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Early HistoryAfrican Americans are considered primarily descendants of enslaved Africans transported via slave ships following the sea route known as the Middle Passage from West and Central Africa to North America and the Caribbean from 1565 through 1807 during the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Some sources estimate that as many as sixty million - 60,000,000- Africans were enslaved in total. The accurate number will never be known because they were not considered human beings and were not "counted" as such. Other African Americans have arrived in the United States through more recent immigration from the Caribbean, South and Central America and Africa. Black immigrants from African and European nations and predominantly black, non-Hispanic Caribbean countries such as Jamaica, and others, though often referred to by their national origins and not culturally defined as African American socially, are demographically classified with black and/or African American by the U.S. Census; however in general, the American assumption is that if a person is black, of predominant unmixed African ancestry, English-speaking and living in the United States, he or she is African American. Until the events of the American Civil War (1861–1865) and, in particular, the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution (1865) resulted in the abolishment of chattel slavery in the United States, most Blacks in America were slaves. For the more than three hundred years during which African enslavement was practiced, and again during the Jim Crow era, African Americans were subject to de jure segregation and discrimination and were kept almost entirely out of political power. African Americans were treated inhumanely by White Americans. White Americans forcibly bred African American sons and daughters with their own mothers and fathers, forced them to wear mouth bits like horses in order to break their spirits, often worked or beat them to death, lynched them, completely shut them out of the educational system, punished them for learning to read and committed many other gross injustices against them with the acquiescence of the legal system and the Catholic / Protestant church. African Americans were frequently sold to different owners, completely destroying the African American structure of family so thoroughly that the ramifications are still present to this day.
The American Civil Rights Movement scored a series of victories from the 1940s into the early 1970s that put an end to de jure segregation and discrimination, made inroads against de facto segregation and discrimination, increased opportunities for African Americans to enter the middle class, and brought African American voices into American politics. However, ongoing racism against African Americans and people of darker skin in general has been very well documented in the areas of employment, housing, politics, health care, and education in the United States. Definition and nomenclatureAfrican Americans descend primarily from enslaved Africans brought to the United States, especially the American South, between 1565 and 1807, the majority of whom were brought in the 18th century. About three-quarters of the slaves came from West Africa and the remaining quarter came from the Angola-Congo region.[1] http://www.ancestrybydna.com/welcome/productsandservices/ancestrybydna/experiments/ AncestryByDNA Experiments], ancestrybydna.com. Accessed 1 December 2006.</ref>[2] Previously acceptable terms that are now viewed as archaic (and, outside of historical contexts, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People or the United Negro College Fund) include Negro and Colored; today, the most common term is African American, with Black also commonly accepted since the late 1960s; the term Afro-American was first prominently used in 1961 by a group of activists including Maya Angelou and Leroi Jones (later known as Amiri Baraka)[3] and became common from the late 1960s into the 1980s; it remains generally acceptable, but less common, and has lately been developing a "period" connotation. Blacks are also included in the broader term "people of color". The history of the use of these terms is evident in the names of various African American organizations founded over time. The civil rights organization the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), founded 1909, is significantly older than the philanthropic organization the United Negro College Fund, founded in 1944. The term colored had come to be seen as politically incorrect by the time of the UNCF's founding. Nonetheless, both Negro and colored remained common until the late 1960s, especially in the Southern United States. As the Civil Rights Movement evolved in the 1960s into the Black Power/Black Pride movement, these older terms lost favor and became associated with the pre-civil-rights situation of Blacks in America. Through this movement, the terms Black and Afro-American both emerged into common usage in the late 1960s. Due to this legacy, by 1980, the term Black had become accepted by a majority of Americans of African descent, and had also became the referential term applied by White Americans in general. In the late 1980s, Blacks began to abandon the term Afro-American, adopting the autonym African American instead. Some did so out of a desire for an unabbreviated expression of their African heritage that could not be mistaken or derided as an allusion to the afro hairstyle. Others wished to assert their pride in their African origins. The term dated back at least to Black nationalist Malcolm X, who favored African American as more historically and culturally defining over other terms, and used it at an OAAU (Organization of Afro American Unity) meeting in the mid-1960s, saying, "Twenty-two million African Americans - that's what we are - Africans who are in America." However, it did not become widely used at that time. During the 1980s, the most influential proponent of the widespread adoption of