This study is intended to be useful for several audiences. With hopes of accomplishing this goal, I structured this study for a wide audience readership. As such, the focus is multilayered and the notes are extensive. This method is incorporated as a means of providing students and teachers, activists and politicians, natives and foreigners with a deeper understanding of the Black experience in the United States. Because these various audiences have varying levels of knowledge about the social history of Blacks in the Americas, a great deal of background information (historical, geographical, and social) will be provided in footnotes. This allows the readers an opportunity to gain needed information that may be missing from their particular purview of the Black experience.

In constructing this work, I was influenced by the myths and misunderstandings that shape the thinking of audiences too young or too distant from experiences such as the Civil Rights Movement or slavery or the rural South to have a comprehensive understanding of the relationship between these phenomena and current events. For example, in an essay on the contributions of Martin Luther King, Jr., one student – born almost 20 years after King's assassination – wrote: “King was killed because he fought for equal rights of the slaves.” The student was unable to make the distinction between the freedom of the slaves as a result of the Civil War and that of Blacks that resulted from the Civil Rights Movement.