African Americans

African Americans. The African American community had its roots in the great migration of peoples from the Old World to the New. Unlike European, Asian, and Latino Americans, however, Africans entered the New World in chains. Despite the Revolutionary War and the emergence of the United States as an independent republic, most African Americans remained in bondage until the Civil War and the First Reconstruction. In the 1860s and 1870s, African Americans gained freedom and citizenship, but the rise of racial segregation soon undercut this achievement. By World War I, the United States had institutionalized new patterns of class and racial inequality in its politics, culture, and economy. The Jim Crow system, as it was called, persisted through the mid–twentieth century.

As the nation instituted different forms of inequality and as African Americans confronted ongoing status and social class conflicts within their own communities, they nonetheless staged both individual and collective resistance to discrimination, and shaped the nation's history in the process. The black freedom struggle culminated in the rise of the modern civil rights movement and gave rise to what has been called the Second Reconstruction in the 1950s and 1960s. While the civil‐rights struggle demolished the legal underpinnings of Jim Crow, it failed to fully translate such changes into material improvements in the lives of poor and working‐class blacks. As these gaps in the civil‐rights agenda became clearer, black activists launched the Black Power movement and advocated new and more autonomous strategies for social change. With the demise of the industrial economy in the 1970s and 1980s, whites intensified their resistance to the gains of the Second Reconstruction as well as to the Black Power movement. By the close of the twentieth century, African Americans again searched for appropriate strategies to counteract new forms of inequality.

The Era of Enslavement.

When Europeans arrived on the West African coast during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, they had already established the economic and technological foundations for the international slave trade. Between 1433 and 1488, Portuguese mariners used new knowledge of ocean currents to navigate Africa's western coast, establish trade relations on the so‐called Gold Coast, and set up sugar plantations on the northwest African islands of Madeira, Principe, and Sao Tomé. Portugal was soon importing some 500 to 1,000 Africans per year to work its island plantations. As early as 1502, the Spanish imported Africans to work on their New World sugar plantations in Hispaniola (today's Haiti). By century's end, the Spanish colonies imported an average of about 80,000 Africans each year. Following a brief decline during the 1790s, the number of slave imports peaked during the early nineteenth century. No less than 10 million Africans landed in the Americas during the era of the slave trade. Another 2 million died in the infamous Middle Passage en route to the New World. The European colonies of the Caribbean and Latin America absorbed over 90 percent of these Africans.

Although some Africans had entered the present‐day United States with Spanish explorers and helped to establish St. Augustine, Florida (the first permanent non‐Indian community in North America), the British colonies became the center of African American settlement in North America. The first Africans entered British North America in 1619, when a Dutch man‐of‐war deposited some twenty Africans at Jamestown. Initially, the black population increased only slowly, comprising no more than 170 in 1640. Until the late seventeenth century, indentured servitude rather than enslavement “for life” defined the labor system of the tobacco‐growing Chesapeake colonies of Virginia and Maryland. Early Africans like Anthony and Richard Johnson won their freedom, legally married, purchased property, gained redress in courts of law, and sometimes imported their own black and white servants. By the early eighteenth century, however, both Virginia and Maryland had passed statutes pronouncing Africans or black servants “Durante Vita” or “slaves for life.” The rice‐ and indigo‐producing colonies of South Carolina and Georgia soon followed suit. By the late eighteenth century, the black population had grown through a combination of imports and natural increase to nearly 800,000.

As Africans made the transition from a less rigid form of servitude to bondmen and bondwomen “for life,” colonial authorities reinforced their enslavement with “Slave Codes.” Borrowing from Caribbean precedents, the new legislation redefined human beings as property by eliminating the right of blacks to bear arms, engage in trade, own property, move about freely, peaceably assemble, or seek legal redress. Such codes also legalized the maiming and even killing of enslaved persons as part of the owners' “property right.” Although such laws were most prevalent in the South, the northern colonies also enacted statutes restricting the lives of bondmen and bondwomen, including laws mandating the whipping of blacks who “attempted to strike” a white person.

