African Americans

Brenda Gayle Plummer

Race and foreign affairs have intersected at numerous points in U.S. history. Officials in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were not always explicitly aware of the impact of race on foreign relations or on their own decision making, but its impact on historical events is demonstrable. Beginning with the American Revolution and continuing through the twentieth century, race influenced what the United States did and how it pursued its interests abroad.

THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

Black volunteers, detesting slavery and wanting liberty, fought on both sides of the revolutionary war. The activities of African-American revolutionaries were matched by those of black loyalists, some of whom were deliberately recruited into military service by British commanders eager to destabilize the plantation economy, especially in tidewater Virginia. This British policy was bitterly resented by slaveholders. Many of these soldiers retreated to Canada with the British after 1783. Freedom proved elusive for black protagonists on both sides. The U.S. flirtation with freedom for blacks proved ephemeral. Slavery persisted as a national institution and free people of color increasingly faced racial discrimination during the course of the antebellum period. Some loyalists who evacuated with the British were sold into slavery in the West Indies. Others found barriers to civil equality in their new Canadian homes.

RACE, IMPRESSMENTS, AND MARITIME ISSUES

Race was a factor in the maritime trades and in navies during the age of sail. Black men from North America, the Caribbean, and Africa, slave and free, were among the thousands employed in a range of industries and at war. They served on slavers, whalers, packet boats, warships, and were represented as sailors in almost all sectors of maritime activity. Rules governing the movements of both enslaved sailors and free men of color affected relations among states. In the antebellum South during periods of slave unrest, authorities enforced regulations that restricted the portside activities of West Indian seamen. Violators were threatened with enslavement. Abuse of foreign black sailors in U.S. ports sometimes brought protests from consuls or influential persons to whom they turned for support. The seamen's papers given black American sailors in 1796 did not afford them substantial protection from infringements on their rights, and until 1823, when civil equality was extended to black sailors in the British navy, black seamen of all nationalities were readily exploited, and those who were free faced the risk of illegal enslavement.

Impressment was a danger for all U.S. seamen, regardless of race, before and during the War of 1812. Those recruited into the British navy could expect harsher treatment than that experienced aboard U.S. ships. The fate of black loyalists enslaved in the West Indies during the American Revolution contributed to anti-British feeling among some African Americans in the early nineteenth century and helped preserve their loyalty to the United States during those years. The United States, however, was reluctant to recruit blacks into any armed forces except the navy. As a result, there were few black combatants except for those enlisted as volunteers in state units. The United States and Britain ultimately employed the same tactic that had been used in the revolutionary war in promising manumission to those who fought or served as military laborers. Those who allied themselves with Britain were taken to Canada at the end of the war and settled on plots of land. While many of the manumission promises made by U.S. authorities were honored, African Americans had no guarantee of civil equality.

SLAVERY AND ABOLITION

In Western countries, efforts to limit slavery began with the prohibition of the African slave trade and attempts to enforce an international ban on this traffic. Britain outlawed the slave trade in its possessions in 1807, and the United States soon followed suit, effective as of 1 January 1808. While the U.S. law curtailed the international supply of slaves, American traders continued to retail slaves through a domestic market. The abolitionist movement then focused on eradicating slavery itself. Antislavery activists created cooperative networks where they proselytized against slavery and abetted the escape of fugitives. Some antislavery activities had an international character. One campaign, noted in the cities of the northeastern United States and in Great Britain, focused on encouraging consumers to buy products grown without slave labor. The effort met with indifferent success but provided small ephemeral markets for imports from Haiti—a country that had gained its independence through slave rebellion—and after 1833, the British West Indies. The promotion of free labor produce coincided with a growing conviction in the northern United States and Britain that wage labor was the most rational, just, and efficient method of work, and with the social and political evolution of industrial society in those areas.

The British Parliament in 1833 enacted a gradual abolition program that ended slavery in British dominions by 1838. Between 1830 and 1860 a small African-American community had gathered in Britain. As most American universities barred black students, some were attending universities of far higher caliber than those in the United States. Others were fugitives who had made their way to a country where slavery was prohibited. Such prominent U.S. abolitionists as Frederick Douglass and Charles Lenox Remond and his sister Sarah Remond visited Britain to enlist both the working classes and the bourgeoisie in the American antislavery cause. Black abolitionists gave public lectures and sold copies of slave narratives written by themselves and others. They succeeded in thwarting many of the fund-raising efforts of the American Colonization Society, established in 1816–1817 to resettle blacks on the west coast of Africa. In Ireland, the Irish nationalist Daniel O'Connell, an outspoken foe of slavery, embraced Frederick Douglass. Douglass spent nineteen months lecturing in the British Isles between 1845 and 1847. British Quakers raised the money to buy Douglass's freedom from his Maryland owner.

Antislavery activists hoped that pressure applied by Britain, then the world's most powerful nation, would persuade the United States to deal forthrightly with the slavery question. Abolitionists did not succeed in capturing all Britons. They faced the opposition of those manufacturers and workers most dependent on imports of U.S. cotton, but benefited from a widespread revulsion among all classes against slavery. The groundwork that Douglass, the Remonds, and others laid helped neutralize British sympathies for southern slaveholders. This was a critical issue during the 1850s, when sectional animosity reached a crisis point in the United States. If Britain, despite its own antislavery stand within its realms, allied with the Confederacy during the U.S. Civil War, the United States would likely be defeated. While American abolitionists often avoided direct discussions of class conflict because of their frequent reliance on elite patronage in Britain and their desire to keep the focus on slavery, the zenith of their activity coincided with the Chartist movement, which sought to improve conditions for the industrial working class, and debates over the status of labor.

American slavery was also drawn into the international arena as a result of the activities of fugitive slaves. In the course of the nineteenth century some thirty thousand black persons from the United States entered Canada. Periods of domestic crisis, such as the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and the Dred Scott decision, accelerated this immigration. The Fugitive Slave Act made it easy for slaveholders and bounty hunters to threaten the liberty of free people of color. In an explicitly racist finding, the Supreme Court, in the 1857 case Scott v. Sandford, ruled that blacks could not be citizens and had no civil rights. The decision effectively ended the prospects of free people of color in the United States until after the Civil War. Many who were able left the country. In addition to the relatively familiar escapes to Canada by slaves and free people alike, blacks from Texas crossed the border into Mexico, where slavery was illegal. During the early years of the Republic, when Spain loosely administered Florida, fugitives in combination with the Seminole nation engaged the United States in wars in 1817–1818 and 1835–1842. In the aftermath of the first Seminole war, Spain, unable and unwilling to guarantee the security of U.S. real and chattel property along its Florida borders, and wishing to avoid armed conflict with Americans, ceded the rebellious territory to the United States.

