AFRICAN AMERICANS

AFRICAN AMERICANS. African American history lies at the foundation of United States history. The story of African Americans began in Africa, where ethnic groups such as the Ashanti, Bantu, Congolese, and Yoruba began their chaotic and protracted journey to what would become the United States.

The First African Americans

The arrival of Africans in America began almost five hundred years ago in 1528, with the arrival of the Moroccan Esteban de Dorantes in Texas. He was the first of many Spanish-speaking Africans who were populating western America. Between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, Africans were imported as property to the "New World" for slave plantations via the transatlantic slave trade. Conservative estimates place the number at 8 to 12 million, but the total may be as high as 20 million. The trade in African men, women, and children exploded into one of the most massive and despotic extractions of a people from their land and way of life in history. These migrants became unwilling participants in a system of enslavement that gave rise to the African diaspora and African Americans. Of the total number of Africans sold into slavery, 600,000 to 1,000,000, or about 6 percent, were brought to the British North American colonies.

The first English-speaking Africans arrived in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619. Initially British colonists and Africans coexisted, but developments in colonial America precipitated the enslavement of black people. By the late sixteenth century, it became clear to white colonists that Indians would not be a viable source of forced labor. Increasingly, white and black indentured servants became targets of the New World's economic development. Eventually, the labor of indentured servants became problematic and scarce. The number of indentured white servants who made the journey to America began to dwindle, and those already in America started to demand an equal share of the wealth, while life expectancies rose sufficiently to make the purchase of slaves financially sensible. Colonists, therefore, turned to the African slave trade to meet their labor needs.

Initially, some European indentured servants and laborers joined with Africans to oppose the exploitation of white and black laborers, but when attitudes and laws changed and as black skin became commensurate with slavery, whites understood that being white—no matter how poor—exempted them from outright slavery. White slave owners came to understand the value of their investments in black human property. White wealth and dreams of prosperity became tied to the survival of black slavery as an institution. As a result, whites began to support statutes that strengthened the chains of black slavery. As the eighteenth century came to a close, Africans were generally considered capital. Black people resisted enslavement, however, and often worked to undermine the institution. They ran away or feigned ignorance and illness, for example, to undermine the commercial success of the farms for which they labored. Slaves such as Nat Turner and Gabriel Prosser physically confronted their masters and overseers in both individual clashes and collective rebellion.

Africans in America, despite their subordinate status, were able to forge a strong sense of community. They learned to speak English and, in the process, expanded and enhanced the language through new words and pronunciations. Many Africans also embraced Christianity and reconstructed it, while some continued to follow their original religions, including Islam. Usually, black people merged their faith with that of the ruling class. From their earliest arrival in America, many blacks also endeavored to give meaning to America's professed belief in freedom by calling upon colonial officials to recognize their right to liberty. In 1791, for example, Benjamin Banneker, an astronomer and publisher of almanacs, and perhaps the most accomplished black person in early America, wrote to Thomas Jefferson to argue for the respect and inclusion of black people in America's experiment in democracy. Most Africans in America, however, could not rely on petitions or whites to recognize their "unalienable" right to secure their freedom. Rather, they articulated belief in their own inherent worth through ongoing resistance to white supremacy and racial slavery.

By the eighteenth century, black acculturation gave rise to a stable, identifiable, and diverse African American culture, both in slave societies and in free black communities. This black culture was anchored in an expanded, flexible family structure and an emerging black church that found the means to survive under difficult circumstances. During this period, nothing exposed the contradiction between slavery and freedom for Africans as much as the American fight for independence from Great Britain. Some black people such as Crispus Attucks, one of the first casualties of the American Revolution, demonstrated their desire to be free from British rule, both as people of African descent and as Americans. On the other hand, having been promised liberation by the royal governor, Lord Dunmore, in 1775, some black people were loyal to the English monarchy only to witness its demise at the hands of tenacious American colonists. But whether in the poems of Phillis Wheatley, the legal action of Quok Walker, or the efforts of Paul Cuffee, Americans of African descent helped define what it meant to be revolutionary citizens. For black slaves in particular, independence was not simply a philosophical debate; it stood as an essential alternative to permanent bondage.

As blacks fought for freedom from both American slavery and British colonial rule, the debate over slavery intensified. As the United States emerged from the crucible of war, black slavery endured and expanded, especially in the South. Between the mid-1600s and 1865, most blacks were considered possessions. They were examined, marketed, sold, purchased, exchanged, and treated as chattel. Black people were ridiculed as aberrant and inferior, and most were denied the freedoms set forth in the Declaration of Independence. Out of this ordeal, Africans in America became a new people. They were no longer Ashanti, Bantu, Kongolese, and Yoruba; they constructed new identities rooted in their African past, yet inextricably linked to a burgeoning American culture.

