African American history
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African American history is the history of an ethnic group in the United States also known as Black Americans. The majority of African-Americans are the descendants of enslaved Africans transported from West and Central Africa to the States during the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Others have arrived through more recent immigration from Africa, South America, and the Caribbean.
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[edit] Early history
[edit] African origins
Like other people of African descent in the Western Hemisphere, the ancestors of the overwhelming majority of African Americans were brought to North America as slaves between 1619 and 1807, when the Trans-Atlantic slave trade was supposed to end. Hundreds of slave ships existed between 1808 and 1858 carrying "black ivory" into the United States.
They came from eight distinct slave-trading regions in Africa. The regions were Gold Coast (present day Ghana and surrounding areas), Senegambia (Present day Senegal, Gambia, Guinea and Guinea Bissau), Sierra Leone (also includes the area of present day Liberia), Windward Coast (present day Ivory Coast), Bight of Benin (Present day Togo, Benin and western Nigeria), Bight of Bonny, Democratic Republic of the Congo and Southeast Africa (Mozambique and Madagascar). The majority of slaves that were taken to what would become the United States came from the Gold Coast, Senegambian, Sierra Leone, Windward Coast, Bight of Benin, and Bight of Biafra. Certain slaves were more favored than others because of experience in agriculture or perceived docile natures.
Black Americans, like their ballswhite counterparts, are not a homogeneous population. Just as white Americans descend from Dutch, French, English, German, Irish, Italian, Franco-American, Polish, Scots-Irish, Scottish, Swedish, Norwegian, and Russian ancestors, Black Americans are composed of multiple ethnic groups. A reliable number of just how many ethnic groups were part of the Atlantic slave trade may never be known. However, there are approximately 40 major ethnic groups Black Americans descend from that can be found in present day African nations:
- Ghana: Ashanti, Fante, Ewe, and Ga
- Mali: Mandinka, Fulani, Bambara, Songhai, and Dogon
- Senegal, Gambia, & Guinea: Wolof, Serer, Fula, Peuhl, Balante, and Papel
- Sierra Leone & Liberia: Temne, Mende, Kissi, Goree, Kru, and Vai
- Ivory Coast: Gullah, Bassa, and Grebo
- Benin & Togo: Fon, Ewe, and Mina
- Nigeria: Yoruba, Nupe, Edo-Bini, Igbo, Ibibio, Ijaw, Ibani, and Efik
- Cameroon: Duala
- Angola: BaKongo, Imbangala, Mbunda, and Lunda
- Congo: Luba
These ethnic groups were usually sold to European traders by powerful coastal or interior states in exchange for European goods such as textiles and firearms. Europeans on occasion kidnapped Africans, but this was rare. As coastal and near-coastal nation states in Africa expanded through military conflicts, the captives of these wars (be they soldiers or villagers) were sold. Slavery had been prevalent on a much smaller scale in African society long before the arrival of Europeans. Another way of becoming a slave was being convicted of a crime. Since most if not all these states did not have a prison system, criminals were usually sold.
Most Africans lived in moderately autonomous villages or densely populated urban centers within tribal kingdoms that checked a king’s power via some sort of council. These villages or cities paid tribute to the king and fought for him when called upon.
While most Africans lived within a semi-centralized state or kingdom, others lived in small villages with no state protection. Without such protection, these Africans were at higher risk to be enslaved. Since early Europeans had little success against the African states militarily, the non-urbanized Africans became frequent victims. Stateless areas such as Gambia, Guinea and southern Angola quickly fell into the hands of Europeans who sold the inhabitants as needed to colonies in the New World. The African states also raided these areas selling the inhabitants to Europeans and each other.
[edit] Introduction of slavery
Africans brought to America between the years of 1619 and 1661 were not considered slaves. Since English law had no precedent for slave laws, Africans were given the same rights as white indentured servants. They would work to gain their independence, and Census records dating from 1651 show free Blacks in the colonies who had worked through their servitude and were given land and their freedom.
The colonies in the 17th century were a land based economy. In order for the owners of large pieces of land to make a profit they required people to work the land for them. Until the onset of slavery, these people were indentured servants. The problem was that as more of these people got their own land, and as more free people immigrated from Europe, it was found that farmhands were in short supply. There was a need for a large and growing number of people in the colonies to work the land. 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.
The first statute of slavery was passed in 1661, by Virginia. A year later, Virginia passed another statute that stated all Black children should have the same status and their mothers. Other states soon followed. By the end of the century, there were over 1,000 slaves brought to the colonies every year.
The importation of slaves into the U.S. was outlawed in 1807. In North America, African slaves could be found primarily in the southern half of the British colonies, although slaves also were owned in the Spanish colony of Florida and the French colony of Louisiana. As chattel slaves in perpetuity, African slaves and their progeny were considered the property of their owners and had no rights. Slaves often were considered little more than beasts of burden, or draught horses. Records of slave births, deaths and sales or trade transactions often were maintained in ledgers alongside similar records of farm animals.