Fugitives also included those whose antislavery activities put them in jeopardy of the law. Frederick Douglass in 1859 was a suspect in John Brown's conspiracy to seize the federal armory in Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Douglass fled to England to avoid arrest. Once there, he contacted the U.S. minister to the Court of St. James's hoping to secure a passport to visit France. The passport was denied on grounds that Douglass, according to Supreme Court dicta, was not a U.S. citizen. Douglass was an early victim of passport denial, a practice that would be used in the twentieth century to restrict the movements of blacks who were known critics of racial discrimination.

COLONIZATION AND EMIGRATION

Opinion leaders on both sides of the slavery question during the antebellum period expressed fears about the consequences of emancipation. Some abolitionists believed that slavery was morally wrong but did not think that freed slaves could be assimilated into American society for racial reasons. Certain proslavery advocates used these doubts about assimilation to argue that slavery could not be eradicated. A third alternative to slavery or abolition was the removal of freed slaves from the United States. The option appealed to blacks who wished a homeland of their own, and to proslavery and antislavery advocates alike who thought blacks could not be assimilated into American life. Paul Cuffe, a black New England shipowner, was committed to civil rights for African Americans and an outspoken opponent of slavery. He nevertheless employed his own resources in a back-to-Africa project in the early 1810s. After correspondence with prominent British abolitionists, including the parliamentarian William Wilberforce, Cuffe sought to repatriate selected emigrants to the British African colony of Sierra Leone. His plans were interrupted by the War of 1812 and by his own death not long thereafter, but he did succeed in settling some thirty-eight persons in Africa.

In 1821 the American Colonization Society resumed Cuffe's work. Members of the organization included such figures as Henry Clay, Francis Scott Key, and other prominent white Americans for whom the United States had to remain a white man's country. The society purchased African land from local rulers, and in 1847 the settlement, called Liberia, became an independent republic. Many antislavery activists opposed the American Colonization Society, believing that it was simply a stratagem to solidify slavery by removing from the United States the only blacks in a position to contest it. Others endorsed colonization and emigration in principle, reserving their objections for the society per se. There were, accordingly, other colonization ventures. In the 1820s and 1850s, two emigration movements to Haiti were organized with the cooperation of the Haitian government. A project in the 1830s involved the removal of American blacks to the island of Trinidad. President Abraham Lincoln, who endorsed colonization as a strategy to prevent a civil war over the slavery question, researched the possibility of a black homeland on the isthmus of Central America. These schemes involved negotiations with heads of state for land grants and concessions. Foreign leaders had their own reasons for endorsing these programs. Haiti had traditionally offered itself as an asylum for blacks in the Western Hemisphere and in the 1820s wanted to create a buffer on its frontier with Santo Domingo (now the Dominican Republic) by settling African Americans there. Great Britain in the 1830s sought labor to work on the Trinidad plantations abandoned by the beneficiaries of its own emancipation laws, a need for which it later recruited workers from India.

CIVIL WAR AND RECOGNITION OF BLACK COUNTRIES

During the nineteenth century, slavery and its accompanying racist ideology prevented the United States from conducting full diplomatic relations with Haiti and Liberia, states modeled on modern republics that were populated and governed by blacks. Many U.S. diplomats did not believe it possible to consort with black counterparts on an equal basis and receive them into the polite society of the period. Proslavery southerners saw Haiti as anathema on social and political grounds and as a security problem. Some southern states passed laws that forbade the entry of sailors and other free people of color from Haiti. Before the Civil War, the U.S. government did not recognize Haiti and was represented there only by consuls. Southern secession removed the obstacles to recognition, which occurred on 12 July 1862 when the State Department appointed a chief of mission, Benjamin Whidden. In 1869, U.S. representation was raised to the ministerial level with the appointment of the first African American in such a post, Ebenezer Don Carlos Bassett. The defeat of the Confederacy and the abolition of slavery meant improvement in Haitian-American relations, ending the threat of slavery expansionism and filibustering raids on Haitian coasts. Beginning with Bassett's appointment, diplomatic and consular posts to Haiti and Liberia became patronage posts for loyal black Republicans, a pattern that persisted until well into the mid-twentieth century.

In the late nineteenth century, American activists sought to bring international attention to the lynching problem in the "Jim Crow" South. Hampered by lack of access to sources of state power, activists such as the anti-lynching advocate Ida B. Wells-Barnett searched for unconventional and less restrictive venues for international contact. Just as American activists had sought British support for abolition during the slavery era, Wells-Barnett toured the United Kingdom in 1893 and 1894 to publicize the lynching problem and bring the weight of British public opinion to bear on the issue. She devised another way to focus international attention on U.S. domestic affairs when, in 1893, Chicago hosted the Columbian Exposition, which brought visitors from all over the world. Through the mediation of Frederick Douglass, the government of Haiti selected Wells-Barnett to manage its exhibit and provided her with a table in the Haitian pavilion. There she sold copies of a book she had written to document lynching and the context in which it occurred. Wells-Barnett was thereby able to reach a wide audience in one of the first efforts to employ an international cultural festival to air concerns about U.S. race relations.

THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS AND THE PAN-AFRICAN CONGRESS

World War I shattered the balance of power in Europe and destroyed the Russian, German, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian empires. These state systems lost control of the diverse ethnic groups previously under their control. Subject nations and national minorities began demanding language rights, sovereignty, and democratic governments. When the Allies met in the Paris suburb of Versailles in 1919 to rebuild the world order, their agenda included the construction of nations in eastern Europe and the revitalization of the empires that remained. European debates on political autonomy and territoriality were the model for Asians and Africans seeking to bring their own interests to world attention.

The Pan-African Congress was an important vehicle for formulating and disseminating such demands. The association emerged from a 1900 London conference. Organized by a Trinidadian attorney resident in London and an African-American bishop, the congress brought together blacks from Britain and its colonies, the United States, and South Africa. The purpose was to discuss colonialism and racism and suggest strategies for reform. The association made little headway in its first twenty years, the zenith of European colonial domination of Africa. World War I provided an opportunity to renew its goals, however, and it planned a Paris conference that would convene simultaneously with the Versailles peace conference.

