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African American history is the portion of American history that specifically discusses the African American or Black American ethnic group in the United States. Most African Americans are the descendants of captive Africans held in the United States from 1619 to 1865 who survived slavery. Others who are considered African American by the US government include voluntary immigrants from Africa, South America, and the Caribbean. African American history is celebrated in the United States during Black History Month.
African Origins
The majority of African-Americans descend from slaves that were either sold as prisoners of war by African states or kidnapped directly by Europeans and Africans. The former was far more common than the latter, and the already existing market for slaves in Africa was put to full advantage by European powers in need of labor for New World plantations. The American slave population was made up of the various ethnic groups from these regions including the Bakongo, Igbo, Mandé, Wolof, Akan, Fon and Makua amongst others. Once mixed together in the Americas, these different peoples did away with tribal differences and forged a new history and culture based on their similarities.[1]
Studies of contemporary documents reveal seven regions from which Africans were sold or taken during the Atlantic slave trade. These regions were Senegambia, encompassing the coast from the Senegal River to the Casamance where captives as far away as the Upper and Middle Niger River Valley were sold. There was also the Sierra Leone region, which included territory from the Casamance to Assini in the modern countries of Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Cote d'Ivoire. Another region was the Gold Coast, which is mainly modern Ghana. The Bight of Benin was a region stretching from the Volta River to the Benue River in modern Togo, Benin and southwestern Nigeria. The Bight of Biafra extended from southeastern Nigeria through Cameroon into Gabon. West Central Africa, the largest region, included the Congo and Angola. The region of Mozambique-Madagascar included the modern countries of Mozambique, parts of Tanzania and Madagascar.[2]
Origins and Percentages of African-Americans imported into British North America and Louisiana (1700-1820) [3]
| Region |
Percentage |
| West Central Africa |
26.1% |
| Bight of Biafra |
24.4% |
| Sierra Leone |
15.8% |
| Senegambia |
14.5% |
| Gold Coast |
13.1% |
| Bight of Benin |
4.3% |
| Mozambique-Madagascar |
1.8% |
Introduction of Slavery
-
The first African slaves were brought to Jamestown in 1619. The English settlers treated these captives as indentured servants and released them after a number of years. This practice was gradually replaced by the system of race based slavery used in the Caribbean.[4] As servants were freed they became competition for resources. Additionally, released servants had to be replaced. This, combined with the still ambiguous nature of the social status of Blacks and the difficulty in using any other group of people as forced servants, led to the relegation of Blacks into slavery. Massachusetts was the first colony to legalize slavery in 1641. Other colonies followed suit by passing laws that passed slavery on to the children of slaves and making non-Christian imported servants slaves for life. [5]
A former slave displays the telltale criss-cross,
keloid scars from being
bullwhipped.
The Revolution and Early America
- See also: American Revolution and History of the United States (1776–1789)
The later half of the 18th century was a time of political upheaval in the United States. In the midst of cries for relief from British tyranny and oppression, several people pointed out the apparent hypocrisies of slave holders demanding freedom. The Declaration of Independence, a document that would become a manifesto for human rights and personal freedom, was written by Thomas Jefferson who owned over 200 slaves. The Second Continental Congress did consider freeing slaves to disrupt British commerce. They also removed language from the Declaration of Independence that included the promotion of slavery amongst the offenses of King George III. A number of free Blacks, most notably Prince Hall—the founder of Prince Hall Freemasonry, submitted petitions for the end of slavery. But these petitions were largely ignored.[6]
This did not deter Blacks, free and slave, from participating in the revolution. Crispus Attucks, a free Black tradesman, was the first casualty of the Boston Massacre and of the ensuing American Revolutionary War. 5,000 Blacks, including Prince Hall, fought in the Continental Army. Many side by side with White soldiers at the battles of Lexington and Concord and at Bunker Hill. But when George Washington took command in 1775 he barred any further recruitment of Blacks. Alternatively, the Loyalists offered emancipation to any slave owned by a Patriot who was willing to join the Loyalist forces. Lord Dunmore, the Governor of Virginia, recruited 300 Black men into his Ethiopian regiment within a month of making this proclamation. Well known Black Loyalist soldiers include Colonel Tye and Boston King. The Americans eventually won the war and in the provisional treaty they demanded the return of property, including slaves. 3,000 to 4,000 documented Black loyalists were able to leave the country for Nova Scotia, Jamaica, and Britain rather than be returned to slavery.[7]
The Constitutional Convention of 1787 sought to define the foundation for the government of the newly formed United States of America. The constitution set forth the ideals of freedom and equality while providing for the continuation of the institution of slavery through the fugitive slave clause and the three-fifths compromise. Additionally, free blacks rights were also restricted in many places. Most were denied the right to vote and were excluded from public schools. Some Blacks sought to fight these contradictions in court. In 1790, Elizabeth Freeman and Quock Walker used language from the new Massachusetts constitution that declared all men were born free and equal to successfully sue for freedom. A free Black businessman in Boston named Paul Cuffe sought to be excused from paying taxes since he had no voting rights.[8]