By 1789, despite America's proclamation that "all men are created equal," slavery as an institution was still legal in eleven of the thirteen States. Moreover, the Atlantic slave trade, which was officially banned in 1808 but continued extralegally until the 1850s, continued to bring thousands of enslaved Africans to America. The primary destinations of black slaves were the rice plantations of low-country South Carolina and the tobacco farms of Piedmont, Virginia. Although there were, as there had always been, "free" blacks in the United States, by 1789, there were fewer than 60,000 of them out of a total black population of 700,000.

By 1831, slavery had emerged as an even more powerful and "peculiar institution." It existed, for example, in twelve southern states, but was almost nonexistent in the twelve northern states. Moreover, although the slave trade had not existed as a legally sanctioned enterprise in almost twenty-five years, cotton plantations from Georgia to Mississippi that depended upon slave labor became inextricably linked to the "Southern way of life." The invention of the cotton gin in 1793 made cotton cultivation a lucrative business. Between 1811 and 1821 it fueled the expansion of slavery from the Atlantic coastal states to Texas. Slave labor also emptied swamps and cleared land for settlement and agriculture. This territorial expansion in turn stimulated an enormous surge in the slave population. By 1831, there were over two million black slaves in the United States, primarily in the deep South. By 1860 the number had risen to 3,953,760. In 1831 the United States was also home to 300,000 free black people, primarily located in the North and upper South; by 1860 there were 488,070.

Major social and cultural changes had taken place among black people in America by 1831. Resistance to slavery intensified as black communities and slaves watched their hopes of freedom continually dissolve and began to learn the ideology behind the American and French revolutions and gain knowledge of the successful slave revolt in Saint Domingue (Haiti). Despite the odds, some blacks continued to gain their freedom from bondage; most of those who succeeded had to struggle to survive the transition from slavery to freedom. Like their enslaved counterparts, free black people were relegated to the bottom of the American racial hierarchy, dominated by the theory of white supremacy. Despite being the objects of white racism, "free" blacks often set themselves apart from black slaves. This class—small, sometimes prosperous, and often literate—usually considered themselves superior to their enslaved counterparts.

Many "free" black people, however, in the North and upper South, expanded their concept of the black community to include those blacks still held in bondage. Many in this group, including celebrated abolitionist Frederick Douglass, championed black equality and freedom in all quarters. By 1831, Africans in America understood that only by destroying slavery could true freedom and equality be secured. Many believed—as did Nat Turner, who initiated a large-scale slave uprising in the fall of 1831—that it would take a devastating event such as a sustained revolt to abolish the institution. By 1840, slavery and its expansion became the most controversial and divisive issue in the nation. By 1860, northern and southern leaders could not avoid the problem of slavery and its expansion, thanks to pressure from a small but influential band of abolitionists—including Maria W. Stewart, David Walker, and William Lloyd Garrison.

Emancipation and the Illusion of Freedom

The end of slavery as an institution in American life can be tied to the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860. Lincoln, a Republican, believed that the Constitution protected slavery in the states, but was opposed to its extension. He objected to the spread of slavery into Kansas and other territories. Southerners believed the Constitution protected slavery and saw Lincoln's resolve as a threat to their political standing in Congress and to their "way of life." Lincoln was elected in 1860, and following his inaugural address in March 1861, South Carolina seceded from the Union in retaliation. By February 1861, it was followed by six more southern states. Lincoln's calls for healing were unsuccessful. The Confederacy launched an artillery attack on Fort Sumter in South Carolina on 12 April, and Lincoln called for volunteers to put down the rebellion. America's divided house fell, and the sectional conflict exploded into Civil War. After five years of fighting, the Southern Confederacy was forced to surrender to Northern troops on 9 April 1865. Four million African Americans emerged from the conflict legally free. Ratification

of the Thirteenth Amendment in December 1865 abolished slavery. The Confederate defeat, however, did not end white supremacy or black subjugation. As one nineteenth-century observer noted, "cannons conquer, but they do not necessarily convert." Former slaveholders faced emancipation with despair and fury and immediately embarked upon a crusade to "redeem" the South and force blacks into a state of virtual slavery.

Emancipated blacks set out to make the best of their new status. Millions of former slaves searched the South for loved ones from whom they had been separated. Women like the writer Harriet Jacobs attempted to re-construct their shattered lives and families, while creating a space for themselves to enjoy their freedom. To gain control over their labor, black washerwomen and domestic workers in Atlanta organized to raise their wages through strikes and demonstrations. In South Carolina, black women took a leading role in negotiating labor arrangements with their former masters. Black men sought

wage labor, worked to acquire land, and made use of the ballot. Out of this movement to reclaim themselves and their families, black communities in the postwar South grew, while organizing schools and health care services. Legally, black people benefited from the enactment of several Constitutional amendments during the subsequent "Reconstruction" period. The ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment on 28 July 1868 affirmed state and federal citizenship rights for African Americans, and the Fifteenth Amendment, ratified on 30 March 1870, guaranteed that no American would be denied the right to vote on the basis of race. Radical Republicans also pushed through the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which was supposed to prohibit discrimination in public accommodations throughout the South.