African-American leaders sought representation as observers at the peace conference and began discussing it before the war ended. Those most interested included the intellectual activist W. E. B. Du Bois, entrepreneur C. J. Walker, National Equal Rights League founder William Monroe Trotter, and activist Wells-Barnett. The Universal Negro Improvement Association, an international organization founded by Marcus Garvey, named delegates to the congress, including the labor leader A. Philip Randolph. Other interested organizations included the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the National Race Congress. The thinking was that if representatives of black organizations were denied admission to the proceedings or audiences with principals, they could use the Pan-African Congress and their proximity to the peace talks to bring their issues to public attention.

President Woodrow Wilson led the U.S. delegation at Versailles. Wilson believed in international organization and saw the peace conference as an opportunity to put the United States permanently at the center of power in the global community. Like other Allied leaders, Wilson wished to maintain control over national minorities. He was, additionally, a committed segregationist who as president of Princeton University had excluded African-American students from dormitories, and as president of the United States had separated federal civil servants by race, placing black employees behind partitions.

The Wilson administration did not want minority observers or protesters in Europe. The State Department accordingly refused passports to most of the black Americans wishing to go to France. Those who managed to cross the Atlantic attended a Pan-African Congress composed of fifty-seven delegates who discussed, under the careful scrutiny of the French government, such issues as the status of defeated Germany's colonies and colonial reform. The more militant civil rights activists and nationalists were less interested in the Pan African Congress than in addressing the peace conference, the forum where decisions affecting the world's national minorities and subject peoples would be made. President Wilson was determined to prevent such initiatives. He refused to see either Trotter or a young Vietnamese leader, Nguyen That Thanh, later known as Ho Chi Minh. Wilson and British Prime Minister David Lloyd George prohibited the presence of delegates of colonized peoples and racial minorities at Versailles, but Du Bois succeeded in representing the NAACP at the first conference of the League of Nations in 1921.

THE ITALO-ETHIOPIAN WAR

In October 1935, Benito Mussolini's fascist Italy invaded Ethiopia. The war there occurred at the height of isolationist sentiment in the U.S. Congress and the nation at large. While public sympathy for Ethiopia was considerable, so was the disinclination to intervene. The minority that pressed for a more forthright stand included African Americans and Irish Catholics who broke with the Catholic majority on the issue. The administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt showed concern about Italian aggression, but domestic opposition to even rhetorical intervention discouraged firm action. When Secretary of State Cordell Hull and President Roosevelt sent Mussolini a note suggesting that the United States would not necessarily remain indifferent to what his government did in Africa, the message was so subdued that Mussolini readily dismissed it. A neutrality act banned the sale of finished war products to belligerents, but it did not deny them access to strategic materials, which could be purchased proportionately to the rate of prewar consumption. Italy, a growing industrial power, bought large quantities of American oil. Ethiopia, still feudal, bought none. The neutrality act thus helped ensure that Italy would be well equipped to defeat its decrepit adversary.

Administration officials shrank from the prospect of ventilating an issue that would bring down isolationist wrath. For actors at the policy center, domestic considerations and the ultimate collapse of Ethiopian resistance tabled the question for the duration of World War II. At the periphery, however, the Ethiopian issue enabled the development of linkages that remained timely. Ethiopia was a ready-made issue for black nationalists and permitted liberals and leftists to focus their general opposition to fascism. The Ethiopian government-in-exile played a leading role itself in keeping public interest alive through publicity campaigns and appeals for funds. It also made explicit appeals to African Americans as a usable pressure group. Ethiopia's experience with fascist conquest facilitated a sharper critique of racism and imperialism and focused postwar attention on the disposition of colonies in northeast Africa and colonialism in general.

GERMAN RECONSTRUCTION AND RACIAL SEGREGATION

In 1945 the Allies claimed victory over a German state that had taken racism to its logical extreme in the pursuit of eugenic purity and the destruction of millions of lives. African-American troops were part of the force that occupied Germany from 1945 to 1955, when efforts were made on all fronts to reform its institutions and reconstruct it physically. From the beginning of the occupation, U.S. racial practices in the military contradicted the essence of its mission in Germany and led to confusion and resentment among the conquered.

In the American zone of occupation, commanding officers could approve soldiers' marriages as they saw fit. Many of those holding conventional American ideas about race often prohibited mixed marriages even when children were involved. When individual soldiers appealed these prohibitions, military judges relied on the laws of the various U.S. states to determine whether a proposed union could be approved and compiled the relevant statutes for their own use. If a soldier resided in a state where interracial marriages were illegal, his application to marry outside his race would be turned down. Racial record keeping on marriages began in 1947. German courts followed this example. The Allies, having struck down the racist Nuremberg laws, oddly found themselves reapplying them in the American zone of occupation, where the German courts followed suit.

Military opposition to mixed marriages gradually declined, but in the interim approximately three thousand biracial children were born in Germany between 1945 and 1951, almost all the offspring of African-American servicemen. As a result of the continuing ambivalence among all parties about the children's prospects for adoption in the United States, the West German state, autonomous in 1955, was charged with the responsibility for absorbing them into German society. Germans witnessed the contradictions between U.S. opposition to nazi racism and policies governing intermarriage. The first cohort of biracial children reached their teens as violence associated with segregation in the United States made international headlines. While some Germans continued to believe that homes in the United States should be sought for those who were not already adopted, the prevailing opinion was that the orphans should not be sent into a society characterized by racial violence. If the United States' goal had been to transform Germany into a democracy characterized by tolerance, the biracial orphans provided them a paradoxical opportunity to show the world they had shed Hitlerism.

THE UNITED NATIONS PETITION

At the Dumbarton Oaks Conference in the autumn of 1944, delegates planned the foundations of a postwar international organization that would reprise the work of the League of Nations. Conferees rejected a racial and national equality clause that the Chinese government had put forward but failed to energetically defend. In the early years of the United Nations, efforts were made to insert ethnic and linguistic rights into the UN Charter and other central documents. Cold War tensions entered the deliberations of the Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities in the late 1940s, as many sovereign states proved reluctant to permit international oversight of their treatment of national minorities.

