Black history topics

African-American history started with the arrival of Africans to North America in the 16th and 17th centuries. Formerly enslaved Spaniards who had been freed by Francis Drake arrived aboard the Golden Hind at New Albion in California in 1579.^[1] The European colonization of the Americas, and the resulting Atlantic slave trade, led to a large-scale transportation of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic; of the roughly 10–12 million Africans who were sold by the Barbary slave trade, either to European slavery or to servitude in the Americas, approximately 388,000 landed in North America.^[2][3] After arriving in various European colonies in North America, the enslaved Africans were sold to white colonists, primarily to work on cash crop plantations. A group of enslaved Africans arrived in the English Virginia Colony in 1619, marking the beginning of slavery in the colonial history of the United States; by 1776, roughly 20% of the British North American population was of African descent, both free and enslaved.^[4][5]

The American Revolutionary War, which saw the Thirteen Colonies become independent and transform into the United States, led to great social upheavals for African Americans; Black soldiers fought on both the British and the American sides, and after the conflict ended the Northern United States gradually abolished slavery.^[6][7] However, the American South, which had an economy dependent on plantations operation by slave labor, entrenched the slave system and expanded it during the westward expansion of the United States.^[8][9] During this period, numerous enslaved African Americans escaped into free states and Canada via the Underground Railroad.^[10] Disputes over slavery between the Northern and Southern states led to the American Civil War, in which 178,000 African Americans served on the Union side. During the war, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery in the U.S., except as punishment for a crime.^[11]

After the war ended with a Confederate defeat, the Reconstruction era began, in which African Americans living in the South were granted equal rights with their white neighbors. White opposition to these advancements led to most African Americans living in the South to be disfranchised, and a system of racial segregation known as the Jim Crow laws was passed in the Southern states.^[12] Beginning in the early 20th century, in response to poor economic conditions, segregation and lynchings, over 6 million primarily rural African Americans migrated out of the South to other regions of the United States in search of opportunity.^[13] The nadir of American race relations led to civil rights efforts to overturn discrimination and racism against African Americans.^[14] In 1954, these efforts coalesced into a broad unified movement led by civil rights activists such as Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. This succeeded in persuading the federal government to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed racial discrimination.^[15]

The 2020 United States census reported that 46,936,733 respondents identified as African Americans, forming roughly 14.2% of the American population.^[16] Of those, over 2.1 million immigrated to the United States as citizens of modern African states.^[17] African Americans have made major contributions to the culture of the United States, including literature, cinema and music.^[18]

Enslavement

Main article: Slavery in the colonial history of the United States

African origins

African Americans are the descendants of Africans who were forced into slavery after they were captured during African wars or raids. They were captured and brought to America as part of the Atlantic slave trade.^[19] African Americans are descended from various ethnic groups, mostly from ethnic groups that lived in West and Central Africa, including the Sahel. A smaller number of African Americans are descended from ethnic groups that lived in Eastern and Southeastern Africa. The major ethnic groups that the enslaved Africans belonged to included the Bakongo, Igbo, Mandinka, Wolof, Akan, Fon, Yoruba, and Makua, among many others. Although these different groups varied in customs, religious theology and language, what they had in common was a way of life which was different from that of the Europeans.^[20] Originally, a majority of the people came from these villages and societies, however, once they were sent to the Americas and enslaved, these different peoples had European standards and beliefs forced upon them, causing them to do away with tribal differences and forge a new history and culture that was a creolization of their common past, present, and European culture .^[21] Slaves who belonged to specific African ethnic groups were more sought after and became more dominant in numbers than slaves who belonged to other African ethnic groups in certain regions of what later became the United States.^[22]

Regions of Africa

Studies of contemporary documents reveal seven regions from which Africans were sold or taken during the Atlantic slave trade. These regions were:

• Senegambia (present-day Senegal and The Gambia) encompassing the coast from the Senegal River to the Casamance River, where captives as far away as the Upper and Middle Niger River Valley were sold;
• The Sierra Leone region included territory from the Casamance to the Assinie in the modern countries of Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Côte d'Ivoire;
• The Gold Coast region consisted of mainly modern Ghana;
• The Bight of Benin region stretched 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; and
• East and Southeast Africa, the region of Mozambique-Madagascar included the modern countries of Mozambique, parts of Tanzania, and Madagascar.^[23]