Abraham Lincoln's Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction on 8 December 1863 allowed blacks to secure fleeting political success. Blacks seized this opportunity to elect state and national Congressmen. Six hundred blacks, most of them former slaves, served as state legislators. During Reconstruction, there were two black senators in Congress—Hiram Revels and Blanche K. Bruce, both Mississippi natives who were educated in the North—and fourteen black members of the House. African Americans also sought to improve their lives by carving out spaces where they could congregate and build community away from the watchful eyes of whites. Reestablished, primarily Protestant, black churches emerged as spiritual havens for African Americans. Education was extremely important to African Americans as well. With the assistance of philanthropic northern whites, blacks established primary and secondary schools, as well as predominantly black colleges, across the South in the postwar period. Tuskegee Institute (1881) in Alabama and Howard University (1867) in Washington, D.C., represent two of the more celebrated examples of historically black colleges and universities founded during this era.

For African Americans, however, the ability to exercise their new rights was short-lived. Southern whites created laws and practices to circumscribe and oppress the lives of blacks. They created black codes, which limited the areas in which blacks could purchase or rent property, and vagrancy laws that forced African Americans to return to work on the plantations from which they were recently liberated. These measures helped force blacks into a state of peonage that would last well into the second half of the twentieth century. Blacks were not permitted to testify in court, except in cases involving other blacks, and fines were levied against them for alleged seditious speeches, insulting gestures and acts, absence from work, violating curfews, and the possession of firearms. Blacks had their freedom assaulted by white terrorist organizations as well. The prototype of these groups was the Ku Klux Klan, organized in 1866 in Pulaski, Tennessee, as a "social club." The Klan was responsible for whippings, mutilations, burnings, and murders of men, women, and children. Violence emerged as one of the most effective ways of keeping blacks politically powerless.

Politically, whites used quasi-legal measures to oppress blacks. Polling places were often erected far from black communities and changed without warning, ballot boxes were stuffed, votes were manipulated, poll taxes were levied, and gerrymandering ran rampant. Black people were separated from whites on trains and ships and were banned from white hotels, barbershops, restaurants, and theaters. By 1885, most Southern states had laws requiring separate schools, and in 1896, the Supreme Court upheld segregation in its landmark "separate but equal" doctrine set forth in Plessy v. Ferguson. The rights of blacks had been neutralized. By 1900, the "New South" was free to conduct its affairs as it saw fit. The New South, however, looked very much like the old. The new century, in fact, opened tragically with 214 lynchings in the first two years. The law, the courts, the schools, and almost every institution in the South favored whites. In the face of this opposition, African Americans and their supporters had few answers. This was an era of white supremacy.

African Americans in the South began to vote with their feet. Between 1900 and 1910, black people tried to escape the South by migrating to the northern and western United States in relatively modest numbers. When wartime industrial needs and labor demands increased between World Wars I and II, however, more than two million black southerners were motivated to migrate north and west to urban areas like Chicago, Detroit, New York, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. This flight erupted into the largest African American migration in history. These migrants sought refuge and opportunity, and many found what they were looking for, while others found social isolation, political marginalization, and economic oppression.

All African Americans, whether they remained in the South or migrated to the North, experienced fundamental changes in their lives during the first decades of the twentieth century. African American men returned home from World War I—a war fought to make the world safe for democracy—prepared and determined to demand democracy for themselves and their community. Their militancy was rewarded with violence. African American men were lynched in their military uniforms, black institutions were attacked by white mobs, and African American workers, who were often the last hired, were the first to be fired during demobilization. On the other hand, many African Americans worked to "uplift the race" in northern and western urban areas by organizing groups such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Even though the 1920s witnessed ongoing race-related social, economic, and political problems, many black artists experienced "renaissances" in African American art, literature, and music in Harlem and Chicago. Some African American leaders became political agents, and others became successful in business.

When the Great Depression struck America in 1929, African Americans were among the hardest hit. The years between 1929 and 1940 were marked by both progress and persistent problems for black people. At a time when a black leader like Mary McLeod Bethune could hold an influential appointment in the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, African American workers had the highest unemployment rate in the nation. Moreover, while New Deal legislation displaced black sharecroppers in the South, the federal government also offered unprecedented opportunities for African American artists and writers such as Aaron Douglass and Zora Neale Hurston. However, discrimination and racial violence, unemployment, and housing shortages remained complicated and dispiriting issues for African Americans. As the United States entered World War II in 1941, blacks seized this opportunity to demand full inclusion in American society. African Americans were critical of the United States for fighting for democracy overseas while blacks lived in a segregated and unjust society in America. Black people fought fascism in Europe and white supremacy in the United States, which they christened the "Double-V": victory abroad and victory at home.