For African Americans in particular the era reflected a rising interest in social science and world affairs and the secularization of black protest that moved it away from philanthropic church control. Black opinion widely supported a pluralist United Nations that would counter the "Anglo-American" conception of a postwar peace elaborated by Winston Churchill in his Fulton, Missouri, "Iron Curtain" speech. While no blacks attended the 1945 United Nations Conference on International Organization in San Francisco, Walter White, secretary of the NAACP; W. E. B. Du Bois, the NAACP's director of special research; and Mary McLeod Bethune, of the National Council of Negro Women, were present as observers. Their attendance resulted from extensive organizing activities by black nongovernmental organizations to formulate an agenda for international activism. The black Republican Perry Howard urged blacks to send telegrams to their congressional representatives to demand that the UN Charter protect minority rights. Despite setbacks, the UN continued to be seen as a potentially useful instrument in checking Western abuses of national minorities and colonial subjects. In 1948 the chair of the Baltimore chapter of the NAACP urged UN Secretary-General Trygve Lie to reject the University of Maryland's offer to house the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO). Segregation at the institution, including its college of agriculture, would inconvenience FAO personnel from non-European countries.

Attempts in 1945 to influence the United Nations to protect minority rights were among the first of several efforts. Backed by labor, professional, fraternal, and veterans' associations, the National Negro Congress drafted a petition to the United Nations in mid-1946. It was formulated at the same time that similar petitions were being presented by Indonesians and the Jewish diaspora, and shortly before the General Assembly voted to censure South Africa for its treatment of its East Indian resident population. Encouraged by parallel international events, the NAACP followed suit with its own petition in 1947. The NAACP asked the UN Commission on Human Rights to investigate racial discrimination in the United States. Supported by hundreds of black organizations across the political spectrum, and by African and Caribbean nationalists and labor federations overseas, the appeal was also viewed favorably by India, Pakistan, Egypt, Ethiopia, Belgium, Haiti, Norway, China (Formosa), and the USSR, which introduced the petition in October 1947. Despite its popularity with the black public in the United States and international endorsement, the petition died in the Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities. Pressure applied on the United Nations by the United States, the influence of Eleanor Roosevelt, then a UNESCO commissioner, and misgivings among certain NAACP officials about Soviet support of the appeal, led to its demise.

RACIAL REFORM AND COLD WAR IDEOLOGY

The U.S. rivalry with the Soviet Union and its Cold War partners involved political as well as military competition. President Harry S. Truman articulated the need to improve U.S. race relations not only because the Soviets were exploiting the race issue but also because U.S. credibility was at stake. Truman and his successor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, articulated a need for reform and coupled this with the same repression of black communists and other radical black critics of America that generally characterized the early Cold War period in U.S. society. Such activists as Du Bois and Paul Robeson were refused passports. U.S. representatives abroad interfered with American-born dancer Josephine Baker, a French citizen and an outspoken critic of U.S. racial mores. The Eisenhower administration, committed to the reduction of military spending but putting greater emphasis on promoting the economic and cultural superiority of American life, had come to associate winning the Cold War with improving the civil rights climate for black Americans. While Eisenhower was not enthusiastic about desegregation, he was committed enough to the principle of civil equality to support a modest civil rights bill in 1957.

The belief that America's ability to champion democracy depended on its success at practicing it at home continued during the Kennedy years. The Cold War rationale for racial reform was strengthened by evidence that hostile countries utilized negative news about race relations to discredit the United States. In an increasingly decolonized world, where Africans and Asians now headed sovereign states, racial discrimination could no longer be endorsed or accepted. Technological change meant that journalists could record instances of racial violence and broadcast them to the world. The Soviet Union and its allies were not the only critics. Disapproval emanated from nonaligned countries, especially India, and from such conventional Western states as Denmark. In contrast to the world press, pro-apartheid South African journalists played up racial incidents in the United States, especially the exploits of white supremacists. This also constituted part of the embarrassment that necessitated a significant propaganda effort to neutralize damaging racial news stories about segregation.

Members of the intelligentsia and business communities also employed arguments that linked foreign and domestic affairs. In September 1950, for example, the NAACP convened the Breakneck Hill Conference, where senators, UN officials, journalists and broadcast executives, State Department representatives, educators, and activists considered the impact of racial discrimination on the nation's foreign policy objectives. Civil rights proponents, including participants in sit-ins and other demonstrations in the 1960s, also used Cold War arguments to rationalize their challenge to discriminatory statutes. Segregation tainted the U.S. reputation abroad, they claimed, and the limited opportunities for minorities that resulted from it meant fewer human resources available to defend the nation and extend its interests.

U.S. government efforts to counter the bad publicity involved activities sponsored by the State Department and the United States Information Agency (USIA). These included providing news to international readers, stocking U.S. libraries abroad with what was perceived as balanced information about black life in the United States, and enlisting African-American lecturers and entertainers to travel abroad and entertain or provide information to interested foreigners. Some individuals who toured foreign countries for this purpose sometimes exaggerated the amount of progress made in race relations. The State Department and USIA, for their part, did not deny the existence of racism but rather emphasized what they portrayed as a national commitment to effect change through nonviolent means. The appointment in 1964 of the African-American journalist Carl Rowan as USIA director was intended to emphasize the latter. Rowan had previously served as deputy assistant secretary of state for public affairs and as ambassador to Finland.

AFRICAN AMERICANS AND THE DIPLOMATIC CORPS

The civil rights movement presented the State Department and other government branches not only with the problem of trying to counter America's racist image abroad but also that of dealing with discrimination within their own ranks. Since Reconstruction, most African-American consuls, ministers, and ambassadors had been political appointees posted to black countries. The number of career black foreign service officers and consular officials remained minuscule until the second half of the twentieth century. The State Department, an executive department in a staunchly segregated capital, steadfastly resisted integration. In addition to racial segregation, its institutional culture traditionally relied on eastern elites. The democratization of the State Department through geographic and demographic diversification evolved only gradually. Its racial desegregation occurred chiefly at the initiative of presidential administrations and informal pressure from black leadership.

Civil rights organizations had expressed dissatisfaction with the unrepresentative character of the State Department since the 1940s, but changes were desultory until the early 1960s. The Kennedy White House, seeking to consolidate its gains with the African-American electorate while maintaining a moderate posture on civil rights, looked to Africa for the solution. Well-publicized visits from African heads of state and the appointment of African Americans to diplomatic posts provided the symbolic politics the situation required. The United States would also realize the additional benefit of encouraging ostensibly nonaligned African states to view the West more favorably and limit their contacts with Warsaw Pact states. The State Department remained slow to change, however, and only after criticism of the pace and scope of reform accelerated were significant numbers of African-American diplomatic representatives named to countries outside Africa and the Caribbean.