The largest source of slaves transported across the Atlantic Ocean for the New World was West Africa. Some West Africans were skilled iron workers and were therefore able to make tools that aided in their agricultural labor. While there were many unique tribes with their own customs and religions, by the 15th century many of the tribes had embraced Islam. Those villages in West Africa which were lucky enough to be in good conditions for growth and success, prospered. They also contributed their success to the slave trade.^[20]

In all, about 10–12 million Africans were transported to the Western Hemisphere. The vast majority of these people came from that stretch of the West African coast extending from present-day Senegal to Angola; a small percentage came from Madagascar and East Africa. Only 5% (about 500,000) went to the American colonies. The vast majority went to the West Indies and Brazil, where they died quickly. Demographic conditions were highly favorable in the American colonies, with less disease, more food, some medical care, and lighter work loads than prevailed in the sugar fields.^[5]

Origins and percentages of African Americans imported to the Thirteen Colonies, New France, and New Spain (1700–1820):^[24]

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%
Total	100.0%

The Middle Passage

Main article: Middle Passage

The western countries of Africa would buy, sell, and trade other enslaved Africans, who were often prisoners of war, with the Europeans. The people of Mali and Benin are known for partaking in the event of selling their prisoners of war and other unwanted people off as slaves.^[20]

Transport

In the account of Olaudah Equiano, he described the process of being transported to the colonies and being on the slave ships as a horrific experience. On the ships, the enslaved Africans were separated from their family long before they boarded the ships.^[25] Once aboard the ships the captives were then segregated by gender.^[25] Under the deck, the enslaved Africans were cramped and did not have enough space to walk around freely. Enslaved males were generally kept in the ship's hold, where they experienced the worst of crowding.^[25] The captives stationed on the floor beneath low-lying bunks could barely move and spent much of the voyage pinned to the floorboards, which could, over time, wear the skin on their elbows down to the bone.^[25] Due to the lack of basic hygiene, malnourishment, and dehydration diseases spread wildly and death was common.

The women on the ships often endured rape by the crewmen.^[20] Women and children were often kept in rooms set apart from the main hold. This gave crewmen easy access to the women which was often regarded as one of the perks of the trade system.^[25] Not only did these rooms give the crewmen easy access to women but it gave enslaved women better access to information on the ship's crew, fortifications, and daily routine, but little opportunity to communicate this to the men confined in the ship's hold.^[25] As an example, women instigated a 1797 insurrection aboard the slave shipThomas by stealing weapons and passing them to the men below as well as engaging in hand-to-hand combat with the ship's crew.^[25]

In the midst of these terrible conditions, enslaved Africans plotted mutiny. Enslaved males were the most likely candidates to mutiny and only at times they were on deck.^[25] While rebellions did not happen often, they were usually unsuccessful. In order for the crew members to keep the enslaved Africans under control and prevent future rebellions, the crews were often twice as large and members would instill fear into the enslaved Africans through brutality and harsh punishments.^[25] From the time of being captured in Africa to the arrival to the plantations of the European masters, took an average of six months.^[20] Africans were completely cut off from their families, home, and community life.^[26] They were forced to adjust to a new way of life.

Colonial era

Africans assisted the Spanish and the Portuguese during their early exploration of the Americas. In the 16th century some Black explorers settled in the Mississippi valley and in the areas that became South Carolina and New Mexico. The most celebrated Black explorer of the Americas was Estéban, who traveled through the Southwest in the 1530s.^[27]

In 1619, the first captive Africans were brought via Dutch slave ship to Point Comfort (today Fort Monroe in Hampton, Virginia), thirty miles downstream from Jamestown, Virginia.^[28] They had been kidnapped by Portuguese slave traders.^[29] Virginia settlers treated these captives as indentured servants and released them after a number of years. This practice was gradually replaced by the system of chattel slavery used in the Caribbean.^[30] When servants were freed, they became competition for resources. Additionally, released servants had to be replaced.^[31]

This—combined with the ambiguous nature of the social status of Black people and the difficulty in using any other group of people as forced servants—led to the subjugation of Black people into slavery. Massachusetts was the first colony to legalize slavery in 1641.^[32] Other colonies followed suit by passing laws that made slave status heritable and non-Christian imported servants slaves for life.^[31]