Technological changes and the opening of new agricultural land in the Deep South intensified the demand for slave labor in the early national era. The cotton gin enabled planters to increase production from under 300,000 bales in 1820 to nearly 4.5 million in 1860. Slave‐produced cotton dominated the nation's foreign exports and fueled the early industrialization of Great Britain and New England milltowns like Lowell and Waltham, Massachusetts. Under the impact of cotton production, nearly a million blacks experienced forced migration from the declining tobacco‐growing states of the Upper South to the booming Deep South states of Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Whereas the majority of blacks had lived in the Chesapeake region during the eighteenth century, the Deep South claimed nearly 60 percent of all African Americans by 1860.

From the outset of their enslavement in the New World, Africans and their American descendants acted in their own behalf. As bondmen and bondwomen, they built formal and informal religious, social, and political networks, ran away, rebelled, and plotted to rebel. Such revolts and plots include the Stono Rebellion (1739), Gabriel Prosser's Plot (1800), Denmark Vesey's Plot (1822) and Nat Turner's Rebellion (1831). African Americans also shaped the advent and outcome of the American Revolution and the Civil War. Some 180,000 blacks, enslaved and free, served in the Union forces and helped transform the war between the states into a war of liberation.

Civil War to World War II.

Following the Civil War, some four million African Americans gained their freedom and made the transition from “slave” to “citizen.” The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution granted blacks citizenship and equal rights under the law. Yet in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, African Americans experienced what the historian Rayford Logan called the “nadir” of their history—economic exploitation under the sharecropping, crop‐lien, and convict lease systems; lynchings; disfranchisement; and institutional segregation. Southern white‐supremacist groups like the Knights of the White Camelia and the Ku Klux Klan encouraged and carried out mob attacks on African Americans and their communities. In 1896, the Supreme Court upheld racial segregation in its landmark Plessy v. Ferguson decision. Jurists, scholars, and popular writers justified the subordination of blacks, further undermining the promise of the First Reconstruction. Racist publications and portrayals of black life proliferated, culminating in D.W. Griffith's racist film The Birth of a Nation (1915).

As the promise of freedom faded, black leaders Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois offered divergent strategies for action. Ordinary African Americans, meanwhile, used their newly won geographical mobility to resist limitations on their rights as citizens and workers. Beginning gradually during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, black population movement turned into the Great Migration during World War I and its aftermath. The proportion of blacks living in cities rose from about 2.6 million, or 27 percent, in 1910, to 6.4 million (49 percent) in 1940 and over 18 million, or over 80 percent, in 1970—10 percent higher than the figure for the population at large.

Although African Americans improved their lot by taking jobs in urban industries, they nonetheless entered the industrial economy at the lowest rungs of the occupational ladder. Moreover, as their numbers increased in northern and western cities, they faced growing residential and educational restrictions and limitations on access to social services and public accommodations. Responding to the impact of such class and racial restrictions, African Americans intensified their institution‐building and their cultural, political, economic, and civil rights activities. They founded mutual aid societies, fraternal orders, and social clubs; established a range of new business and professional services; and launched diverse political, labor, and civil rights organizations, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), founded in 1909.

Urbanization and northern migration profoundly affected African American cultural life as well. Black churches, including those of the Baptist, Pentecostal, and African Methodist Episcopal (AME) denominations, ranging from struggling storefronts to large establishments with thousands of members, provided spiritual and social support to urban newcomers. From the black communities of New Orleans, Kansas City, Chicago, and other cities emerged vibrant new adaptations of musical traditions rooted in the past, including ragtime, gospel, the blues, and jazz. New York City's black community of the 1920s produced a rich flowering of literary, dramatic, and artistic activity, the so‐called Harlem Renaissance, including such writers, performers, and intellectuals as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Paul Robeson, and Alain Locke (1885–1954). In Native Son (1940), novelist Richard Wright offered a searing picture of race relations and life among the black underclass in Depression‐era Chicago.

