African Americans In Finding Your Roots

“Most African Americans, know very little about their family history in the nineteenth century when their ancestors were not considered equal to white Americans” (Roots). While tracing the ancestry of many African Americans is nearly impossible. The episode Finding Your Roots Season 2 had the ability to trace three African American Icons Nas, Angela Bassett, and Valerie Jarrett’s ancestry’s back centuries, giving us a glimpse of the realization that slavery was not that long ago. Looking back at the three Famous African Americans pasts; Nas, Angela Bassett, and Valerie Jarrett, we see three different paths their ancestors endured. For Nas’s ancestry their family was shockingly known for marrying others with the same last name. Today there would be some concerning questions, but as they looked further they found that “Little” was the last name of their elite plantation owners. Nas’s great-great-great grandparents Calvin and Pocahontas Little lived to see emancipation and “In 1865 Calvin and Pocahontas walked off the …show more content…
Using the course readings of the firsthand accounts that Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs had encountered while enslaved and on their journey to freedom. Their stories aligned with the time lines of the Americans in Finding Your Roots gives you a layered timeline of how little ago slavery ended. It is shocking how Slavery ended only one-hundred and fifty-one years ago, that is only a few generations ago that witnessed this first hand. Many Americans have little clue that we had enslaved fellow humans less than two generations ago. Like Nas in Finding Your Roots was shocked that slavery was around just over a century and a half ago. Along with Nas the others seem as shocked as the realization of ancestors being enslaved not so long ago, which must have brought out many emotions for all of subjects finding out their