The U.S. Constitution of 1787 said that slaves, who at no time had the right to vote in any state, should count as part of the population at the ratio of three persons counted per five slaves. Some persons have translated this into a belief that slaves counted as 3/5 of a person, which is a rough approximation of the truth of their status. Students of the abolitionist movement, however, note that slaves would have been better off if they were not counted as people at all: the population counts added pro-slavery members of the House of Representatives and added electoral votes for pro-slavery Presidential nominees.
The twin doctrines of white supremacy and its corollary, a belief in the inherent inferiority of blacks, combined with capitalism to create a powerful rationale for slavery. Nationwide, de facto and de jure segregation and discrimination based on the notion of race were accepted and effective tools to enforce and entrench a pervasive system of white economic power and privilege and black oppression and disadvantage.
[edit] Post-Independence
After the American Revolution (1775-1783), changing economic conditions resulted in the decline and end of what limited slavery there was in the North. Indeed some blacks fought as Loyalists, whose descendants now reside in Canada. Conversely, the rapid spread of cotton cultivation in the South encouraged the growth of slavery there. By 1860, 3.8 million slaves accounted for one third of the total population of the southern states.
Contrary to popular belief, however, not all blacks in America were slaves. By the year 1860, well over 11%[citation needed] of the total black population in the U.S. was free. There were approximately 500,000 free blacks who lived throughout the United States, with slightly more than half residing in the South. Because of the high monetary value placed on strong, healthy slaves capable of hard physical labor and reproduction, free blacks often lived in constant danger of being kidnapped and sold into slavery.
After having completed the labor required of them by their masters, some slaves were permitted to perform work for hire. In this way, over time some were able to purchase their freedom. Once free, many then continued to save their incomes in order to purchase their entire families' freedom. Others sometimes were manumitted, usually upon the death of their masters, and still others escaped to freedom. The Underground Railroad was a series of well-traveled escape routes to the North along which people, both black and white, sympathetic to the anti-slavery cause provided refuge, food and directions to safeguard and speed fugitive slaves on their journey North.
In the North, many free blacks joined the abolitionist cause, and tens of thousands of free black men and fugitive slaves enthusiastically joined the ranks of the Union Army after the Civil War began.
[edit] The Civil War, Reconstruction and its aftermath
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.
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]
[edit] The collapse of Reconstruction and 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.
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 black's 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.
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 tens of millions of Afro-Americans living in a constant state of anxiety and fear of the white mob.[1] the Jim Crow laws were named after minstrel show character Jim Crow, who became famous from the song "Jump Jim Crow;" blackface was in fact a key symbol of racism against African Americans.
- (See also: Jim Crow laws)
[edit] Segregation
After Congress passed the Reconstruction Act of 1867, the ratification of the 15th Amendment to the Constitution in 1870 providing the right to vote, and the Civil Rights Act of 1875 forbidding racial discrimination in accommodations, Federal occupation troops in the South assured blacks the right to vote and to elect their own political leaders.
In order to discourage black voting Southern Democrats resorted to violence. The white supremacist Ku Klux Klan terrorized black political leaders to counter the Repubican party's power base. Many blacks were killed for attempting to exercise their right to vote, for political organization and for attending school. Thus segregation can be seen as a reaction to growing political power of blacks in the South.
[edit] Founding of the NAACP
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.
[edit] 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.
[edit] Two World Wars
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 U.S. 761st Tank Battalion proved their value in combat, leading to desegregation of all US Armed Forces by order of President Harry S. Truman in July of 1948 via Executive Order 9981. It also opened jobs for black women in the field of nursing.
[edit] The Civil Rights Movement
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 reform. The conflict grew to involve steadily escalating physical violence, bombings and intimidation; and southern law enforcement responded with batons, electric cattle prods, fire hoses, attack dogs and mass arrests.
In Virginia, a campaign of obstructionism and outright defiance, called Massive Resistance, entailed a series of actions by state legislators, school board members and other public officials to deny state funding to integrated schools and fund privately run "segregation academies" for white students. Farmville, Virginia, in Prince Edward County, was one of the plaintiff African-American communities involved in the 1954 Brown v. Board Supreme Court decision. As a last-ditch effort to avoid court-ordered desegregation, officials in the county shut down the county's entire public school system in 1959.[1] White students were able to attend private schools established for the sole purpose of circumventing integration. The largely black, rural population of the county had little recourse. Some families were split up as parents sent their children to live with relatives in other locales to attend public school; but the majority of Prince Edward's more than 2,000 black children, as well as many poor whites, simply remained unschooled until court action forced the schools to reopen five years later.