The Civil Rights Movement and Beyond

World War II and the industries that arose to support it also improved the prospect of good jobs and a freer life for African Americans, particularly in the West. As a result, a huge migration ensued that increased black populations in those urban areas. In the western region, some black populations grew tenfold. This migration gave rise to the nation's Civil Rights Movement during the 1950s and 1960s, and ignited the careers of local black leaders such as Dr. Lincoln J. Ragsdale Sr. in Phoenix, Arizona, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X at the national level. The black American freedom struggle quickly became a more inclusive beacon in the global fight for human rights, the defeat of European colonialism, and the destruction of racism. It ushered in profound and positive changes.

The Civil Rights Movement produced several pieces of legislation, which reaffirmed the rights of African Americans. The most effective were the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Civil Rights Act prohibited discrimination in public places, and discrimination by employers of labor unions on the basis of color, race, religion, national origin, and sex. The Voting Rights Act re-enfranchised blacks by outlawing obstructionist educational requirements for voting and by

empowering the attorney general to have the Civil Rights Commission assign federal registrars to uphold the voting rights of African Americans.

The impact of the Civil Rights Movement was monumental. Although their tremendous accomplishments did not end racial inequality or usher in true socioeconomic integration, black Americans did enjoy some major gains. However, jobs, infrastructure, and opportunity moved to predominantly white suburbs; unemployment remained disproportionately high among African Americans; and dislocations in black family structures, drug use, gang violence, police brutality, and urban poverty all emerged as disheartening and complex issues for black communities. Although African Americans had ended de jure segregation, they quickly realized that de facto segregation and racial socioeconomic inequality were just as debilitating and often more difficult to combat. Despite these problems, the black middle class continued to grow, most black families remained intact, and African American organizations continued to work for the advancement of the community as a whole.

By 1970, most black people were optimistic about the future of race relations and the black community. Many black people believed that the Black Power movement would instill a new confidence and independence in African Americans. Furthermore, a rash of victories in electoral politics gave hope to millions of African Americans. By the 1970s, in fact, several blacks, such Carl Stokes in Cleveland and Richard Hatcher in Gary, Indiana, were elected mayors of major urban centers. In 1972, Shirley Chisholm became the first African American to make a serious bid for a major-party presidential nomination; Jesse Jackson, a protégé of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s did it again in 1984. By the end of the twentieth century an influential and growing black middle class had emerged. Multimillionaires such as the journalist, actor, talk show host, producer, and entrepreneur Oprah Winfrey and the athlete and businessman Michael Jordan stood as symbols of the ability of blacks to achieve against overwhelming odds. Despite persistent problems such as joblessness, police brutality, and economic and political inequality, African Americans—whose population stood at thirty mil-lion, or slightly over 10 percent of the population, by 2000—continued to make substantial gains. Indeed, the poverty, economic isolation, political marginalization, and racism in African American history are really aspects of a larger history of black progress through struggle, a history of survival and achievement.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hine, Darlene Clark, William C. Hine, and Stanley Harrold. The African American Odyssey. 2d ed. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2002.

Kelley, Robin D. G., and Earl Lewis, eds. To Make Our World Anew: A History of African Americans. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Marable, Manning. Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction in Black America, 1945–1990. 2d ed. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1991.

Taylor, Quintard, Jr. In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West, 1528–1990. New York: Norton, 1998.

White, Deborah G. Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894–1994. New York: Norton, 1999.

MatthewWhitaker

See alsoDiscrimination: Race ; Harlem Renaissance ; Lynching ; Migration, African American ; South, the ; Suffrage: African American ; Tuskegee University .

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.

African Americans

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The term African American has typically referred to descendants of enslaved and indentured black Africans transplanted by force into what is now the United States. The terms African American, black, and Afro-American are sometimes used interchangeably. African American has supplanted other designations, such as Negro, derived from the word Negroid, coined in the eighteenth century by European anthropologists. African American is sometimes applied more broadly to descendants of all ten million or more Africans forcibly transported to the Western Hemisphere from the beginning of the sixteenth century until the 1860s.

Africans shipped to the United States represented over forty ethnic groups from twenty-five different kingdoms, but constituted only 7 percent of all Africans transported to the Western Hemisphere by 1810. Over time, their descendants in the United States formed a composite identity shaped primarily by shared conditions, since historical circumstances and systematic de-Africanization efforts precluded the tracing of ancestry to precise points of origin. African American identity has been and is continuing to be constructed out of an African cultural and historical legacy, but it is shaped within the framework of intragroup cooperation and intergroup conflict within American society.

Chattel slavery contributed significantly to pre–Civil War economic growth in the United States. The invention of the cotton gin (1793) dramatically increased the demand for slaves by lowering the cost of cotton production and inducing landowners to expand production beyond coastal areas. Approximately one million African Americans were redeployed from the upper to the lower South via a well-organized urban-based internal slave trade. Slavery was a normal feature of southern American cities—in 1860 there were approximately seventy thousand urban slaves. Exploitation of African American labor resulted in a massive increase in cotton production from 300,000 bales in 1820 to nearly 4.5 million bales in 1860. Plantation owners used harsh physical punishments such as whippings, brandings, and amputations along with incentives to garner compliance. Incentives included prizes for the largest quantity of cotton picked, year-end bonuses, time off, and plots of land. Developing reliable estimates of income and wealth generated by slavery is difficult because much of the accumulated wealth of the slave regime was destroyed by the Civil War. Some income financed planters’ conspicuous consumption, a portion was converted into personal wealth holdings, and another fraction provided capital for large-scale industrial ventures.