In line with the perceived need to court newly independent African states and encourage them to maintain close ties with the West, U.S. officials tried to insulate U.S. foreign relations from the repercussions of domestic racism by assisting diplomats from Africa, the Caribbean, and other regions who encountered discrimination while living and traveling in the United States. In the 1950s and early 1960s, negative experiences of foreign envoys chiefly involved the refusal of service to Africans (as well as South Asians and others) in states where segregation was official, the relegation of nonwhites to Jim Crow sections of public facilities, and housing discrimination in states ranging from New York to Virginia.

Initially, the State Department dealt with the problem by attempting to isolate foreign blacks from African Americans, a task facilitated by the nature of diplomatic relations. Nonwhite envoys could, for example, simply be exempted from segregation laws by virtue of their status. Federal officials could intervene in particular cases, but they were not always present when visitors experienced embarrassments. When the Ghanaian finance minister was denied service at a Delaware restaurant in 1957, Eisenhower invited him to breakfast at the White House, and Vice President Richard Nixon sent him a formal apology. The State Department discussed the matter with the restaurant's franchisee. The most serious incident was the beating of a Guinean foreign service officer by New York City police officers following a traffic accident. The presence of nonwhite envoys also forced adjustments in the elite social life of Washington. State Department chief of protocol Angier Biddle Duke resigned in 1961 from the prestigious Metropolitan Club because of its refusal to continue extending what had previously been automatic membership to foreign diplomats and its absence of black members.

To be sure, another consideration that drove reform within the diplomatic corps was the awareness that segregation as a whole made a bad impression on foreigners regardless of race. As early as June 1951, the solicitor general of the United States, Philip Perlman, filed an amicus curiae brief in a U.S. Court of Appeals case that involved a Washington, D.C., restaurant's refusal of service to a U.S. citizen on racial grounds. Perlman argued that foreigners judge the United States by their experiences in its capital and that segregation marred the image of American democracy. The solicitor general thus linked the reform of racial policies in the United States to the nation's best interests abroad.

In August 1961 the Kennedy administration created a task force composed of representatives from the White House, State Department, and local state governments to address the problem of racial discrimination. Because of local entrepreneurs' inability to distinguish between Africans and African Americans and favor the former, public facilities along the Washington-Maryland corridor ultimately had to be desegregated for everyone.

THE VIETNAM WAR

African-American opposition to the war in Vietnam, the overriding U.S. foreign policy concern of the 1960s and early 1970s, reflected perceptions of self-interest. During the 1950s the major civil rights organizations had stopped taking action on foreign policy questions. As the war escalated, civil rights leaders feared both the loss of organizational revenues if prowar advocates withdrew their support and the prospect of internal friction among organizations over the peace issue. Anxiety about possible accusations of subversion, and concern lest the civil rights focus be dissipated, were other causes of apprehension. The immediacy of civil rights insurgency in the South provided a powerful pretext for channeling organizational energies to domestic questions only.

Moreover, by the mid-1960s the reluctance of black leaders to engage in issues apart from domestic civil rights was reinforced by an increasingly beleaguered presidential administration fighting to maintain a "one voice" approach for U.S. foreign policy around the globe. President Lyndon B. Johnson, for whom Africa was a low priority, particularly opposed the consolidation of an African-American foreign policy constituency. Johnson did not want to multiply the number of players in international affairs and perceived such a constituency as contradicting the goal of fully integrating blacks into American life. Johnson believed that racially and ethnically based interest groups generally fragmented what should be a unitary national position on foreign affairs as government experts defined them.

In 1965, however, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, at the center of some of the most sweeping changes in American society, publicly advocated draft resistance. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee became the first national body to oppose the war. While antiwar sentiment did not overtake the black majority until 1969, activist organizations mounted pressure on Martin Luther King, Jr., to take a stand. Vietnamese Buddhists who sent him an "open letter" joined with domestic war critics in urging action. In 1967, King formally reiterated his inability to square the war with his conscience, his belief that the war was sapping the economic and spiritual vigor of the country, and his conviction that the national mission needed redefinition. In an April speech at the Riverside Church in New York City, King delivered a radical critique of U.S. foreign policy.

Ultimately, Vietnam was a broad enough issue to absorb many of the questions that had long preoccupied African Americans. Critiques of the war called into question the integrity of the political process and opened the door to largescale insurgency. On this issue black foreign policy audiences entered the controversy late, had dwindling access to increasingly less responsive policymakers, and were considerably alienated from "normal politics." Their efforts to influence the conduct of the war were also hampered by strategies that were based on addressing legislatures and courts rather than executive officials.

The spirit of insurgency in the late 1960s combined with new global media to afford African-American activists new forums for international exposure to U.S. domestic problems. One of the most prominent examples was the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City, from which South Africa had been excluded owing to worldwide opposition to that country's apartheid policy. Certain African-American athletes had contemplated a boycott of the games because of their dissatisfaction with racial conditions in the United States, but they ultimately decided to participate. African-American medalists Tommie Smith and John Carlos, feeling the need to make at least a symbolic gesture, raised their fists in protest at U.S. racial injustice as the "Star-Spangled Banner" was being played. Both athletes were widely criticized and their careers were destroyed. In an ironic twist in 1980, the U.S. government asked African-American boxing champion Muhammad Ali to persuade various countries to boycott the 1980 Olympics in Moscow.

SOUTH AFRICA

By the mid-1950s, only in South Africa could U.S. diplomats be committed and outspoken racists. The State Department sent envoys to South Africa whose own outlook aligned closely with that of their hosts. In light of U.S. reliance on South African raw materials, mutual anticommunism, and interest in free trade, policymakers acquiesced to South African segregation laws that paralleled those that were still current in the United States. As civil rights insurgency and changing views toward race worldwide eroded segregation at home, U.S. official acceptance of South African racial practices could no longer be direct. Washington attempted to distance itself rhetorically from apartheid while continuing harmonious relations with South Africa.

As noted, the State Department and USIA often sponsored goodwill tours of African-American entertainers to foreign countries, and these included South Africa. U.S. authorities may have believed that exposure to the diversity of U.S. society would give proponents of apartheid pause. Visits to South Africa by American performers were not limited to government-sponsored ventures. South African promoters signed U.S. artists to lucrative contracts, but they were often required to perform before segregated audiences.