In the Northern states the revolutionary spirit did help African-Americans. Beginning in the 1750s, there was widespread sentiment during the American Revolution that slavery was a social evil (for the country as a whole and for the whites) that should eventually be abolished.[citation needed] All the Northern states passed emancipation acts between 1780 and 1804;[citation needed] most of these arranged for gradual emancipation and a special status for freedmen, so there were still a dozen "permanent apprentices" in New Jersey in 1860.[citation needed] The Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 declared all men "born free and equal";[citation needed] the slave Quork Walker sued for his freedom on this basis and won his freedom, thus abolishing slavery in Massachusetts.[citation needed]
There were more than 59,000 free Blacks in the United States in 1790. By 1810, that number had risen to 186,446. Among the successful was Benjamin Banneker, a distinguished scientist, almanac writer, and surveyor, who was instrumental in the design and construction of Washington DC. Despite the challenges of living in the new country most free Blacks fared far better than the nearly 800,000 enslaved Blacks. Even so, many considered emigrating to Africa.[8]
The Antebellum Period
- See also: History of the United States (1789–1849) and Origins of the American Civil War
As the United States grew, the institution of slavery became more entrenched in the southern states and northern states began to abolish it. Pennsylvania was the first with a gradual abolition act passed in 1780. A number of events continued to shape views on slavery. The invention of the cotton gin in 1793 triggered a 70% increase in the number of slaves in the United States in only 20 years. In 1808, congress abolished the international slave trade. While American Blacks celebrated this as a victory in the fight against slavery, it served to further increase the demand for slaves. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 allowed any Black person to be claimed as a runaway unless a White person testified on their behalf. A number of free Blacks, especially indentured children, were kidnapped and sold into slavery with little or no hope of rescue. By 1819 there were exactly 11 free and 11 slave states, increasing sectionalism and fears of an imbalance in Congress led to the 1820 Missouri Compromise requiring states to be admitted to the union in pairs, one slave and one free.[9]
The Black Community
The number of free Blacks grew during this time as well. By 1830 there were 319,000 free Blacks in the United States. 150,000 lived in the northern states. While the majority of free blacks lived in poverty, some were able to establish successful businesses that catered to the Black community. Racial discrimination often meant that Blacks weren't welcome or would be mistreated in White businesses and other establishments. To counter this, Blacks developed their own communities with Black owned businesses. Black doctors, lawyers and other businessmen were the foundation of the Black middle class.[10] A number of Black organizations were created to help strengthen the Black community and continue the fight against slavery. One of theses was the American Society of Free Persons of Colour, founded in 1830. These organizations amongst other things provided social aid to poor blacks and organized responses to political issues. The Black community also established schools for Black children, since they were often barred from entering public schools.[11] Further supporting the growth of the Black Community was the Black church. Starting in the early 1790s with the AME, AME Zion and other churches, the Black church grew to be the focal point of the Black community. As with most aspects of the Black community, the Black church was born out of the racial discrimination found in White churches. At first, Black preachers formed separate congregations within the existing denominations but the discrimination at the higher levels of the church hierarchy encouraged the founding of separate Black denominations.[12]
The Dred Scott Decision
-
The American Civil War
- See also: American Civil War
Emancipation and Reconstruction
In 1863, during the American Civil War (1861–1865), President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing slaves in the southern states at war with the North. The 13th amendment of the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1865, outlawed slavery in the United States. In 1868, the 14th amendment granted full U.S. citizenship to African-Americans. The 15th amendment, ratified in 1870, extended the right to vote to black males.
The Emancipation Proclamation
After the Union victory over the Confederacy, a brief period of southern black progress, called Reconstruction, followed. From 1865 to 1877, under protection of Union troops, some strides were made toward equal rights for African-Americans. Southern blacks began to vote, were elected to the United States Congress, held local public office, established schools and built towns and businesses.
The aftermath of the Civil War accelerated the process of national African-American identity formation.[citation needed] Tens of thousands of Black northerners left homes and careers and also migrated to the defeated South, building schools, printing newspapers, and opening businesses. As Joel Williamson puts it:
Many of the migrants, women as well as men, came as teachers sponsored by a dozen or so benevolent societies, arriving in the still turbulent wake of Union armies. Others came to organize relief for the refugees.... Still others... came south as religious missionaries... Some came south as business or professional people seeking opportunity on this... special black frontier. Finally, thousands came as soldiers, and when the war was over, many of [their] young men remained there or returned after a stay of some months in the North to complete their education.[citation needed]
The Rise of Jim Crow
In the face of mounting violence and intimidation directed at blacks as well as whites sympathetic to their cause, the U.S. government retreated from its pledge to guarantee constitutional protections to freedmen and women. When President Hayes withdrew Union troops from the South in 1877, white southerners acted quickly to reverse the groundbreaking advances of Reconstruction, and European American mob violence against African Americans intensified. Many blacks were fearful of this trend, and men like Benjamin "Pap" Singleton began speaking of separating from the South. This idea culminated in the 1879-1880 movement of the Exodusters.