A dramatic disparity in wealth holdings between African Americans and white Americans constitutes one of the most enduring legacies of slavery. While emancipation enabled African Americans to increase the portion of income actually received from agricultural pursuits, forces reproducing wealth disparities ensured continuing subjugation. The arrangements by which most African Americans remained tied to the agricultural sector were characterized as the “tenancy system.” Three different classes of tenancy emerged: cash tenancy, share tenancy, and sharecropping. Sharecroppers, the status to which African Americans were disproportionately relegated, owned nothing. Implements were supplied by the landowners on credit and the sharecropper paid half the crop as rent to the landowner. Debt peonage emerged when the croppers’ share of the harvest was insufficient to repay the landlord. Landlords often charged exorbitant interest rates for supplies and failed to give croppers their full share of the harvest value. Sharecropping laws required that indebted croppers remain on landlords’ land until all debts were satisfied.

Prior to World War I (1914-1918), African Americans remained overwhelmingly rural residents. In 1910 over 90 percent of the 9.8 million African Americans lived in the South and only 25 percent lived in cities of 2,500 or more. Between 1890 and 1910 the percentage of African American males employed in agriculture fell only slightly; the occupational situation of females actually worsened. The persisting effects of institutional discrimination introduced during earlier periods led to an unusual set of circumstances whereby the occupational and economic status of African Americans declined as their absolute and relative education was increasing. The opposite pattern would have been predicted by traditional economic models. Moreover, the trends in inequality that developed during this period were reproduced into the 1980s.

Spurred by floods, crop destruction by boll weevils, and the need for workers in war-related industries, the first net exodus from the South of about 454,000 African Americans occurred between 1910 and 1920. During World War I, the Division of Negro Economics was established within the U.S. Department of Labor to reduce tensions resulting from the introduction of African American workers into northern factories. The wisdom of this initiative was reinforced by race riots in Chicago, Omaha, and Washington, DC, during the summer of 1919.

Northward migration initiated a redefinition of African American identity that manifested itself most visibly in the cultural movement termed the “Harlem Renaissance” and the associated concept of the “New Negro.” The negritude movement that developed in the French African and Caribbean colonies introduced similar reconceptualizations of black identity. The African American scholar Alain Locke (1886-1954) declared that this redefined identity reflected a transformation in psychology such that “the mind of the Negro seems suddenly to have slipped from under the tyranny of social intimidation and to be shaking off the psychology of imitation and implied inferiority” (1925, p. 631).

Efforts to translate this new sense of identity into economic gains proved, however, to be problematic. Throughout the interwar period, rapid technological change increasingly pushed African Americans out of the agricultural sector. By 1930 the percentages of African American males and females employed in agriculture had fallen to 45 percent and 27 percent, respectively. Opportunities for manufacturing employment for African Americans were largely restricted to nonunionized industries, prompting a resurgence of self-organizing efforts, such as those of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, formed by the labor leader A. Philip Randolph (1889– 1979).

Many African Americans capitalized on the new industrial employment opportunities generated by World War II (1939-1945), and this prospect contributed to a net southern out-migration of 1.6 million between 1940 and 1950. Between 1910 and 1950 the proportion of African American males employed as operatives increased from 6 percent to 22 percent. By 1950 the proportion of African American males and females employed in agriculture had fallen to 25 percent and 10 percent, respectively. For African American women, the decline in agricultural employment was associated with increases in employment as service workers, operatives, clerical and sales workers, and private household workers. These employment shifts contributed to a marked improvement in African Americans’ economic progress after World War II. Even before the civil rights movement took center stage in 1956, one in every three urban African American families owned their own home.

The civil rights and Black Power movements signaled shifts in the political and economic consciousness of African Americans catalyzed, in part, by the emergence of a larger and more diverse middle class. The two movements offered different approaches to addressing identity and economic advancement issues. The civil rights movement promoted complete integration of African Americans through elimination of all legalized segregation and discrimination, whereas the Black Power movement emphasized group solidarity and self-determination. It is important to note that the ideologies undergirding these movements were influenced significantly by such Caribbean scholars as Frantz Fanon (1925-1961), C. L. R. James (1901-1989), and Eric Williams (1911-1981), as well as the liberation movements that developed in the African colonies. The most concrete policy outcomes of the civil rights movement were the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Equal Housing Act of 1968. Measures focusing on redistribution of economic benefits, such as affirmative action, have proved to be more controversial and less successful.