At first, Africans in the South were outnumbered by white indentured servants who came voluntarily from Europe. They^[who?] avoided the plantations. With the vast amount of arable land and a shortage of laborers, plantation owners turned to African slavery. The enslaved had some legal rights—it was a crime to kill an enslaved person, for example, and several whites were hanged for it.^{[citation needed]} Generally, enslaved Africans developed their own family system, religion, and customs in the slave quarters with little interference from owners, who were only interested in work outputs.^{[citation needed]} Before the 1660s, the North American mainland colonies were still fairly small in size and did not have a great demand for labour, so colonists did not import large numbers of enslaved Africans at this point.^{[citation needed]}

By 1700, there were 25,000 enslaved Black people in the North American mainland colonies, forming roughly 10% of the population. Some enslaved Black people had been directly shipped from Africa (most of them were from 1518 to the 1850s), but initially, in the very early stages of the European colonization of North America, occasionally they had been shipped via the West Indies in small cargoes after spending time working on the islands.^[33] At the same time, many were born to Africans and their descendants, and thus were native-born on the North American mainland. Their legal status was codified into law with the Virginia Statutes: ACT XII (1662):^[34] setting forth that all children upon birth would inherit the same status of their mother .^[35]

As European colonists engaged in aggressive expansionism, claiming and clearing more land for large-scale farming and the construction of plantations, the flow of enslaved Africans brought to the continent rapidly increased, beginning in the 1660s.^[36] The slave trade from the West Indies proved insufficient to meet demand in the now fast-growing North American slave market. Additionally, most North American buyers of enslaved people no longer wanted to purchase enslaved people who were coming in from the West Indies—by now they were either harder to obtain, too expensive, undesirable, or more often, they had been exhausted in many ways by the brutality of the islands' sugar plantations.^[37] From the 1680s onward, the majority of enslaved Africans imported into North America were shipped directly from Africa, and most of them disembarked in ports located in what is now the Southern U.S., particularly in the present-day states of Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, and Louisiana.

Black women were often raped by white men.^[38][39]

Black population in the 18th century

By the turn of the 18th century, enslaved Africans had come to fully supplant indentured servants in providing the labor source for the rapidly expanding plantation system of the Southern Colonies.^[40] The population of enslaved African Americans in North America grew rapidly during the 18th and early 19th centuries due to a variety of factors, including a lower prevalence of tropic diseases.^[41] Colonial society was divided over the religious and moral implications of slavery, though it remained legal in each of the Thirteen Colonies until the American Revolution. Slavery led to a gradual shift between the American South and North, both before and after independence, as the comparatively more urbanized and industrialized North required fewer slaves than the South.^[42]

By the 1750s, the native-born enslaved population of African descent outnumbered that of the African-born enslaved.^{[citation needed]} By the time of the American Revolution, several Northern states were considering the abolition of slavery.^{[citation needed]} Some Southern colonies, such as Virginia, had produced such large and self-sustaining native-born enslaved Black populations that they stopped taking indirect imports of enslaved Africans altogether.^{[citation needed]} However, other colonies such as Georgia and South Carolina still relied on a steady influx of enslaved people to keep up with the ever-growing demand for agricultural labor among the burgeoning plantation economies. These colonies continued to import enslaved Africans until the trade was outlawed in 1808, save for a temporary lull during the Revolutionary War.

South Carolina's Black population remained very high for most of the eighteenth century due to the continued import of enslaved Africans, with Blacks outnumbering whites three-to-one.^{[citation needed]} In contrast, Virginia maintained a white majority despite its significant Black enslaved population.^[43] It was said that in the eighteenth century, the colony South Carolina resembled an "extension of West Africa".^{[citation needed]}

Black population in the 19th century

Legal importation of enslaved Africans halted in 1808 when the newly formed United States outlawed the slave trade on the earliest date allowed by the Constitution. Despite the ban, small to moderate cargoes of enslaved Africans continued to be illegally brought into the U.S., only ending for good in 1859.^[44]

Gradually, a free Black population emerged, concentrated in port cities along the Atlantic coast from Charleston to Boston.^{[citation needed]} Enslaved people who lived in the cities and towns had more privileges than enslaved people who did not, but the great majority of enslaved people lived on southern tobacco or rice plantations, usually in groups of 20 or more.^[45] Wealthy plantation owners eventually became so reliant on slavery that they devastated their own lower class.^[46] In the years to come, the institution of slavery would be so heavily involved in the South's economy that it would divide America.