the term was Jesse Jackson. Jackson and like-minded persons argued that African American was more in keeping with the United States tradition of "hyphenated Americans", which links people with their ancestors' geographic points of origin, and allows people to assert pride in their ethnic heritage, while maintaining an American national identity. This usage of the term African American generally refers to black African ancestry and American nationality. But generally speaking, the term does not include [[White people|Whites] from Africa. Still, there is disagreement as to whether the term should refer only to Blacks who can trace their American roots to the colonial period or slavery, or whether it also should include black immigrants from Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America and their descendants. To some extent, this is a matter of cultural vs. geographic meaning. In the narrow sense, the term refers only to those descended from a small number of colonial indentured servants and the estimated 500,000 Africans taken to British North America (later becoming the United States) as slaves (of approximately 10 - 12 million Africans taken to the Western Hemisphere in general). In a broader usage, the term can include West Indian and Afro-Latino immigrants whose African ancestors also survived the Middle Passage or recent African immigrants/children of immigrants with American citizenship, but these groups tend to use the ethnic terms Latino or Hispanic, or identify themselves by their countries of origin, (for example, as Nigerian, Dominican or Jamaican), instead of African American. However, under certain circumstances these groups that have existed in the Central American and Caribbean region since the 1600s will be called black by people from these diverse regions. Demographics
Image:New 2000 black percent.gif African Americans as percent of population, 2000. Image:New 2000 black density.gif African American population density, 2000. In 1790, when the first census was taken, African Americans numbered about 760,000—about 19% of the population. In 1860, at the start of the American Civil War, the African American population increased to 4.4 million, but the percentage rate dropped to 14% of the overall population of the country. The vast majority were slaves, with only 488,000 counted as "freemen". By 1900, the black population had doubled and reached 8.8 million. In 1910, about 90% of African Americans lived in the South, but large numbers began migrating north looking for better job opportunities and living conditions, and to escape Jim Crow and racial violence. The Great Migration, as it was called, spanned the 1890s to the 1970s. From 1916 through the 1960s, more than 6 million black people moved north. But in the 1970s and 1980s, that trend reversed, with more African Americans moving south to the Sunbelt than leaving it. By 1990, the African American population reached about 30 million and represented 12% of the U.S. population, roughly the same proportion as in 1900. In current demographics, according to 2005 U.S. Census figures, some 39.9 million African Americans live in the United States, comprising 13.8 percent of the total population. African Americans were once the largest minority in the United States, but are now second, only behind Hispanics or Latinos of any race. At the time of the 2000 Census, 54.8 percent of African Americans lived in the South. In that year, 17.6 percent of African Americans lived in the Northeast and 18.7 percent in the Midwest, while only 8.9 percent lived in the western states. The west does have a sizable black population in certain areas, however. California, the nation's most populous state, has the fifth largest African American population, only behind New York, Texas, Georgia, and Florida. Almost 58 percent of African Americans lived in metropolitan areas in 2000. With over 2 million black residents, New York City had the largest black urban population in the United States in 2000, overall the city has a 28 percent black population. Chicago has the second largest black population, with almost 1.6 million African Americans in its metropolitan area, representing about 18 percent of the total metropolitan population. Among cities of 100,000 or more, Gary, Indiana, had the highest percentage of black residents of any U.S. city in 2000, with 85 percent (though it should be noted that the 2006 Census estimate puts the city's population below 100,000.) Nonetheless, Gary is followed closely by Detroit, Michigan, with 83 percent African American. Atlanta, Georgia, has a substantial African American population of about 65 percent. Baltimore, Maryland, has a high African American population of 64 percent. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, with 43 percent, Washington, D.C., with 60 percent, and Memphis, Tennessee with 61 percent, are also large African American population centers. The nation's most affluent county with a majority African American population is Prince George's County, Maryland, with a median income of $62,467. Other affluent African American majority counties include Dekalb County in Georgia, and Charles City County in Virginia. Queens County, New York, which is the only county with a population of 65,000 or more where African Americans have a higher household income than White Americans.