While nondiscrimination and affirmative action policies have undoubtedly contributed to increases in the relative income of African Americans, as well as significant improvements in occupational distribution, many African Americans have not experienced significant improvements in economic well-being. Moreover, data covering the mid-1990s to the first decade of the twenty-first century paint a fairly consistent picture of racial wealth disparities—namely, that the wealth of African American families is less than one-fifth that of whites. Stagnation in the quality of life of many African Americans has resulted, in part, from disproportionate vulnerability to forces associated with transformation of the U.S. economy. Between 1960 and 2000, the percentage of men working as operatives, fabricators, and laborers has declined from 46 to 29 for African Americans and from 25 to 18 for white Americans. About 50 percent of all workers displaced as a result of plant closings and relocations had been employed in manufacturing, and African Americans have been significantly overrepresented among displaced workers. In the wake of these employment shifts, African American men have a much higher unemployment rate than other groups, and between 1991 and 2000 the percentage of African American men not in the labor force has averaged 26, compared to 15 for whites.

Black Power ideology emphasizes African American self-determination, economic self-sufficiency, and black pride; these foci became a catalyst for the displacement of terms like Negro and colored. Black and Afro-American were in vogue briefly, but African American became the most popular term during the 1980s. Advocates of African American argue that this term is consistent with the nation’s immigrant tradition of “hyphenated Americans,” which preserves links between people and their or their ancestors’ geographic origins. For many, African American describes cultural and historical roots and also conveys pride and a sense of kinship and solidarity with other African diasporans.

Embracing the designation African American is not symbolic of a commitment to the type of cultural nationalism advocated by Black Power proponents. This is especially the case in the economic arena, although some contemporary commentators claim that African Americans’ disposable income constitutes a potential form of collective economic power, an argument reminiscent of those advanced in the past. However, suburbanization of a significant segment of the black middle class has stymied efforts to promote any functional type of economic development in the black community, which would require, among other conditions, the capacity to exercise sufficient control over economic resources to mobilize production processes and create markets.

Ironically, African American suburbanization has also not produced outcomes anticipated by integrationists, such as substantial reductions in residential segregation. Like their inner-city counterparts, African American suburban dwellers experience a high degree of residential segregation. In addition, middle-class suburbanization has increased the isolation experienced by inner-city African American residents, and has made it increasingly difficult to ameliorate persisting economic and social inequalities. The economic prospects of inner-city African American residents are constrained, in part, by a spatial mismatch between job location and place of residence as African Americans generally have the longest travel times to work in all regions of the country where public transportation is available.

Divergence of interests between middle-class and other African Americans creates new complications in defining African American identity. Each group accesses different configurations of “social capital,” that is, the complex of resources associated with group membership that individuals can use to enhance well-being. Persisting differences in social capital can generate disparate conceptions of group identity. Conventional notions of African American identity are also challenged by phenotypical discrimination reminiscent of patterns associated with the one-drop rule operative during the slavery and Jim Crow eras that led to formal designations of the extent of African parentage—mulatto (1/2), quadroon (1/4), and octoroon (1/8).

Phenotypical discrimination results in African Americans and Latinos with the darkest and most non-European phenotype receiving lower incomes, having less stable employment, and obtaining less prestigious occupations than counterparts who are lighter or have more European physical features. In some studies, skin tone has been found to be the most important determinant of occupational status other than an individual’s education. Internalization of beliefs that skin-shade differences reflect membership in different groups adds ambiguity to efforts to define African American identity. In the 1980s parents of mixed-race children lobbied for the addition of a more inclusive term in census racial designations to reflect the multiple heritages of their offspring, and the term biracial has become more widely used and accepted to classify people of mixed race, reintroducing divisions between black and biracial subgroups into the American social-identity fabric.

Contemporary immigration patterns also have important economic and identity consequences for those traditionally defined as African American. There is ongoing disagreement about the impact of international migration on African American employment, but some researchers maintain that immigration lowers the wages and reduces the labor supply of competing native workers, with the largest effects on high school dropouts. Increasingly, African American is applied to recent immigrants and their offspring from African and diasporan countries, irrespective of preferred self-identification. In every year between 1995 and 2003 (with the exception of 1999), over forty thousand documented immigrants from African nations entered the United States, with the largest numbers originating in Nigeria and Ghana. First-generation African and Caribbean immigrants tend to identify most strongly with their country of origin, although many of their offspring identify with domestic African Americans. Some immigrants from South American countries are also classified as African American, but are even less likely to identify with domestic African Americans.

To the extent that the designation African American and related terms are increasingly used to collect information regarding economic outcomes for diverse subgroups, researchers should practice extreme care in interpreting data to ensure that aggregate data do not mask inequalities experienced by identifiable subgroups. There are likely to be differences across subgroups in income-generating characteristics. In addition, the types of phenotypical and linguistic discrimination experienced by immigrants may parallel forms of discrimination experienced by domestic African Americans, but, a priori, it cannot be assumed that the consequences for economic outcomes are identical. As a consequence, ameliorative strategies may need to be tailored specifically to address the unique circumstances of various subgroups.