The most serious slave rebellion was the 1739 Stono Uprising in South Carolina. The colony had about 56,000 enslaved Blacks, outnumbering whites two-to-one. About 150 enslaved people rose up, seizing guns, ammunition, and killing twenty whites before fleeing to Spanish Florida. The local militia soon intercepted and killed most of the slaves involved in the uprising.^[47]

At this time^[when?], slavery existed in all American colonies. In the North, 2% of people owned enslaved people, most of whom were personal servants. In the south, 25% of the population relied on the labour of enslaved people.^{[in what fashion? who, plantation owners or small-time farmers?]} Southern slavery usually took the form of field hands who lived and worked on plantations.^[48] These statistics show the early imbalance that would eventually tip the scale and rid the United States of slavery.^{[clarification needed][49]}

American Revolution and early United States

See also: American Revolution, History of the United States (1776–1789), and African Americans in the Revolutionary War

The latter half of the 18th century was a time of significant political upheaval on the North American continent. In the midst of cries for independence from British rule, many pointed out the hypocrisy inherent in colonial slaveholders' demands for freedom. The Declaration of Independence, a document which would become a manifesto for human rights and personal freedom around the world, was written by Thomas Jefferson, a man who owned over 200 enslaved people. Other Southern statesmen were also major slaveholders. The Second Continental Congress considered freeing enslaved people to assist with the war effort, but 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 Black people, most notably Prince Hall—founder of Prince Hall Freemasonry—submitted petitions which called for abolition, but these were largely ignored.^[50]

This did not deter Black people, free and enslaved, 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 Black people, including Prince Hall, fought in the Continental Army. Many fought side by side with White soldiers at the battles of Lexington and Concord and at Bunker Hill. However, upon George Washington's ascension to commander of the Continental Army in 1775, the additional recruitment of Black people was forbidden.^{[citation needed]}

Approximately 5000 free African-American men helped the American Colonists in their struggle for freedom. One of these men, Agrippa Hull, fought in the American Revolution for over six years. He and the other African-American soldiers fought in order to improve their white neighbor's views of them and advance their own fight of freedom.^[51]

By contrast, the British and Loyalists offered emancipation to any enslaved person owned by a Patriot who was willing to join the Loyalist forces. Lord Dunmore, the Governor of Virginia, recruited 300 African-American men into his Ethiopian regiment within a month of making this proclamation. In South Carolina 25,000 enslaved people, more than one-quarter of the total, escaped to join and fight with the British, or fled for freedom in the uproar of war.^{[citation needed]} Thousands of slaves also escaped in Georgia and Virginia, as well as New England and New York. Well-known African-Americans who fought for the British include Colonel Tye and Boston King.^{[citation needed]}

Thomas Peters was one of the large numbers of African Americans who fought for the British. Peters was born in present-day Nigeria and belonged to the Yoruba tribe, and ended up being captured and sold into slavery in French Louisiana.^[52] Sold again, he was enslaved in North Carolina and escaped his master's farm in order to receive Lord Dunmore's promise of freedom. Peters had fought for the British throughout the war. When the war finally ended, he and other African Americans who fought on the losing side were taken to Nova Scotia. Here, they encountered difficulty farming the small plots of lands they were granted. They also did not receive the same privileges and opportunities as the white Loyalists had. Peters sailed to London in order to complain to the government. "He arrived at a momentous time when English abolitionists were pushing a bill through Parliament to charter the Sierra Leone Company and to grant it trading and settlement rights on the West African coast." Peters and the other African Americans on Nova Scotia left for Sierra Leone in 1792. Peters died soon after they arrived, but the other members of his party lived on in their new home where they formed the Sierra Leone Creole ethnic identity.^{[53][54][55][56][57]}

American independence

The colonists eventually won the war and the United States was recognized as a sovereign nation. In the provisional treaty, they demanded the return of property, including enslaved people. Nonetheless, the British helped up to 3,000 documented African Americans to leave the country for Nova Scotia, Jamaica and Britain rather than be returned to slavery.^[58]

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 Black people's rights were also restricted in many places. Most were denied the right to vote and were excluded from public schools. Some Black people sought to fight these contradictions in court. In 1780, Elizabeth Freeman and Quock Walker used language from the new Massachusetts constitution that declared all men were born free and equal in freedom suits to gain release from slavery. A free Black businessman in Boston named Paul Cuffe sought to be excused from paying taxes since he had no voting rights.^[59]

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]}