The gap between U.S. democratic beliefs on one hand, and government and private sector ties to the South African regime on the other, led in the 1980s to an international protest movement against apartheid. Anti-apartheid activists set out to discourage artist exchanges in the belief that they had no effect on apartheid, degraded the artist involved, and lent credibility to the South African regime. Through adverse publicity and boycott, many U.S. entertainers were pressured into avoiding South Africa. Similar actions were mounted when the South African government sent African troupes to the United States if they apologized for conditions in their homeland.

Pressure from advocacy groups was a crucial factor in leading the United States to impose economic sanctions against South Africa in the 1980s. Thus, in February 1990, South African President F. W. de Klerk released the African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela from his twenty-seven-year imprisonment, and in March 1992 white South Africans passed a referendum that would end white minority rule.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ahrari, Mohammed E., ed. Ethnic Groups and U.S. Foreign Policy. New York, 1987.

Blackett, R. J. M. Building an Antislavery Wall: Black Americans in the Atlantic Abolitionist Movement, 1830–1860. Baton Rouge, La., 1983.

Borstelmann, Thomas. Apartheid's Reluctant Uncle. New York, 1993.

Collum, Danny Duncan, ed. African Americans in the Spanish Civil War: "This Ain't Ethiopia, but It'll Do." New York, 1992.

DeConde, Alexander. Ethnicity, Race, and American Foreign Policy: A History. Boston, 1992.

Du Bois, W. E. B. "Inter-Racial Implications of the Ethiopian Crisis: A Negro View." Foreign Affairs 14 (October 1935): 82–92.

Dudziak, Mary L. "Desegregation as a Cold War Imperative." Stanford Law Review 41 (November 1988): 61–120.

——. Cold War Civil Rights. Princeton, N.J., 2000.

Fairclough, Adam. "Martin Luther King Jr. and the War in Vietnam." Phylon 45, no. 1 (1984): 19–39.

Füredi, Frank. The Silent War: Imperialism and the Changing Perception of Race. New Brunswick, N.J., 1998.

Gatewood, Willard B. Black Americans and the White Man's Burden, 1898–1903. Urbana, Ill., 1975.

Hannaford, Ivan. Race: The History of an Idea in the West. Washington, D.C., 1996.

Harris, Robert L., Jr. "Racial Equality and the United Nations Charter." In Armstead L. Robinson and Patricia Sullivan, eds. New Directions in Civil Rights Studies. Charlottesville, Va., 1991.

Horne, Gerald. Black and Red: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War, 1944–1963. Albany, N.Y., 1986.

Hunt, Michael H. Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy. New Haven, Conn., 1987.

Isaacs, Harold Robert. The New World of Negro Americans. New York, 1964.

Krenn, Michael L. Black Diplomacy: African Americans and the State Department, 1945–1969. Armonk, N.Y., 1999.

Krenn, Michael L., ed. The Impact of Race on U.S. Foreign Policy: A Reader. New York, 1999.

Lauren, Paul Gordon. Power and Prejudice: The Politics and Diplomacy of Racial Discrimination. 2d ed. Boulder, Colo., 1996.

Lockwood, Bert, Jr. "The UN Charter and U.S. Civil Rights Litigation: 1946–1955." Iowa Law Review 5 (1984): 901–956.

Noer, Thomas J. Cold War and Black Liberation: The United States and White Rule in Africa, 1948–1968. Columbia, Mo., 1985.

Plummer, Brenda G. Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935–1960. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1996.

Smith, Tony. Foreign Attachments: The Power of Ethnic Groups in the Making of American Foreign Policy. Cambridge, Mass., 2000.

Weston, Rubin Francis. Racism in U.S. Imperialism: The Influence of Racial Assumptions on American Foreign Policy, 1893–1946. Columbia, S.C., 1972.

See also Civil War Diplomacy; Peace Movements; Race and Ethnicity .

JIM CROW AND THE COLD WAR

"A vast literature has explored the major American cold war initiatives of the late 1940s and early 1950s. The decision-making processes and ramifications of the Truman Doctrine, the European Recovery Plan (Marshall Plan), the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and National Security Council document 68 (NSC 68) have received painstaking analysis from a variety of political perspectives. But there has been only occasional attention paid either to the ways in which these policy initiatives emerged from a racially hierarchical domestic and international landscape or to their racial meanings and ramifications. Yet, people of color at the time were well aware of this other context. Winston Churchill's 'Iron Curtain' speech of February 1946 represented a declaration of cold war, but it also served as a call for Anglo-American racial and cultural unity. The Truman Doctrine of March 1947 opposed potential 'armed minorities' of the left but not those of the right who actually ruled much of the world: European colonialists. The Marshall Plan (1948) and NATO (1949) bolstered anticommunist governments west of the Elbe River but also indirectly funded their efforts at preserving white rule in Asia and Africa. NSC 68 laid out an offensive strategy of diminishing Soviet influence abroad, but it also revealed American anxieties about a broader 'absence of order among nations' that was 'becoming less and less tolerable' when the largest change in the international system was coming not from communist revolutions but from the decolonization of nonwhite peoples."

— From Thomas Borstelmann, "Jim Crow's Coming Out: Race Relations and American Foreign Policy in the Truman Years," Presidential Studies Quarterly 29, no. 3 (1999): 549–569 —

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

ETHNONYMS: (contemporary) : Black Americans, Afro-Americans; (archaic): Colored, Negro

Orientation

Identification. African Americans constitute the largest non-European racial group in the United States of America. Africans came to the area that became the United States in the sixteenth century with the Spaniards, but their first appearance as a group in the English colonies occurred in 1619, when twenty Africans were brought as indentured servants to Jamestown, Virginia. Subsequent importations of Africans from western Africa stretching from Morocco on the north to Angola on the south over a period of two hundred years greatly increased the African population in the United States. By the time of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, they numbered 4.5 million people. A composite People, comprised of numerous African ethnic groups including Yoruba, Wolof, Mandingo, Hausa, Asante, Fante, Edo, Fulani, Serer, Luba, Angola, Congo, Ibo, Ibibio, Ijaw, and Sherbro, African Americans have a common origin in Africa and a common struggle against racial oppression. Many African Americans show evidence of racial mixture with Native Americans, particularly Creek, Choctaw, Cherokee, and Pawnee, as well as with Europeans from various ethnic backgrounds.