Perhaps, the high point of the Civil Rights Movement was the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which brought more than 200,000 marchers to the grounds of the Lincoln Memorial and the National Mall in Washington, D.C., to speak out for an end to southern racial violence and police brutality, equal opportunity in employment, equal access in education and public accommodations. The organizers of the march were the "Big Six" of the Civil Rights Movement: labor organizer and initiator of the march, A. Phillip Randolph; Roy Wilkins of the NAACP; Whitney Young, Jr., of the National Urban League; Martin Luther King, Jr., of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC); James Farmer of the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE); and John Lewis of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Also active behind the scenes and sharing the podium with Dr. King was Dorothy Height, head of the National Council of Negro Women. It was at this event, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial that King delivered his historic "I Have a Dream" speech. This march 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.
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, 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.
[edit] Political and economic empowerment
Politically but less so economically, blacks have made substantial strides in the post-civil rights era. Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson, who ran for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 1984 and 1988, brought unprecedented support and leverage to blacks in politics. In 1989, Virginia became the first state in U.S. history to elect a black Governor, Douglas Wilder. In 1992 Carol Moseley-Braun of Illinois became the first black woman elected to the U.S. Senate. There were 8,936 black officeholders in the United States in 2000, showing a net increase of 7,467 since 1970. In 2001 there were 484 mayors and 38 members of Congress. The Congressional Black Caucus serves as a political bloc in Congress for issues relating to African Americans. The appointment of blacks to high federal offices—including General Colin Powell, Chairman of the U.S. Armed Forces Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1989-1993, United States Secretary of State, 2001 - 2005; Condoleezza Rice, Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, 2001-2004, confirmed Secretary of State in January, 2005; Ron Brown, United States Secretary of Commerce, 1993-1996; and Supreme Court justices Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas—also demonstrates the increasing visibility of blacks in the political arena. However many African Americans are discouraged by the fact that most of the above mentioned Blacks appointed to government positions served the political party opposed by 90% of Black Americans.
Economic progress for blacks has been equally slow. According to Forbes rich lists, Oprah Winfrey was the richest African American of the 20th century and has been the world's only black billionaire in 2004, 2005, and 2006.[2] Not only was Winfrey the world's only black billionaire but she's been the only black on the Forbes 400 nearly every year since 1995 (BET founder Bob Johnson briefly joined her on the list from 2001-2003 before his ex-wife acquired part of his fortune, though he recently returned to the list in 2006). With only two black wealthy enough to rank among America's 400 richest people, blacks are currently only 0.5% of America's economic elite, despite being 12% of the U.S. population.
[edit] Historians
[edit] See also
[edit] Biography
- Notable African-Americans
- Notable African-American scientists
[edit] Further reading
- The African-American Odyssey, by Darlene Clark Hine, William C. Hine, and Stanley Harrold, 2nd ed.; Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, N.J., 2002
- Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, Darlene Clark Hine, Rosalyn Terborg-Penn and Elsa Barkley Brown, editors; paperback edition, Indiana University Press, 2005
- Black Trials: Citizenship from the Beginnings of Slavery to the End of Caste, by Mark S. Weiner, Alfred A. Knopf, 2004
- Bridges of Memory; Chicago's First Wave of Black Migration: An Oral History, by Timuel D. Black Jr., Northwestern University Press, 2005 ISBN 0-8101-2315-0
- From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans, by John Hope Franklin, rev. ed., Alfred Moss, McGraw-Hill Education, 2001
[edit] Notes
- ^ For the story of the lynchings, see Philip Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America (New York: Random House, 2002). For the systematic oppression and terror inflicted, see Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York, 1998).
[edit] External links
- "Africans in America" - PBS 4-Part Series (2007)
- Living Black History: How Reimagining the African-American Past Can Remake America's Racial Future by Dr. Manning Marable (2006)
- Black History Collection
- Library of Congress - African American History and Culture
- Center for Contemporary Black History at Columbia University
- Encyclopedia Britannica - Guide to Black History
- Missouri State Archives - African American History Initiative
- Black History Month
- "Remembering Jim Crow" - Minnesota Public Radio (multi-media)
- Educational Toys focused on African-American History developed by History in Action Toys
- "Slavery and the Making of America" - PBS - WNET, New York (4-Part Series)
- Timeline of Slavery in America
- Tennessee Technological University - African-American History and Studies
- "They Closed Our Schools," the story of Massive Resistance and the closing of the Prince Edward County, Virginia public schools
- Return to Glory: The Powerful Stirring of the Black Man
- "A White Man's Journey Into Black History"
- Black People in History
- Comparative status of African Americans in Canada in the 1800s
- Historical resources related to African American history provided free for public use by the State Archives of Florida
- USF Africana Project A guide to African American genealogy
- Ancient Egyptian Photo Gallery
- Research African American Records at the National Archives
