African Americans
- African Americans (also referred to as Black Americans or Afro-Americans, and formerly as American Negroes) are
- citizens or residents of the United States who have origins in any of the black populations of Africa.
- Mostly direct descendants of captive Africans who survived the slavery era within the boundaries of the present United States.
- African-American history starts in the 17th century with indentured servitude in British America and progresses onto the election of Barack Obama as the 44th and current President of the United States.
- Between those landmarks there were other events and issues that were faced by African Americans. Some of these were slavery, reconstruction, development of the African-American community, racial segregation, and the Civil Rights Movement.
- African Americans make up the single largest racial minority in the United States and form the second largest racial group after whites in the United States.
Slavery era
- The first recorded Africans arrived in 1619 as indentured servants who settled in Jamestown, Virginia. As English settlers died from harsh conditions, more and more Africans were brought to work as laborers. Africans for many years were similar in legal position to poor English indentures.
- Africans could legally raise crops and cattle to purchase their freedom.They raised families, marrying other Africans and sometimes intermarrying with Native Americans or English settlers. By the 1640s and 1650s, several African families owned farms around Jamestown and some became wealthy by colonial standards.
- The popular conception of a race-based slave system did not fully develop until the 18th century.
- The first black congregations and churches were organized before 1800 in both northern and southern cities following the Great Awakening.
- During the 1770s, Africans, both enslaved and free, helped rebellious English colonists secure American Independence by defeating the British in the American Revolution. Africans and Englishmen fought side by side and were fully integrated.
- By 1860, there were 3.5 million enslaved African Americans in the United States due to the Atlantic slave trade, and another 500,000 African Americans lived free across the country.
- In 1863, during the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation which declared that all slaves in states which had seceded from the Union were free.
- In 1865, Advancing Union troops enforced the proclamation with Texas thus being the last state to be emancipated
Reconstruction and Jim Crow
- African Americans quickly set up congregations for themselves, as well as schools, community and civic associations, to have space away from white control or oversight.
- While the post-war reconstruction era was initially a time of progress for African Americans, in the late 1890s, Southern states enacted Jim Crow laws to enforce racial segregation and disenfranchisement.
- Most African Americans followed the Jim Crow laws, using a mask of compliance to prevent becoming victims of racially motivated violence.
- In the last decade of the 19th century, racially discriminatory laws and racial violence aimed at African Americans began to mushroom in the United States.
Great Migration and Civil Rights Movement
- The desperate conditions of African Americans in the South that sparked the Great Migration of the early 20th century, led to a movement to fight violence and discrimination against African Americans that crossed racial lines.
- The Civil Rights Movement from 1954 to 1968 was directed at abolishing racial discrimination against African Americans, particularly in the Southern United States.
- Johnson put his support behind passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that banned discrimination in public accommodations, employment, and labor unions, and the Voting Rights Act (1965), which expanded federal authority over states to ensure black political participation through protection of voter registration and elections.
- 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 economic and political self-sufficiency, and freedom from white authority.
Post-Civil Rights era
- Politically and economically, blacks have made substantial strides during the post-civil rights era.
- In 1989, Douglas Wilder became the first African-American elected governor in U.S. history.
- Clarence Thomas became the second African-American Supreme Court Justice.
- 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 black mayors.
- On November 4, 2008, Democratic Senator Barack Obama defeated Republican Senator John McCain to become the first African American to be elected President.
- At least 95 percent of African-American voters voted for Obama. He also received overwhelming support from young and educated whites, a majority of Asians, Hispanics,and Native Americans picking up a number of new states in the Democratic electoral column.
- Obama lost the overall white vote, although he won a larger proportion of white votes than any previous nonincumbent Democratic presidential candidate since Jimmy Carter.
- The following year Michael S. Steele was elected the first African-American chairman of the national Republican Party.
Religion
- The majority of African Americans are Protestant of whom many follow the historically black churches which ministers predominantly African American congregations.
- Black congregations were first established by freed slaves at the end of the 17th century, and later when slavery was abolished, more African Americans were allowed to create a unique form of Christianity that was culturally influenced by African spiritual traditions.
- The largest Protestant denomination among African Americans are the Baptists,distributed in four denominations,
- the largest being the National Baptist Convention and the National Baptist Convention of America.
- The second largest are the Methodists, the largest sects are the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church.
- Pentecostals are mainly part of the Church of God in Christ. About 16% of African American Christians are members of white Protestant communions.
- The are also large numbers of Roman Catholics, constituting 5% of the African American population. Of the total number of Jehovah's Witnesses, 22% are black.
- Some African Americans follow Islam.
- Historically, between 15 to 30% of enslaved Africans brought to the Americas were Muslims, but most of these Africans were converted to Christianity during the era of American slavery.
- However during the 20th century, some African Americans converted to Islam, mainly through the influence of black nationalist groups that preached with distinctive Islamic practices.
Terms no longer in common use
- The terms mulatto and colored were widely used until the second quarter of the 20th century, when they were considered outmoded and generally gave way to the use of negro.
- By the 1940s, the term commonly was capitalized, but by the mid 1960s, it had acquired negative connotations, though the term mulatto is still in use in many parts of Latin America and is not considered offensive there.
- Today, in the culture of the United States, the term is considered inappropriate and is now rarely used and perceived as a pejorative.
- The term Negro is largely out of use among the younger black generation, but is still used by a substantial block of older black Americans, particularly in the southern U.S.
- In Latin America, negro, which translates as black is the term generally used to refer and describe black people and, similarly to mulatto, it is not considered offensive at all in these regions.