Location. African Americans were predominantly a rural and southern people until the Great Migration of the World War II era. Thousands of Africans moved to the major urban centers of the North to find better jobs and more equitable living conditions. Cities such as Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and Detroit became magnets for entire southern communities of African Americans. The lure of economic prosperity, political enfranchisement, and social mobility attracted many young men. Often women and the elderly were left on the farms in the South, and husbands would send for their families, and children for their parents, once they were established in their new homes. Residential segregation became a pattern in the North as it had been in the South. Some of these segregated communities in the North gained prominence and became centers for culture and commerce. Harlem in New York, North Philadelphia in Philadelphia, Woodlawn in Detroit, South Side in Chicago, and Hough in Cleveland were written into the African Americans' imagination as places of high style, fashion, culture, and business. The evolution of the African American communities from southern and rural to northern and urban has been going on since 1945. According to the 1980 census, the largest populations are found in New York, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Houston, Baltimore, New Orleans, and Memphis. In terms of percentage of population, the five leading cities among those with populations of over 300,000 are Washington, D.C., 70 percent; Atlanta, 67 percent; Detroit, 65 percent; New Orleans, 55 percent; and Memphis, 49 percent. (East St. Louis, Illinois, is 96 percent African American, but its population is less than 100,000.)

Demography. The 1990 population of African Americans is estimated to be 35 million. In addition to those in the United States, there are approximately 1 million African Americans abroad, mainly in Africa, Europe, and South America. African Americans constitute about 12 percent of the American population. This is roughly equal to the percentages of Africans in the populations of Venezuela and Colombia. The largest population of African people outside the continent of Africa resides in Brazil; the second largest is in the United States of America. The following countries have the largest populations of Africans in the world: Nigeria, Brazil, Egypt, Ethiopia, Zaire, and the United States. The cities with the largest populations of African Americans are New York, 2.1 million; Chicago, 1.4 million; Detroit, over 800,000; Philadelphia, close to 700,000; and Los Angeles, more than 600,000. Seven states have African American populations of more than 20 percent. These are southern and predominantly rural: Mississippi, 35 percent; South Carolina, 30 percent; Louisiana, 29 percent; Georgia, 27 percent; Alabama, 16 percent; Maryland, 23 percent; and North Carolina, 22 percent.

Linguistic Affiliation. African Americans are now native speakers of English. During the seventeenth century, most Africans in the Americas spoke West African languages as their first languages. In the United States, the African Population developed a highly sophisticated pidgin, usually referred to by linguists in its creolized form as Ebonics. This language was the prototype for the speech of the vast majority of African Americans. It was composed of African syntactical elements and English lexical items. Use of this language made it possible for Africans from various ethnic and linguistic groups (such as Yoruba, Ibo, Hausa, Akan, Wolof, and Mande) to communicate with one another as well as with the Europeans with whom they came in contact.

The impact of the African American language on American society has been thorough and all-embracing. From the ubiquitous "O.K.," a Wolof expression from Senegal, to the transformations of words like "bad" and "awesome" into different and more adequate expressions of something entirely original, one sees the imprint of African American styles that are derived from the African heritage. There are more than three thousand words, place names, and concepts with African origins found in the language of the United States. Indeed, the most dynamic aspects of the English language as spoken in the United States have been added by the popular speakers of the African American idiom, whether Contemporary rap musicians, past jazz musicians, or speakers of the street slang that has added so much color to American English. Proverbs, poems, songs, and hollers, which come with the historical saga of a people whose only epics are the spirituals, the great songs, provide a rich texture to the ever-evolving language of the African American people.

History and Cultural Relations

African Americans did not come freely to America. Theirs is not a history of a people seeking to escape political oppression, economic exploitation, religious intolerance, or social injustice. Rather, the ancestors of the present African Americans were stolen from the continent of Africa, placed on ships against their wills, and transported across the Atlantic. Most of the enslaved Africans went to Brazil and Cuba, but a great portion landed in the southern colonies or states of the United States. At the height of the European slave trade, almost every nation in Europe was involved in some aspect of the enterprise. As the trade grew more profitable and European captains became more ambitious, larger ships with specially built "slave galleries" were commissioned. These galleries between the decks were no more than eighteen inches in height. Each African was allotted no more than a sixteeninch wide and five-and-a-half-foot-long space for the many weeks or months of the Atlantic crossing. Here the Africans were forced to lie down shackled together in chains fastened to staples in the deck. Where the space was two feet high, Africans often sat with legs on legs, like riders on a crowded sled. They were transported seated in this position with a once-a-day break for exercise. Needless to say, many died or went insane.

The North made the shipping of Africans its business; the South made the working of Africans its business. From 757,208 in 1790 to 4,441,830 in 1860, the African American population grew both through increased birthrates and through importation of new Africans. By 1860, slavery had been virtually eliminated in the North and West, and by the end of the Civil War in 1865, it was abolished altogether. After the war, 14 percent of the population was composed of Africans, the ancestors of the overwhelming majority living in the United States today.

During the Reconstruction period after the Civil War, African American politicians introduced legislation that provided for public education, one of the great legacies of the African American involvement in the legislative process of the nineteenth century. Education has always been seen as a major instrument in changing society and bettering the lives of African American people. Lincoln University and Cheyney University in Pennsylvania, Hampton in Virginia, and Howard University are some of the oldest institutions of learning for the African American community. Others, such as Tuskegee, Fisk, Morehouse, Spelman, and Atlanta University, are now a part of the American educational story of success and excellence.

The Great Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s ushered in a new generation of African Americans who were committed to advancing the cause of justice and equality. Rosa Parks refused to give her seat to a White man on a Montgomery city bus and created a stir that would not end until the most visible signs of racism were overthrown. Martin Luther King, Jr., emerged as the leading spokesperson and chief symbol of a people tired of racism and segregation and prepared to fight and die if necessary in order to obtain legal and human rights. Malcolm X took the battle a step further, insisting that the African American was psychologically lost as well and therefore had to find historical and cultural validity in the reclamation of the African connection. Thus, out of the crucible of the 1960s came a more vigorous movement toward full recognition of the African past and legacy. Relationships with other groups depended more and more on mutual respect rather than the African Americans acting like clients of these other groups. African Americans expressed their concern that the Jewish community had not supported affirmative action, although there was a long history of Jewish support for African American causes. Accepting the role of vanguard in the struggle to extend the protection of the American Constitution to oppressed people, African Americans made serious demands on municipal and federal officials during the civil rights movement. Voting rights were guaranteed and protected, educational segregation was made illegal, and petty discriminations against African Americans in hotels and public facilities were eradicated by the sustained protests and demonstrations of the era.

