Fourscore and ten years ago, two African Americans, William Munroe Trotter and W.E.B. Du Bois, initiated a new movement for social justice in America that ultimately took on the formal name of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. This movement, which was in the tradition of earlier social-justice initiatives spawned by such African-American visionaries as Frederick Douglass, was concurrent with the national efforts led by Booker T. Washington in the Southern U.S. to train Black men and women for industry and create a Black-American work force. From the post-Emancipation period through the early 1900s, over 100 African-American colleges and institutions of higher learning were founded by ex-slaves and their offspring to prepare Blacks for equal participation in American society. In an atmosphere of routine lynchings and constant racial terrorism, the Black American human rights agenda slowly built its momentum to the post-World War II years and culminated in the Civil Rights movement of the late ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s. The Black-American Civil Rights movement created the legal and institutional foundation for social justice for all U.S. citizens. The issues of social justice and human rights for minorities of color and white women were not a major part of the national dialogue or agenda before the African-American Civil Rights liberation movement and the leadership of the father of American social justice, Martin Luther King, Jr. The struggle for social justice and human rights in America, from the Abolitionist movement through the Civil Rights struggle, was conceived, organized and led by African Americans. More specifically, the African Americans who sacrificed and led the struggle to gain human and civil rights for Americans of all racial and ethnic backgrounds, all had one thing in common: they were "descendants of American slaves."

There emerged a certain nobility of character and bearing in the African-American society in the post Emancipation era--a nobility naturally bestowed upon a people who had struggled against incredible odds and won their freedom from an exploitive oppressor. Black men and women from the cotton fields of the South to the factories of the North felt that nobility and carried themselves in a proud and dignified manner. Colonized and exploited people all over the world looked with great admiration and envy at the courageous strides made by African Americans to gain their freedom and respect in the United States. Human-rights activists of many nations, from Ireland to China, adopted as their liberation song, the African-American Civil Rights mantra “We Shall Overcome.” But today, many African Americans have lost touch with their historic cultural nobility. Tragically, too many of the descendants of American slaves, particularly those under 40 years of age, have no understanding of their cultural history or the value of their African-American ancestors.

The descendants of American slaves are a unique group of U.S. citizens in many respects. Their forebears did not voluntarily sail to America for a more prosperous life after a devastating potato famine or for wealth or religious autonomy. The ancestors of the traditional African Americans were abducted from nations such as Ghana, Senegal, Angola, and The Gambia; transported across the Atlantic like animals in the bowels of a ship; sold to the highest European-American bidder; and held in bondage for generations. Their enslavers stripped them of traditional African names (such as Quasi, Kofi, and Kwame) and replaced them with a sobriquet (such as Pompey, Cato, or Caesar). For over 250 years, millions of these African captives and all their offspring were held prisoner in U.S.-government-sanctioned and enforced slavery. While all non-native people who emigrated to America in search of a better life from the 17th through the early 20th centuries (European and Asian), arrived by ship, only one group arrived chained to the ship’s hold, and only one was forced to set foot on American soil: African Americans. They and their descendants were the only Americans ever to be held in chattel slavery. And, they were held in slavery by European immigrant groups of all nationalities and creeds.

American slavery involved two groups of people: the enslaver and the enslaved. In the United States, the enslaver was invariably a European American (mainly from Portugal, Spain, Holland, France, and England), and the enslaved was always an African American. (There is also a good deal of documentation to show that some Asian immigrants were also permitted by Whites to be designated as "honorary Whites" in order that they might also own Black-skinned persons as slaves.) This may be translated into the exploiter and the exploited, since only the European American derived the economic benefit and advantages from this arrangement. For over 100 years following the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, African Americans were still forced into de facto slavery in which a European American of any socioeconomic status or persuasion was still permitted to oppress and exploit Black Americans. All a person in the U.S. had to do was to achieve the status of "white" in order to own and lawfully exploit an African American during slavery and the post slavery era in America. Even ethnic groups that were not accorded full “white” status in Europe and other parts of the world could immediately attain this rank in America and all the rights and privileges granted to persons with this supremacist designation, including the right to own and exploit and oppress any American, male or female, deemed to have Black blood. One curious trait among many early European-American males, from the poorest sharecropper to the wealthy, educated and powerful, was the cruel pattern of sexually exploiting and impregnating the African-American slave women they owned, and then enslaving their offspring. U.S. President Thomas Jefferson is the most notable example of this widespread practice, which some scientists view as a form of maladaptive biological detachment. The mixed-race offspring formed a new race of chattel assets that were at birth designated colored “slave” by the enslaver and American law.

It is widely accepted that African Americans have never received proper compensation from the United States for their quarter millennium of institutional slavery, followed by another one hundred years of racial exclusion, oppression, discrimination, and economic exploitation. Even the most salient national symbols of American freedom, such as the U.S. Capitol and the White House, were built by African-American slaves whose white owners were compensated instead. The many and significant contributions of Blacks to the development of the United States are largely ignored by American history books and mainstream society past and present.