SEE ALSO Affirmative Action; African American Studies; Black Arts Movement; Black Conservatism; Black Liberalism; Black Middle Class; Black Panthers; Black Power; Blackness; Capitalism, Black; Civil Rights Movement, U.S.; Discrimination ; Dred Scott v. Sanford; Ethnic Enterprises; Harlem Renaissance; Harris, Abram L.; Jim Crow; Lewis, W. Arthur; Politics, Black; Politics, Urban; Race; Race and Anthropology; Rand Economics; Race and Education; Race Relations; Racial Classification; Racism; Reconstruction Era (U.S.); Reparations; Separate-but-Equal; Slave Trade; Slavery; U.S. Civil War; Weaver, Robert C.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

America, Richard, ed. 1990. The Wealth of Races: The Present Value of Benefits from Past Injustices. Westport, CT: Greenwood.

Baugh, John. 1991. The Politicization of Changing Terms of Self Reference Among American Slave Descendants. American Speech 66 (2): 133-146.

Borjas, George. 2003. The Labor Demand Curve Is Downward Sloping: Reexamining the Impact of Immigration on the Labor Market. Quarterly Journal of Economics 118 (4): 1335-1374.

Conrad, Cecilia, John Whitehead, Patrick Mason, and James Stewart, eds. 2005. African Americans in the U.S. Economy. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Darity, William, Jr., Patrick Mason, and James Stewart. 2006. The Economics of Identity: The Origin and Persistence of Racial Norms. Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 60 (3): 283-305.

Fogel, Robert. 1989. Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery. New York: Norton.

Hughes, Emmet. 1956. The Negro’s New Economic Life. Fortune (September): 127-131.

Jacobson, Louis, Robert LaLonde, and David Sullivan. 1993. The Costs of Worker Dislocation. Kalamazoo, MI: Upjohn Institute for Employment Research.

Keith, Verna, and Cedric Herring. 1991. Skin Tone and Stratification in the Black Community. American Journal of Sociology 97 (3): 760-778.

Locke, Alain. 1925. Enter the New Negro. Survey Graphic Harlem 6 (6) (March): 631-634.

Office of Immigration Statistics, U.S. Department of Homeland Security. 2004. 2003 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. Editions from 1975 to 2003 available online at http://uscis.gov/graphics/shared/aboutus/statistics/ybpage.htm.

Smitherman, Geneva. 1991. What Is Africa to Me?: Language, Ideology, and African American. American Speech 66 (2): 115-132.

Stewart, James. 1977. Historical Patterns of Black-White Political Economic Inequality in the United States and the Republic of South Africa. Review of Black Political Economy 7 (3): 266-295.

Stewart, James. 2004. Globalization, Cities, and Racial Inequality at the Dawn of the 21st Century. Review of Black Political Economy 31 (3): 11-32.

Trotter, Joe, Jr. 2001. The African American Experience. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

James B. Stewart

AFRICAN AMERICANS

The use of the taxonomic category African American, either in public or health or other disciplines, fundamentally reflects the historic and contemporary systems of racial stratification in American society. The term "African American," as a categorical descriptor, includes many different segments of the American population referred to as "black" or Americans of sub-Saharan African ancestry. It is also a product of the group self-definition process in which African Americans have historically engaged as an expression of identity, power, defiance, pride, and the struggle for human rights. These designations were often in contradistinction to official government classifications and popular characterizations, which frequently reflected prevailing ideas about white supremacy intended to denigrate African Americans.

The historical roots of the nominal identity of African Americans date back to the early nineteenth century, when there were intense debates and political movements, mostly among free blacks in the North, to reunite with their African heritage. Part of the discussion and designation also involved classification of "mixed-race" populations, whose identity raised serious questions about the relevance of racial classification based on pigmentation. According to Collier-Thomas and Turner,

From the 1830s to the middle of the 1890s, Colored American and the more commonly used derivation Colored were the most popular terms. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Negro gained considerable support as a generic term, becoming by 1920 the most commonly used expression of race. Increasing dissatisfaction with the term Negro, most noted in the late 1930s, culminated with the Black power movement of the 1960s.

During the latter period of heightened cultural nationalism, "Black" and "Afro-American" emerged as key terms for race designation and were frequently used interchangeably. More recently, in the late 1980s, "African American" was posited as the most appropriate and comprehensive race designation. This current designation not only reflects a historical lineage, but it also establishes an identity that is rooted in cultural and ethnogeographic origins, rather than skin pigmentation as defined by United States politics and policy.

One reason for the attention African Americans have given to group designations is that group classifications by the white majority were highly instrumental in attempting to justify slavery, deny basic human rights, and restrain social opportunities. These oppressive practices had the effect of subordinating African Americans. Richard B. Moore in a book entitled The Name "Negro": Its Origin and Evil Use described how the skin color and other physical features of Africans who were brought into slavery "were identified in the mind of the people generally with ugliness, repulsion, and baseness." During earlier periods of the twentieth century, white media, publishers, and the scientific community largely refused to capitalize group designations such as Black, Colored, Negro, or African. This practice was in clear contrast to references in print to whites or the Caucasian "race." Moreover, scientific research and theories about so-called racial group differences (e.g., eugenics) were highly influential in promoting white supremacy.

