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I began to extol the rich contributions of blacks to American history. - 2nd Amendment

What are they?

The answer, IMHO, is that blacks are in fact Americans - and, as such, they have a great deal in common with other Americans which they - which everyone - takes for granted.
Start with being native English speakers (after the American idiom). That is deeply ingrained; they can’t go “home” to Africa because they were never there in the first place, they don’t speak the lingo in the second place, “Africa” is highly multicultural (thus, an American black’s ancestry might very likely trace to various tribes widely separated in Africa, for example).
Go on from there to say that if blacks hadn’t systematically been brought to America in the numbers they were, it is obviously quite impossible that any modern American black now alive today - here I refer to the particular DNA of individuals - would now exist because their ancestors could never have met if they had been left in Africa. And - only less obviously but quite certainly - neither I nor anyone else with southern ancestry would exist because even the smallest change in society 200 years ago would have inevitably meant that an ancestor would have met and married someone who was not one of my ancestors. Or an ancestral woman would have gotten pregnant a month earlier or later - and had a boy instead of a girl (or vice versa), and then all bets would be off all over the place as to the repercussions of who married who after that.
The point is that, even if only in subtle ways, the effects of everyone in American society hundreds of years ago exists in everyone alive today. I have long considered that the way to teach history would be to have students find out at least a smattering of their own geneology - and thereby arouse interest in recent history, just for starters. Then chain back from there, to a little older history - and by then you could hope that your students would have taken the point of the less immediately personal, but enduring and ineluctable, significance of ancient history.
As I said, American blacks are Americans, ineluctably; even the alienated ones have to know that they don’t know any other languages besides English (and certainly don’t consider themselves to be English) and that they interact with other Americans either exclusively or very predominantly.
And Thomas Sowell’s point about the history of slavery Black Rednecks and White Liberals is salient: slavery existed everywhere, and in all times in history. What is exceptional is not slavery in the American South, but its (relative) absence in modern times. And what is exceptional about Christianity is that, in modern times (read, after about 1700) Christianity and no other religion (not excluding atheism) delegitimated the institution of slavery (for unrelated others - obviously no one has ever liked being a slave). Of course it wasn't that American Southerners weren’t Christian but that, within Christendom, they were uniquely situated to be the last to get - that is, to accept - the word.
And, I submit, the way to look at their reluctance to reject slavery (they preferred to use the word “servants” rather than slaves) is to ask yourself how you would react if I told you that it wasn’t Christian to use electricity. Because they did have slaves but they didn’t have electric appliances all over the place. In that context it has been suggested that an American secretary today would have to think long and hard about living the lifestyle of Queen Victoria (1819-1901). Victoria had servants galore, but nothing that we have that works on electricity, nothing made of plastic, no motorized - let alone airborne - transportation (other than railroad), and no health care that would now be considered worthy of the word (that last, BTW, impacted her in that her husband died young - she was long a widow, and not a particularly merry one).
A few months ago I was in New Orleans, and (it wasn’t my choice, she who must be obeyed arranged it) I visited a sugar plantation there. There was of course substantial emphasis on the POV of slaves, and few of us there were on the tour who weren’t black. And the guide mentioned that the owner of the plantation was for a time the governor of Louisiana. It was only hours later that I thought what I should have asked the guide: “Was he a Republican?” Knowing that the correct answer would be that there were no slaveowners who were Republican - anywhere, ever (closest thing to it was U.S. Grant - who switched from Democrat to Republican well after his wife’s slave absconded).
That (actually obvious) fact I learned from Dinesh D’Souza, who also noted that of all the racist Southern Democrats, about 0.5% switched to the Republican Party at the (Nixon era) time of the so-called “great switch.” Among Southern Democrat governors and senators of the time, one - Strom Thurmond - switched. And among all two thousand plus Southern Democrat officials at all levels, about a dozen switched to the Republican Party. The rest of them lived and died in good standing with the Democrat Party. One political legacy of slavery was that, for generations after the Civil War, blacks were Republicans. That they became Democrats generations later is the legacy of the New Deal (notwithstanding that, at the behest of the Southern Democrats, FDR limited the effect of the New Deal in ways tailored to disadvantage blacks - but blacks were in pretty desperate straits during the Depression).
It has been remarked that people don’t rebel when they are repressed, but when they stop being oppressed. The trouble we have with “Black Lives Matter” might best be understood in that perspective. American history is certainly relevant to all Americans who think about it at all.