HistoryImage:WEB Du Bois.jpg W.E.B. Du Bois, notable proponent of Pan-Africanism, prominent intellectual leader and civil rights activist in the African American community; co-founder of the Niagara Movement and the NAACP. Blacks in America are descended from many diverseethnic groups. Members of over 40 identifiable ethnic groups from at least 25 different kingdoms were sold to British North America (which later became Canada and the United States) during the Atlantic slave trade. These African slaves were usually sold to European traders by powerful coastal or interior states in exchange for European goods such as textiles and firearms. Africans were very rarely kidnapped by Europeans because they could not penetrate the interior. The danger of fatal disease was ever-present and the coastal areas were dominated by powerful warrior kingdoms. Africans sold and traded into bondage and shipped to the United States came from eight distinct slave-trading regions in Africa, including the south of Morocco, Mauritania, Senegambia (present-day Senegal, the Gambia, Guinea and Guinea Bissau), Sierra Leone (also includes the area of present-day Liberia), the Windward Coast (present-day Ivory Coast), the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana and surrounding areas), the Bight of Benin (present-day Togo, Benin and western Nigeria), the Bight of Biafra (Nigeria south of the Benue River, Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea), Central Africa (Gabon, Angola, Democratic Republic of the Congo) and Southeast Africa (Mozambique and Madagascar). Enslaved Africans brought their own religious beliefs, languages, and cultural practices with them when they were forced on ships from Africa to the New World; however, slave traders and owners mounted a systematic and brutal campaign to de-Africanize them, eventually nearly completely stripping them of their original names, languages and religious beliefs. As additional means of subjugation, slave owners often intentionally mixed people who spoke many different African languages to discourage communication in any language other than English on their plantations and it became illegal for slaves to be taught to read or write. Over time, Africans in America formed a new and common identity focused on their mutual condition in America as opposed to cultural and historic ties to Africa. Image:BookerTWashington-Cheynes.LOC.jpg Booker T. Washington, political leader, educator, author, and one of the dominant figures in African American culture and politics in the early 20th century Throughout the period of African enslavement, various types of slavery developed. The types of crops grown (rice, cotton, tobacco, etc), led to varying types of slavery. The schedules of planting, tilling, sowing and harvesting throughout the seasons of the year led to different work regimens and different frequencies of owner-'property' interactions. The majority of slaves were owned by farmers who owned less than three slaves. This sometimes led to an intense blending of culture and sexual relations. In these situations it also enabled the enslaved a modicum of power through work stoppage and running away to nearby plantations during critical times of the year to barter for better treatment and working conditions. By 1860, there were 3.5 million enslaved Africans in the Southern United States, and another 500,000 Africans lived free across the country. Slavery was a controversial issue in American society and politics. The growth of abolitionism, which opposed the institution of slavery, culminated in the 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States, and was one reason for the secession of the Confederate States of America, which led to the American Civil War (1861 - 1865). After the Civil War, the United States offered certain civil rights to African Americans. The Emancipation Proclamation of 1862 declared all slaves in the Confederacy free under U.S. law. It included exceptions for those held in all territories that had not seceded, however, and thus did not immediately free a single slave, since U.S. law held no sway over the Confederacy at the time. The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1865, freed all slaves, including those in states that had not seceded. During Reconstruction, African Americans in the South obtained the right to vote and to hold public office, as well as a number of other civil rights they previously had been denied. However, when Reconstruction ended in 1877, southern, White landowners reinstituted the "Jim Crow" regime of disenfranchisement and racial segregation, and with it a wave of terrorism and repression, including lynchings and other vigilante violence. During the Progressive Era, black members of the middle class attempted improving the conditions of their race. This movement was strongest in the Southern United States and it often revolved around black southern universities such as Tuskegee University and Atlanta University, academic journals, and the Episcopal Church. Like white progressives, black progressives helped the working class through charitable means while supporting political changes that increased the role of the state in creating socioeconomic equity, as opposed to equality. Some black progressives were elitist and often condescending towards those they were intent on helping, akin to white progressives' attitudes and actions towards European immigrants. Black progressives were successful in their charitable efforts, but often were not concerned with issues like racial segregation. Instead, they supported a social Darwinist mentality with the hope that blacks through hard work and education could accelerate their social evolution. The plight of most black people did not improve during this time due to racist political policies supported by many Whites in conjunction with white vigilante action. In the last decade of the nineteenth century in the United States, racially discriminatory laws and racial violence aimed at African Americans began to mushroom. Elected, appointed, or hired government authorities began to require or permit discrimination, specifically in the states of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, Oklahoma, and Kansas. These discriminatory acts included racial segregation – upheld by the United States Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 - which was legally mandated by southern states and nationwide at the local level of government, voter suppression or disfranchisement in the southern states, denial of economic opportunity or resources nationwide, and private acts of violence and mass racial violence aimed at African Americans unhindered or encouraged by government authorities. Although racial discrimination was present nationwide, the combination of law, public and private acts of discrimination, marginal economic opportunity, and violence directed toward African Americans in the southern states became known as Jim Crow. The desperate conditions of African Americans in the South that sparked the Great Migration of the early 20th century, combined with a growing African American intellectual and cultural elite in the Northern United States, led to a movement to fight violence and discrimination against African Americans that, like abolitionism before it, crossed racial lines. One of the most prominent of these groups, the NAACP, galvanized by outspoken journalist and activist Ida B. Wells Barnett, led an anti-lynching crusade. In the 1950s, the organization mounted a series of calculated legal challenges to overturn Jim Crow segregation, culminating in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas decision.  The Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board was one of defining moments of the modern-day American Civil Rights Movement. It was part of a long-term strategy to strike down Jim Crow segregation in public education, the hospitality industry, public transportation, employment and housing, granting equal access to African Americans and ensuring their right to vote. The Civil Rights Movement aimed at abolishing public and private acts of racial discrimination against African Americans between 1954 to 1968, particularly in the southern United States. By 1966, the emergence of the Black Power Movement, which lasted from 1966 to 1975, expanded upon the aims of the Civil Rights Movement to include racial dignity, economic and political self-sufficiency, and freedom from white authority. Several scholars have begun to refer to the Civil Rights Movement as the Second Reconstruction. The Civil Rights Movement and subsequent Black Power Movement was the culmination of generations of oppression and contained several key events in American history, including the murder of Emmett Till, Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott, the desegregation of Little Rock, Arkansas, multiple sit-ins and freedom rides, the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and many other notable events. The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and the conditions which brought it into being are credited with putting pressure on President John F. Kennedy and then Lyndon B. Johnson that culminated in the passage the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that banned discrimination in public accommodations, employment, and labor unions. Image:Malcomxm1carbine3gr.gif Malcolm X holding an M1 Carbine. The "Mississippi Freedom Summer" of 1964 brought thousands of idealistic youth, black and white, to the state to run "freedom schools", to teach basic literacy, history and civics. Other volunteers were involved in voter registration drives. The season was marked by harassment, intimidation and violence directed at Civil Rights workers and their host families. The disappearance of three youths, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner in Philadelphia, Mississippi, captured the attention of the nation. Six weeks later, searchers found the savagely beaten body of Chaney, a black man, in a muddy dam alongside the remains of his two white companions, who had been shot to death. Outrage at the escalating injustices of the "Mississippi Blood Summer", as it by then had come to be known, and at the brutality of the murders brought about the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Act struck down barriers to black enfranchisement and was the capstone to more than a decade of major civil rights legislation. By this time, African Americans who questioned the effectiveness of nonviolent protest had gained a greater voice. More militant black leaders, such as Malcolm X of the Nation of Islam and Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense, called for blacks to defend themselves, using violence, if necessary. From the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, the Black Power movement urged African Americans to look to Africa for inspiration and emphasized black solidarity, rather than integration. The movement reached its peak in the 1960s under leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Whitney Young, and Roy Wilkins, Sr. At the same time, Nation of Islam spokesman Malcolm X and, later, Stokely Carmichael, the Black Panther Party, and the Republic of New Africa called for African Americans to embrace black nationalism and black self-empowerment, propounding ideas of African (black) unity, solidarity and pan-Africanism. By the end of the 1960s, however, several civil rights activists, leaders and pan-Africanists were assassinated, including Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. and Fred Hampton. Nevertheless, politically and economically, African Americans have made substantial strides in the post-civil rights era. Common Terms1. Brown v Topeka Black children were denied admission to public schools attended by white children under laws requiring or permitting segregation according to the races. White and black schools approached equality in terms of buildings, curricula, qualifications, and teacher salaries. It was a case that was decided together with Briggs v. Elliott and Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County. 