By Attorney Zulu Ali
Nationwide — Foundational Black Americans (FBA) are a distinct American people descended from the Black Americans who arrived during the transatlantic slave trade and built this nation and, over centuries, created a culture, identity, and legacy that transformed America and influenced the world.
There is a peculiar insult sometimes directed at Foundational Black Americans: “You have no culture.”
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Foundational Black Americans did not simply inherit a culture. We built one. We built it over centuries on American soil, under circumstances designed to prevent us from becoming a people at all. What emerged was not a broken imitation of somebody else’s identity. It became one of the most recognizable, influential, envied, borrowed, marketed and imitated cultures on earth.
We call it different things: style, rhythm, soul, cool, flavor, attitude, innovation. Today they call it swag. Whatever name one chooses, the world knows where much of it came from.
Our Culture Is Older Than Many Modern African Nation-States
The year 1619 is conventionally associated with the arrival of Africans in English Virginia, although Africans were present elsewhere in what is now the United States earlier. From those beginnings emerged generations of Black Americans whose collective experiences, traditions and institutions developed on American soil for centuries.
Ancient African peoples are not the same thing as modern African nation-states. Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa and other African peoples and civilizations long predate the FBA experience. But many countries on today’s political map of Africa are considerably younger.
Consider Nigeria. The peoples occupying what is now Nigeria existed long before colonialism, but Nigeria as the modern political entity did not. The name “Nigeria” is generally credited to British journalist Flora Shaw, who proposed it in 1897. Britain later amalgamated the Northern and Southern protectorates in 1914.
By then, FBAs had already accumulated nearly three centuries of collective history in America. We had survived slavery and a Civil War, experienced emancipation and Reconstruction, established churches, schools, newspapers, businesses and communities, and Black Americans had already served in Congress. We were already a people.
While Europe Was Dividing Africa, We Were Building
The Berlin Conference of 1884-1885 became a defining event in the European partition of Africa. By then, American slavery had ended, the Reconstruction Amendments had transformed the Constitution, and Black Americans were acquiring land, building churches and schools, organizing politically and serving in government.
While European powers were intensifying colonial domination across much of Africa, FBAs were emerging from slavery and building institutions within a nation our ancestors had already spent generations helping to construct. We were not culturally dead. We were culturally becoming.
We Did Not Merely Suffer in America. We Built America.
Too much Black history begins with what somebody did to us: slavery, Jim Crow, lynching, segregation and discrimination. Those things happened, but they describe what others did to us. They do not adequately describe what we did. We survived. We worked. We built. We invented. We fought. We worshipped. We organized. We educated. We litigated. We created. We transformed.
Our ancestors’ labor contributed enormously to America’s agricultural and commercial development, in essence making the nation the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world, a distinction that still exists today. Black Americans served in all of America’s wars. After emancipation, our people established schools, churches, businesses, newspapers, towns and civic institutions. When America denied us its promises, we forced America to confront its own Constitution and helped change what American citizenship meant. We have the receipts.
People Came to a Nation We Helped Build
There is an uncomfortable irony in someone voluntarily immigrating to the United States and then telling FBAs that we have no culture. People from around the world come to America for education, economic opportunity, stability and entrepreneurship. There is nothing wrong with that. But understand the history of the house before insulting the descendants of the people who helped build it.
FBAs did not arrive yesterday looking for the American Dream. Our ancestors helped create the conditions under which that dream became available to others. They fought over citizenship, challenged segregation, organized, marched, litigated, went to jail, and changed federal and constitutional law. Victories won through Black struggle ultimately expanded American freedom beyond Black America.
So when someone comes to America seeking its opportunities while ridiculing FBA culture, there is a contradiction worth confronting: you are pursuing opportunity inside a house that our fingerprints are all over. And if the culture you left behind is supposedly so much greater than ours, it is fair to ask why you came here to benefit from a nation our ancestors built.
If We Have No Culture, Explain the Swag
No culture? Then explain spirituals, gospel, blues, jazz, R&B, rock and roll, soul, funk and hip-hop. Explain Black preaching, the Black church, HBCUs, Black fraternities and sororities, Juneteenth, soul food, Black American language, literature, dance, fashion and comedy.
But our contribution cannot be reduced to entertainment and style. Explain the vast record of FBA inventors, patents, scientists, scholars, writers and intellectuals. Explain our military leaders and generations of Black Americans who fought in America’s wars even when America denied them equal rights at home. Explain our political leaders, lawyers, judges and activists. Explain Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and the generations of thinkers and organizers who reshaped American political and intellectual life.
And explain the Civil Rights Movement—a movement led overwhelmingly by descendants of American slavery whose struggle helped produce the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and a transformation of American law that opened doors far beyond FBA communities.
Our fingerprints are not merely on American culture. They are on American invention, thought, law, politics, military history and democracy itself.
The Middle Passage Did Not Produce a Weak People
The Middle Passage and slavery were atrocities, but they are not evidence that Blackness represents weakness. Our ancestors endured circumstances intended to reduce human beings to property. Families were separated, languages disrupted, literacy restricted, labor exploited and legal personhood denied. And they did not disappear.