African American activism in these years included Marcus Garvey's mobilization of the urban black masses in the 1920s; participation in the Democratic party's New Deal Era coalition during the 1930s; and A. Philip Randolph's March on Washington movement demanding an end to discrimination in defense industries and the NAACP's “Double V” campaign (for military victory abroad and victory over racism at home) before and during World War II.

Partly because of blacks voters' overwhelming support of the New Deal, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1941 issued Executive Order 8802 banning racial discrimination in industries with government contracts and setting up the federal Fair Employment Practice Committee (FEPC) to monitor the process. For the first time, African Americans broke the job ceiling and moved into jobs above the “unskilled” and “semiskilled” categories. While the wartime struggle against inequality entailed substantial tensions and conflicts within the African American community between elites and workers, urban newcomers and older residents, and men and women, it nevertheless formed the communal, institutional, and leadership foundation for the rise of the postwar civil rights movement.

The Civil Rights Movement.

Building upon their wartime militancy, African Americans moved their struggle to the streets during the 1950s and 1960s, adopting nonviolent direct‐action strategies for social change. Grassroots organizations like the Montgomery (Alabama) Improvement Association initiated boycotts, sit‐ins, freedom rides, and voter education projects across the South and parts of the North and West.

The Supreme Court's landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing racial segregation in public schools intensified the impetus for change, while black writers such as Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin contributed to the heightened sense of identity and group consciousness within the postwar African American community.

While their actions were rooted in their own local community‐based institutions and national organizations like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, African Americans gained the support of white allies in federal agencies and diverse peace and freedom organizations, including the New York‐based Fellowship of Reconciliation. With their white allies, African Americans achieved a Second Reconstruction with passage of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964, 1965, and 1968. This legislation demolished the legal pillars of discrimination in employment, housing, and the voting booth, and sought to reverse centuries of inequality by setting up affirmative action programs in employment and institutions of higher education.

While the Second Reconstruction destroyed the legal foundations of the segregationist system, it also highlighted the further and more difficult challenge of translating legal victories into real change. Moreover, the 1968, assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. removed a key symbol and source of unity in the nonviolent freedom struggle. According to one activist, King was “the one man of our race that this country's older generations, the militants, and the revolutionaries and the masses of black people would still listen to.” As the limitations of the Civil Rights movement became more apparent, growing numbers of young African Americans advocated Black Power as an alternative to nonviolent direct‐action strategies. Partly because revolutionary black organizations like the Black Panther party (formed in 1966) emphasized the mass mobilization of poor and working‐class blacks, armed struggle, and opposition to the Vietnam War, they came under the combined assault of federal, state, and local authorities. Under the weight of official and unofficial white resistance, the Black Power movement fragmented and gradually dissipated by the early 1970s.

Late Twentieth Century Developments.

As the civil rights and Black Power movements weakened, white resistance to the gains of the Second Reconstruction intensified. Opposition to affirmative action policies in employment and education were closely related to the deindustrialization of the nation's economy. The loss of jobs to mechanization and low‐wage overseas factories affected all industrial workers, black and white, but the persistence of overt and covert discriminatory employment practices rooted in white kin and friendship networks made black workers and their communities especially vulnerable to economic down swings. African American unemployment rates persisted at well over the white rate, especially among young black males. At the same time, the beneficiaries of existing affirmative action programs—the middle class and better‐educated members of the black working class—experienced a degree of upward mobility and moved into outlying urban and suburban neighborhoods. They left working‐class and poor blacks, disproportionately single women with children, concentrated in the central cities, where violence, drug addiction, and class‐stratified social spaces intensified, causing acute tensions in day‐to‐day intraracial as well as interracial relations.