2. Little Rock Representing the struggle for equal educational opportunity for African Americans. Focusing on these two communities, this highlights two important historic places and the role each played in testing the prevailing assumptions of the time regarding racial integration of schools. It is also about conflict between the rule of law versus mob rule, and the importance of a free press in exposing social injustice 3. Montgomery Bus Boycott Started on December 1, 1955. That was the day when the blacks of Montgomery, Alabama, decided that they would boycott the city buses until they could sit anywhere they wanted, instead of it being relegated to the back when a white boarded. It was not, however, the day that the movement to desegregate the buses started 4. Greensboro Sit-ins Began on February 1, 1960, when four NC a&T freshmen shown in the mural photograph sat down at the downtown Woolworth lunch counter and tried to order something to eat and drink. Were told that people of their race had to stand up at another counter to eat 5. Freedoms Rides A series of non-violent, direct demonstrations performed in 1961 as part of the U.S. civil rights movement. African American and white (volunteers), many of whom were college students, called Freedom Riders, rode in interstate buses into the segregated southern United States to test the 1960 United States. The Supreme Court decided Boynton v. Virginia, (1960) 364 U.S. 454, which outlawed racial segregation in interstate transportation facilities, including bus stations and railroad terminals 6. Freedom Summer A campaign in the United States that launched during the summer of 1964 to attempt to register as many African American voters as possible in the Southern United States. They decided that this campaign would continue the interest in civil rights and the precedents set by the Freedom Riders 7. The assassination of Martin Luther King Dead in the southern US city of Memphis, Tennessee, where he was to lead a march of sanitation workers protesting against the low wages and poor working conditions 8. Give the provisions of the voting rights act. Voting rights act were set to expire next year. Requirements that states and counties with a history of discrimination. Clear any changes to their election process with federal authorities. Those federal observers are present if there is evidence that voters have been intimidated. Those counties with significant non-English-speaking populations provide bilingual ballots Economic StatusThe collective economic status of African Americans is a matter of contentious debate, with statistics simultaneously suggesting both the residual effects of historical marginalization and sustained progress for large sections of the population in the United States, and the greater affluence of the group when compared to populations outside of the United States. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the median income of African Americans as a group is roughly 65 percent[4] of that of "white" people, that is, "people having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa.[5] The only county in the nation with a population over 65,000 where the median income among black households surpasses that of whites is Queens in New York City (the median income among black households there was close to $52,000 in 2005).[6] Racial economic disparities are greatest of all at the highest levels of income, although this economic super elite does not reflect any American population collective, black or otherwise. According to Forbes magazine's "wealthiest American" lists, a 2000 net-worth of $800 million dollars made (by 2006 1.5 billion USD) Oprah Winfrey the richest African American of the 20th century in sharp contrast to the 20th century's richest White American Bill Gates whose net-worth briefly hit $100 billion in 1999 However, in Forbes' list of 2006, Gates' net worth decreased to $53 billion USD while Winfrey's net worth increased to $1.5 billion USD,[7][8] making her the richest Black person on the face of the planet,[9][10] and the first African American to make Business Week's 50 greatest philanthropists list.[11]Image:Oprah Winfrey (2004).jpg Philanthropist, talk show host, book critic, actor and magazine publisher Oprah Winfrey, richest African American of the 20th century, the world's only Black billionaire for 3 straight years[12][10][13] and elected the Greatest American woman of all time.[14] Despite the poverty levels of many African American communities in the United States, African Americans collectively are more affluent than most other groups outside of the country. In 2006 the Selig Center estimated African Americans to have $852.8 billion USD in purchasing power, as a country African Americans would be the 18th wealthest nation. Current information points to a continuation of a long-term trend toward parity with national levels and absolutely higher levels of affluence than those experienced by most populations outside the United States. Packaged Facts estimate African American purchasing power will be $981 billion by 2010.[citation needed] Since the mid to late 1990s, African American incomes have risen at a remarkable pace and the progress shows up at every income level - from the still-large but shrinking underclass, to the fast-developing black middle class, to the growing ranks of wealthy African Americans.[citation needed] Over 1.7 million African Americans have gone off the poverty rolls; earnings by African American women have moved to within a few percentage points of white women's; and unemployment among blacks in recent years has dropped below the 10 percent mark.[citation needed] The poverty rate among African Americans has dropped from 26.5% in 1998 to 24.7% in 2004.[15] The growth in African American incomes is translating into big gains in buying power and opportunities for black businesses.[citation needed] By 2003, sex had replaced race as the primary factor in life expectancy in the United States, with African American females expected to live longer than white males born in that year.[16] In the same year, the gap in life expectancy between American whites (78.0) and blacks (72.8) had decreased to 5.2 years, reflecting a long term trend of this phenomenon.[16] The current life expectancy of African Americans as a group is comparable to those of other groups who live in countries with a high human development index. In 2004, African American workers had the second-highest median earnings of American minority groups after Asian Americans, and African Americans had the highest level of male-female income parity of all ethnic groups in the United States.[17] Also, among American minority groups | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
