Vincent Harding · 1981There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America
There Is a River chronicles the times of Black resistance with feeling, with urgent meaning for our time.
With lyrical prose and a prophetic urgency, Vincent Harding’s There Is a River arrived at a time where a serious reckoning with the Black freedom movement and the discipline of history required a reassessment of how deep Black resistance was.
The result of years of study and organizing within the Institute of the Black World, the word becomes flesh in an account that places you in the midst of a people who never backed down. It is a chronicle of the arrival of enslaved Africans to the US and of their struggle to destroy those terms of their arrival: the institution of slavery.
The river is a metaphor bespeaking their ever-constant drive to undo that which desired their undoing. A river never stops flowing, though it can curve and freeze and acquire new earthly elements along its way.
In the nineteenth century, Black struggle was all of this. And in Harding’s words, we learn of the names of ancestors, as well as those whose names have been lost but whose memories of what it took to be free still guide the river’s movement.
These words register a radical hope that refuses naivete about all that it took. What it still takes.