The transatlantic slave trade subjected captured Africans to an extraordinarily brutal process of human trafficking. Many perished before ever reaching the Americas. Others died during the Middle Passage, and still others did not survive the brutal conditions of enslavement that followed. Those who survived required extraordinary physical endurance, mental strength and adaptability simply to remain alive.
That history matters when we consider who we are. FBA are descended from generations of people who passed through an extraordinary crucible of survival—from capture and forced marches, through the Middle Passage, slavery and generations of oppression in America. Our ancestral story therefore includes a profound selection through survival: generations of men and women who possessed the physical endurance, mental fortitude and adaptability necessary to survive conditions in which countless others perished.
They survived. Their children survived. Their grandchildren survived. And those descendants produced inventors and intellectuals, institutions and businesses, military and political leaders, movements for justice, and music and art that transformed the very country that once enslaved them.
We are descendants of survivors—people who endured one of the most physically and psychologically demanding experiences imposed upon any population in human history and nevertheless built a people, a culture and a legacy. The people who survived that historical furnace demonstrated extraordinary human strength. We are their descendants. That is not shame. That is inheritance.
When God Favors a People, Opposition Follows
There is also a spiritual dimension to how I understand our history. I believe that when God places favor, purpose and extraordinary gifts upon a people, evil does not simply stand aside and applaud. When God favors a people, the devil takes notice and seeks to oppose what God has favored. In sum, opposition follows favor.
Scripture repeatedly shows favored people facing bondage, exile, persecution and enemies while carrying a larger purpose. Through that lens, the extraordinary targeting of Black Americans does not prove something defective about us; our survival shows that the attempt to destroy us failed. If God can favor a people, the devil can target what God has favored. Yet after the Middle Passage, slavery, racial terror, segregation and generations of opposition, we are still here—and the culture our ancestors created now reaches around the world. In sum, if the ink on God’s Word were not already dry, what we endured, survived and ultimately became would be biblical.
Our enemies do not get to define us by what they attempted to do to us. The better measure is what we became despite them.
We Are Not Asking to Borrow Somebody Else’s Identity
None of this requires disrespecting Africa. Africa contains ancient peoples, civilizations, languages and traditions worthy of respect. But respect works both ways. FBAs do not need to erase four centuries of history to borrow somebody else’s modern national identity. African inheritances crossed the Atlantic; generations adapted, preserved, combined, invented and created. Something new emerged: us.
We became FBA. We did not need a European government to draw a border around us before we could become a people, and we do not need anyone’s permission today to recognize the civilization our ancestors created.
We Have the Receipts
So when somebody says FBA has no culture, do not argue. Bring the receipts.
Play the music. Show them the churches and masjids. Show them the HBCUs. Show them Reconstruction and Black Wall Street. Show them the inventors and their patents, the scientists, scholars and intellectuals. Show them the entrepreneurs and institutions we built. Show them the soldiers, officers and military leaders who served this country even when it refused to fully serve them. Show them the lawyers, judges, political leaders and activists who helped reshape American law and democracy. Show them the Civil Rights Movement, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the constitutional battles that expanded American freedom. Show them our literature, language, food, fashion, music and art.
Then look at popular culture almost anywhere on earth and ask: If FBA culture does not exist, why is everybody wearing it, speaking it, dancing to it, listening to it and imitating it?
Our fingerprints are everywhere—not only on American entertainment, but on American invention, scholarship, business, military history, politics, law, religion, constitutional freedom and democracy itself.
We have a people. We have a history. We have institutions. We have traditions. We have faith. We have intellectual thought. We have inventions. We have businesses. We have military heroes. We have political leaders. We have movements that changed the law. We have language. We have food. We have music. We have style. We have influence. And yes—we have swag.
Foundational Black Americans did not arrive yesterday searching for America. We helped build America. We did not emerge from slavery culturally empty. We built a culture. And we do not need to chase the world’s approval. For generations, the world has been chasing us.
We have the receipts.
About Attorney Zulu Ali
Attorney Zulu Ali is an attorney, social commentator, author, and social entrepreneur, and principal of the Law Offices of Zulu Ali & Associates, LLP, a Black-owned law firm in California’s Inland Empire. A former police officer and U.S. Marine Corps veteran, he earned a J.D. from Trinity International University; an LL.D. focused on international law and reparative justice and a D.Phil. researching Pan-African economics and Black social entrepreneurship from the Faculty of Administration and Economic Studies at Akademia Jagiellońska; an undergraduate degree in Liberal Studies with a concentration in African Studies from Regents College through a consortium with Tennessee State University under the mentorship of Dr. Amiri Yasin Al-Hadid, the founder of the Africana Studies department. He was trained in international criminal law at the Philippe Kirsche Institute and police certification (P.O.S.T.) at the Tennessee Law Enforcement Training Academy. Ali is listed as counsel before the International Criminal Court and the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights and is the host of Justice Watch with Attorney Zulu Ali. He is the founder and director of the Linda Reese Harvey Stop & Frisk Leadership Academy for young men and women.