Today, America welcomes persons of all races and cultural backgrounds to its shores. This is a very good and positive direction for our nation; we should offer equal opportunity to Americans of all ethnic backgrounds. In the new millennium America contains a greater variety of people than ever before. This is nowhere more evident than in the nation’s colleges and universities such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Berkeley, and the University of Wisconsin, which were founded as exclusively European-American universities, but now all have significant numbers of students of African-American, Asian-American, Latino/Hispanic-American, and Native-American descent. In fact, the number of Asian-American and Latino students in U.S universities has increased dramatically over the last 25 years. What makes the advancement of the African American particularly significant and unique is that throughout the period of school segregation in which Blacks were denied access to public schools, persons of Asian and Hispanic backgrounds were permitted to attend anti-Black elementary and high schools and colleges on an equal basis with white Americans in most parts of the U.S. For example, in the recent conflict over “affirmative action” in the admissions policy of the University of Texas, it was revealed that during the entire period that Black citizens of Texas were fighting in the courts to remove the racial barriers that prevented them from being admitted to the law school, the university had never barred Hispanic-Latino Americans, who were admitted to the law school on an equal basis with whites.

Today, most racial barriers in the United States have been dismantled by the efforts of descendants of American slaves (along with some genuinely sympathetic and supportive European Americans who had joined them in their effort to force America to live up to its constitutional doctrine of liberty and justice for all). The gains made in the area of social justice in the United States that have benefited Americans of color, including Hispanics and Asians, as well as white women can be traced directly to the Black Civil Rights movement of the 50s and 60s. However, many of today's young Americans and immigrants are unaware of this fact, and in some cases are completely insensitive to or resentful of the continued African-American struggle against injustice (witness, for example the racial antipathy toward Black Americans expressed in the public speeches and writings of the misguided and racially exploitive Dinesh D'Souza, an Asian-American immigrant who launched himself to sudden success and acclaim among white supremacists by attacking African Americans).

The present-day diversity in educational institutions and in industry has led many to question the value of affirmative action, as well as who deserves "special" opportunities in America. Many European Americans are asking whether the "affirmative action" initiatives that were set up to provide opportunity of the African-American descendants of American slaves are fair, still necessary, and benefiting the people for whom they were intended. Some who now oppose affirmative action and other initiatives designed to assure the inclusion of African Americans argue that most of the people who have benefited from affirmative-action programs are European-American females, and non-Black Americans who have no history of service or sacrifice. Some point out that it would be unfair for Black Americans to travel to South Africa and take advantage of a university scholarship or job set-aside program that was established to remedy the effects of years of apartheid abuse against Black South Africans. It would be equally unfair, they insist, for a native of Bombay to go to Australia and demand a special benefit set up to assist long-abused native Australian Aborigines, simply because he too is “non-white.” In a recent conversation with a white corporate executive, I was somewhat surprised when he said, "When we instituted these affirmative-action and set-aside programs for Black Americans, we were trying to make up for the horrific discrimination and disadvantage that whites like myself had caused Blacks during and since slavery. But when I look around and see that the people taking the advantage of our special programs are mainly white women and recent immigrants from other parts of the world, I must admit that I no longer support affirmative action."

In private, many Black Americans, who can trace their ancestry back to slaves in the United States, often express similar views. "We beat our heads against the American stone wall of racism and white supremacy for years," said one African-American educator. "And just when we had knocked a hole in that wall large enough for some of our people to wriggle through to the side for opportunity, we stepped back to wipe the blood from our heads; and while we were wiping away the blood and tears, others who had stood idle on the sidelines, often berating our efforts, and waiting for us to suffer the head wounds, rushed through the opening to take advantage of all that we had fought for." Some African Americans feel that their meager allotment of opportunity is being exploited by other Americans of color, including some recent African and Caribbean immigrants who privately disassociate themselves from American Blacks when among whites. Another well-educated African-American administrator with Southern roots put it more bluntly. "The African-American race is used like a roadside collard patch. Everybody who passes snatches a free mess of greens."

African Americans must continually remind this nation of its unpaid debt to its Black slaves and descendants of American slaves. Our focus in this effort for recognition and reparations must begin in the United States, where our ancestors lived and died in brutal slavery. African Americans from Jamaica, for example, are descendants of British slaves, while Blacks in Cuba and other Latin American nations are descendants of slaves held captive by Spain and Portugal. The African Americans of Martinique and French Guiana are descendants of African men and women enslaved by citizens of France, and so on. They too should demand special recognition and reparations from their European enslavers. We are descendants of American slaves in the United States. We must not be ashamed of our legacy of slavery in the U.S., but rather treat our collective experience as one of overcoming the greatest of imposed human evils in the annals of U.S. history and emerging as a special race. We must erect a national monument to our forebears who lived and died in U.S. slavery. We may be the only race of Americans who have not demanded of our government a national monument to the historical suffering of its people--on this soil, in this land.

In the 20th Century, the word “freedom” in the United States became synonymous with the African-American struggle. Only the Native-American genocide in the U.S. is comparable to the horror of African-American slavery. Our African-American ancestors, however, were mixed with European and Native-American "Indian" genes, forging in us a new race, indigenous to this land. America still owes a special debt to the African-American slaves and their descendants. As proud Black Americans, we can honor our ancestors who suffered and endured the horrors of slavery by the simple act of proudly placing behind our surnames the initials D.A.S.: "Descendant of American Slaves." This act will serve as an eloquent and perpetual reminder for present and future generations of Americans, that we nobly carry the lashes of slavery's whips on our backs, the great sacrifice of ancestral blood in our hearts, and America’s debt to our enslaved African-American forebears in our minds and souls.

S. Allen Counter, D.M.Sc., Ph.D., is a neuroscience professor at Harvard Medical School and the director of the Harvard Foundation.