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FREEDOMWAYS FIRST QUARTER 1973 Afro-American speaker of Standard American English has no guarantee thereby that he will be accorded the same social and economic status as that of this Euro-American fellow-countryman—to suggest that African-Americans eschew the standard national language in favor of their group-specific subnational expression. Most African-Americans already speak American Afro-English, and of course, everything should be done to preserve it and promote its proper appreciation. But to invite African-Americans, on the college level, to use Afro-English as a medium of normal academic discourse is to provide to racists a gratuitous justification for excluding them from the very benefits higher education is calculated to confer. Much more practical, in this connection, is Dillard's support of Stewart's contention that it might be highly effective to teach Standard American English as a foreign language to African-Americans who use Afro-English as a first language. (The situation then might be somewhat comparable to that in which in Germany persons who spoke Yiddish at home and with their co-ethnics studied the standard German language—to which Yiddish is related—in school.) In this exhaustive study Dillard has shown the development of American Afro-English from its beginnings as a West African-English Pidgin through its transplantation and growth in America as a "Plantation creole" to its present form of a distinctive English-based, African-influenced, structurally coherent and functionally efficient speech form. For the scholar, in spite of its frequently polemical tone, it is a useful compendium; for the average reader it offers more than one knew there was even to ask about Afro-English. Keith E. Baird TWO STUDIES OF BLACK STRUGGLE AMERICAN NEGRO SLAVERY AND ABOLITION: A SOCIOLOGICAL STUDY. By Wilbert E. Moore. The Third Press, New York. 119 pages. $8.95. FROM RECONSTRUCTION TO REVOLUTION: THE BLACK'S STRUGGLE FOR EQUALITY. By Joseph A. Alvarez. Atheneum, New York. 216 pages. $6.50. THE AUTHOR of American Negro Slavery and Abolition, a distinguished sociologist and one-time president of the American Sociological Society, opens his books with the lament: "This book is now 74
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Reopened for Editing 2024-02-21 19:53:34