Sign for "Colored waiting room",
Georgia, 1943
Seeking to return blacks to their subordinate status under slavery, white supremacists resurrected de facto barriers and enacted new laws to further marginalize blacks in southern society, limiting, among other things, black access to transportation, schools, restaurants and other public facilities. White supremacists also promoted the idea that black's participation in government in the south was ended due to incompetence; this view was disseminated in school textbooks and movies such as The Birth of a Nation in 1915. Although slavery had been abolished, most southern blacks for decades continued to struggle in grinding poverty as agricultural, domestic and menial laborers. Many were sharecroppers, their economic status little changed by emancipation.
Racial Terrorism
After its founding in 1867, the Ku Klux Klan, a clandestine organization sworn to perpetuate white supremacy, became a power in the South and beyond, eventually establishing a northern headquarters in Greenfield, Indiana. The Klan employed lynching, cross burnings and other forms of terrorism, violence and intimidation.
The Jim Crow era saw the cruelest wave of "racial" hatred that America has yet experienced. Between 1890 and 1940, millions of African Americans were disenfranchised, killed, brutalized, even discouraged from learning the Three Rs. According to newspaper records kept at the Tuskegee Institute, about 5,000 men, women, and children were murdered outright by the system, tortured to death in documented extrajudicial public rituals—human sacrifices called "lynchings." Public murders not reported by the newspapers plus similar executions under the veneer of due process were estimated by Ida B. Wells to have added up to about 20,000 killings. Of the tens of thousands of lynchers and onlookers during this period, it is reported that less than 50 whites were ever indicted for their crimes, and only four sentenced. Meanwhile, the lynchings were a weapon of terror with millions of Afro-Americans living in a constant state of anxiety and fear of the white mob.[13]
Civil Rights
In response to these and other setbacks, in the summer of 1905, W.E.B. DuBois and 28 other prominent, African-American men met secretly at Niagara Falls, Ontario. There, they produced a manifesto calling for an end to racial discrimination, full civil liberties for African-Americans and recognition of human brotherhood. The organization they established came to be called the Niagara Movement. After the notorious Springfield, Illinois race riot of 1908, a group of concerned European Americans joined with the leadership of the Niagara Movement and formed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) a year later, in 1909. Under the leadership of DuBois, the NAACP mounted legal challenges to segregation and lobbied legislatures on behalf of black Americans. During this period, African Americans continued to create independent community and institutional lives for themselves. They established schools, churches, social welfare institutions, banks, newspapers and small businesses to serve the needs of their communities.
The Great Migration and the Harlem Renaissance
-
During the first half of the 20th century, the largest internal population shift in U.S. history took place. During the Great Migration, over 5 million African Americans moved from the South to northern cities, the West and Midwest in hopes of finding better jobs and greater equality. In the 1930s, the concentration of blacks in urban areas led to the cultural movement known as the Harlem Renaissance. Black intellectual and cultural circles were influenced by thinkers such as Aime Cesaire and Leopold Sedar Senghor, who celebrated blackness, or negritude; and arts and letters flourished. Writers Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay and Richard Wright; and artists Lois Mailou Jones, William H. Johnson, Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence and Archibald Motley gained prominence. A new generation of powerful African American political leaders and organizations also came to the fore. Membership in the NAACP rapidly increased as it mounted an anti-lynching campaign in reaction to ongoing southern white violence against blacks. Marcus Garvey's UNIA, the Nation of Islam and union organizer A. Philip Randolph's Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters all were established during this period and found support among urban African Americans.
Two World Wars
Black soldiers in
France, 1944
Many soldiers of color served their country with distinction during World War I and World War II.
Famous segregated units, such as the Tuskegee Airmen and the U.S. 761st Tank Battalion proved their value in combat. Approximately 75 percent of the soldiers who served in the European theater as truckers for the Red Ball Express and kept Allied supply lines open were African American.[14] A total of 708 African Americans were killed in combat during World War II.[15]
The distinguished service of these units was a factor in the desegregation of all US Armed Forces by order of President Harry S. Truman in July of 1948 with the promulgation of Executive Order 9981. It also helped open jobs for black women in the field of nursing.
The Civil Rights Movement
-
The Supreme Court handed down a landmark decision in the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. This decision led to the dismantling of legal segregation in all areas of southern life, from schools to restaurants to public restrooms. Meanwhile, Fannie E. Motley graduated from Spring Hill College in Mobile Alabama in 1956. The ruling also brought new momentum to the Civil Rights Movement. Boycotts against segregated public transportation systems sprang up in the South, the most notable of which was the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Civil rights groups organized other boycotts, voter registration campaigns, Freedom Rides and other nonviolent direct action, such as marches, pickets and sit-ins to mobilize around issues of equal access and voting rights. Southern segregationists fought back to block ref
Classical
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