Perhaps even more than in the industrial era, the post‐industrial age challenged African Americans to develop new strategies for coping with social change and the persistence of inequality. Some of their emerging responses built upon earlier struggles. Institution‐building, marches, participation in electoral politics, and migration in search of better opportunities all continued to express black activism and resistance to social injustice. Yet, much had changed in the nation and in African American life, and such time‐tested strategies took on different meanings in the 1980s and 1990s. Rising numbers of southern‐born blacks returned to the South during the 1970s. After declining for more than a century, the proportion of blacks living in the South increased by 1980. Other African Americans rallied behind the Rainbow Coalition and supported the Reverend Jesse Jackson's bid for the Democratic party's Presidential nomination in 1984 and 1988. Still others endorsed Nation of Islam minister Louis Farrakhan's Million Man March (MMM) in 1994. Calling the march a “day of atonement” for black men, leaders of the MMM encouraged black men to earn and reclaim a position of authority in their families and communities. Four years later, many black women responded to the MMM's gender bias with their own Million Woman March, which emphasized the centrality of women in the ongoing black freedom struggle. Through these various actions and many more, African Americans continued to resist shifting forms of inequality and gave direction to their own lives as a new century began.

These same years saw the emergence a new generation of African American academics, musicians, performers, sports figures, and writers. Such diverse men and women as the scholars and public intellectuals Henry Louis Gates, Cornel West, and Stephen L. Carter; basketball superstar Michael Jordan and track‐and‐field athlete Jackie Joyner‐Kersee; film actors Eddie Murphy and Denzel Washington; jazz musicians Joshua Redman, Herbie Hancock, and Wynton and Bradford Marsalis; television celebrity Oprah Winfrey; and an array of novelists and writers including Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison enriched American life and gave voice to the black experience.

By the 1990s, the nation's more than 30 million African Americans, representing about 12 percent of the total population, had transformed themselves from a predominantly rural people into an overwhelmingly urban people; from a southern regional group to a national population living in every part of the nation; and, perhaps most importantly, from a group confined to southern agriculture, domestic service, and general labor to a work force with representation in every sector of the nation's economy.
See also African American Religion; Ali, Muhammed; Amistad Case; Anderson, Marian; Antislavery; Armstrong, Louis; Basie, William (“Count”); Black Nationalism; Brownsville Incident; Bunche, Ralph; Civil Rights Cases; Civil Rights Legislation; Coltrane, John; Cotton Industry; Davis, Miles; Douglass, Frederick; Drew, Charles Richard; Ellington, Edward (“Duke”); Freedmen's Bureau; Fugitive Slave Act; Johnson, James Weldon; Johnson, Jack; Louis, Joe; Lowell Mills; Malcolm X; Nat Turner's Uprising; Owens, Jesse; Parker, Charlie; Pentecostalism; Powell, Colin; Racism; Race, Concept of; Robinson, Jackie; Sickle‐Cell Anemia; Slave Uprisings and Resistance; Slavery; Sojourner Truth; Spirituals; Student Non‐Violent Coordinating Committee; Tobacco Industry; Trotter, William Monroe; Tubman, Harriet; Tuskegee Experiment; Urban League, National; Wheatley, Phillis.

Bibliography

Lerone Bennett Jr. , Before the Mayflower: A History of Black America, 5th ed., 1982.
Mary Frances Berry and and John W. Blassingame , Long Memory: The Black Experience in America, 1982.
John Hope Franklin and and A. Moss Jr. , From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans, 7th ed., 1994.
Charles M. Christian , Black Saga: The African American Experience, 1995.
Darlene Clark Hine and and Kathleen Thompson , A Shining Thread of Hope: The History of Black Women in America, 1998.
James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, eds., A History of the African People: The History, Traditions & Culture of African Americans, 1995.
Arwin D. Smallwood and and Jeffrey M. Elliot , The Atlas of African‐American History and Politics: From the Slave Trade to Modern Times, 1998.
Robin D.G. Kelley and Earl Lewis, eds., To Make Our World Anew, 2000.
Joe W. Trotter , The African American Experience, forthcoming 2001.

Joe W. Trotter Jr.