Public health and medicine have historically reflected the racial inequities of American society as manifested in discrimination in medical care, research ethics and applications, professional education, and ideas about the disease etiology. Physicians in the antebellum period gave different treatment to blacks because of the belief that the black physiology was inferior to whites and thus differed with regard to intelligence, sexuality, and sensitivity to pain. These racist beliefs in the subhuman qualities of the "Black race" were responsible for blacks being used as subjects in excruciating medical experiments. For example, between 1845 and 1849, Dr. J. Marion Sims, the father of modern gynecology, subjected three African-American women in Alabama to 30 operations without anesthesia to perfect a surgical technique to repair vesicovaginal fistulas. During the same period, another physician in Georgia, Dr. Thomas Hamilton, subjected black bodies to high temperatures by burying them with their heads above ground in his quest to test the remedy for heatstroke so that slaves could work longer hours in the field. This tragic legacy of unethical race biology research was evident in the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study, in which 399 black men in Alabama unknowingly participated in a study (from 1932 to 1972) to determine the health consequences of untreated syphilis, even though there were known treatments for the disease during this period.

Some scholars have asserted that a lasting effect of this type of institutional racism has been the reluctance of many African Americans to seek medical care. The apprehension of being given different and inferior treatment or being used as guinea pigs in unethical medical research is also believed to have led to the present distrust by African Americans of prevention and treatment in HIV/AIDS (human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome). Indeed, the persistence in the disparity of health outcomes between African Americans and the white population was the subject of a governmental report in 1985 documenting 60,000 excess deaths among African Americans.

Implicit in most discussions of race and health is the suggestion of a direct "racial" or genetic lineage between African Americans and Africans, advancing the notion of a defective gene pool in these populations. Ancestors of most African Americans were primarily from West Africa, and therefore the imputed genetic heritage may not necessarily be applicable to Africans from other parts of the continent. Additionally, sickle cell anemia, which has been conventionally viewed as an African-American or "Black" genetic disease, actually evolved from a biologic adaptation among persons residing in tropical climates as a protection against malaria. However, many non– West Africans, for example, people of the Mediterranean region or descent, also have a high incidence of this disease or carry the trait but would not be considered "Black" or African American. Also, some diseases such as stomach, lung, and esophageal cancers, as well as hypertension, are higher in African Americans than many Africans and, according to a study in Chicago, low birthweight is higher among African Americans compared to Africans. These examples suggest the strong role of environmental influences rather than genetic factors. Thus putative associations with "black" skin color or other phenotypic similarities are more complex and will continue to be the subject of more public health debate with regard to the human genome project, gene therapy applications, and sociobiologic research.

Within the field of public health, there has been extensive discussion of what the term "race" actually means and its overall value. One problem is that it is seldom defined by researchers. References are frequently made to biologic, cultural, and socioeconomic factors, as well as racism and political differences, without explicitly stating their meaning or relevance. For example, although the term "African American" is generally used inter-changeably with "Black" or "Negro," this is not the case with the descriptor of "non-white," which was widely used prior to 1960. This "racial" category included mostly African Americans but also Hispanic populations, Asian Americans, and Native Americans.

About 30 million persons were identified as African American in the U.S. Census of 1990. From the perspective of public health research, practice, and policy, it is not possible to view them as a monolithic or single group. While they have many commonalities, especially in terms of political opinions and interests, geographic concentrations, and some cultural patterns, it is crucial that public health professionals recognize within-group differences. Social heterogeneity among African Americans regarding health practices or risk factors and outcomes must be carefully examined in terms of age, gender, geographic location, migratory status, social class or socioeconomic status (e.g., education and income), and nativity.

The history of social designations applied to African Americans suggests that the nominal identity of this group may change in the future to reflect the evolution of internal group consciousness, political interests, and social heterogeneity or diversity. Some groups such as "biracial" persons or foreign-born immigrants from African or Caribbean countries may choose in increasing numbers not to be viewed strictly as African American. These issues point to the dynamic nature and significance of racial classification—it has changed and will continue to change. It is also important to note that African American as a racial classification in the United States reflects the unique historical experience and journey of identity in ways that render international comparisons problematic.

In summary, being classified as African American is quite significant because it reflects an important social group transformation and reality in terms of group identity, political orientation, life chances or social opportunity, normative standards and lifestyles, and discriminatory behavior. These are some of the factors that strongly relate to disease susceptibility, quality of life, morbidity and mortality, and longevity. It is only when the reality of racial classification carries little social impact that the term will become obsolete. At the present time, it is unlikely that serious consideration can be given to eliminating the use of racial designations such as "African American" in public health.

Collins O. Airhihenbuwa

Gary King

(see also: Ethnicity and Health; Ethnocentrism; Immigrants, Immigration )

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