for nearly …...

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