Economy

African Americans have been key components in the Economic system of the United States since its inception. The initial relationship of the African American population to the economy was based upon enslaved labor. Africans were instrumental in establishing the industrial and agrarian power of the United States. Railroads, factories, residences, and places of business were often built by enslaved Africans. Now African Americans are engaged in every sector of the American economy, though the level of integration in some sectors is less than in others. A considerable portion of the African American population works in the industrial or service sectors. Others are found in the professions as opposed to small businesses. Thus, teachers, lawyers, doctors, and managers account for the principal professional workers. These patterns are based upon previous conditions of discrimination in businesses throughout the South. Most African Americans could find employment in communities where their professional services were needed; therefore, the above-mentioned professions and others that cater to the African American population provide numerous opportunities for employment. During the past twenty years, the number of businesses opened by African Americans has begun to increase again. During the period of segregation, many businesses existing solely for the convenience of the African American population flourished. When the civil rights movement ended most of the petty discriminations and it became possible for African Americans to trade and shop at other stores and businesses, the businesses located in the African American Community suffered. There is now a greater awareness of the need to see businesses as interconnected and interdependent with the greater American society. A larger and more equitable role is being played by women in the African American Community. Indeed, many of the chief leaders in the economic development of the African American community are and have been women. Both men and women have always worked in the majority of African American homes.

Kinship, Marriage and Family

Marriage and Family. African American marriage and kinship patterns are varied, although most now conform to those of the majority of Americans. Monogamy is the overwhelming choice of most married people. Because of the rise of Islam, there is also a growing community of persons who practice polygyny. Lack of marriageable males is creating intense pressure to find new ways of maintaining traditions and parenting children. Within the African American population, one can find various arrangements that constitute Family. Thus, people may speak of family, aunts, uncles, fathers, mothers, and children without necessarily meaning that there is a genetic kinship. African Americans often say "brother" or "sister" as a way to indicate the possibility of that being the actual fact. In the period of the enslavement, individuals from the same family were often sold to different plantation masters and given the names of those owners, creating the possibility that brothers or sisters would have different surnames. Most of the names borne by African Americans are derived from the enslavement period. These are not African names but English, German, French, and Irish names, for the most part. Few African Americans can trace their ancestry back before the enslavement. Those that can do so normally have found records in the homes of the plantation owners or in the local archives of the South. African Americans love children and believe that those who have many children are fortunate. It is not uncommon to find families with more than four children.

Socialization. African American children are socialized in the home, but the church often plays an important role. Parents depend upon other family members to chastise, instruct, and discipline their children, particularly if the family Members live in proximity and the children know them well. Socialization takes place through rites and celebrations that grow out of religious or cultural observances. There is a growing interest in African child socialization patterns with the emergence of the Afrocentric movement. Parents introduce the mfundalai rites of passage at an early age in order to provide the child with historical referents. Increasingly, this rite has replaced religious rites within the African American tradition for children. Although it is called mfundalai in the Northeast, it may be referred to as the Changing Season rite in other sections of the United States. This was done in the past in the churches and schools, where children had to recite Certain details about heroines and heroes or about various aspects of African American history and culture in order to be considered mature in the culture. Many independent schools have been formed to gain control over the cultural and psychological education of African American children. A distrust of the public schools has emerged during the past twenty-five years because African Americans believe that it is difficult for their children to gain the self-confidence they need from teachers who do not understand or are insensitive to the culture. Youth clubs established along the lines of the African age-set groups are popular, as are drill teams and Formal youth groups, often called "street gangs" if they engage in delinquent behavior. These groups are, more often than not, healthy expressions of male and sometimes female socialization clubs. Church groups and community center organizations seek to channel the energies of these groups into positive socialization experiences. They are joined by the numerous Afrocentric workshops and seminars that train young people in traditional behaviors and customs.

Sociopolitical Organization

Social Organization. African Americans can be found in every stratum of the American population. However, it remains a fact that the vast majority of African Americans are outside of the social culture of the dominant society in the United States. In a little less than 130 years, African Americans who were emancipated with neither wealth nor good prospects for wealth have been able to advance in the American society against all odds. Considered determined and doggedly competitive in situations that threaten survival, African Americans have had to outrun economic disaster in every era. Discrimination against African Americans remains in private clubs, country clubs, social functions, and in some organizations. Nevertheless, African Americans have challenged hundreds of rules and regulations designed to limit choice. Among the major players in the battle for equal rights have been the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (naacp) and the Urban League. These two Organizations have advanced the social integration of the African American population on the legal and social welfare fronts. The naacp is the major civil rights organization as well as the oldest. Its history in the struggle for equality and justice is legendary. Thurgood Marshall, the first African American to sit on the Supreme Court, was one of the organization's most famous lawyers. He argued twenty-four cases before the Supreme Court as a lawyer and is credited with winning twenty-three. Although there is no official organization of the entire African American population, and no truly mass movement that speaks to the interests of the majority of the people, the naacp comes closest to being a conscience for the nation and an organized response to oppression, discrimination, and racism. At the local level, many communities have organized Committees of Elders who are responsible for various activities within the communities. These committees are usually informal and are set up to assist the communities in determining the best strategies to follow in political and legal situations. Growing out of an Afrocentric emphasis on Community and cohesiveness, the committees are usually composed of older men and women who have made special contributions to the community through achievement or philanthropy.

Political Organization. African Americans participate freely in the two dominant political parties in the nation, Democratic and Republican. Most African Americans are Democrats, a legacy from the era of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal Democrats who brought about a measure of social justice and respect for the common people. There are more than six thousand African Americans who are elected officials in the United States, including the governor of Virginia and the mayors of New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Detroit. A previous mayor of Chicago was also an African American. Concentrated in the central cities, the African American population has a strong impact on the Political processes of the older cities. The national Democratic party chairperson is of African American heritage, and some of the most prominent persons in the party are also African Americans. The Republican party has its share, though not as large, of African American politicians. There is no independent political party in the African American community, although it has remained one of the dreams of leading strategists.

Social Control and Conflict. Conflict is normally resolved in the African American community through the legal system, although there is a strong impetus to use consensus first. The idea of discussing an issue with other members of the community who might share similar values is a prevalent one within the African American society. A first recourse when problems arise is another person. This is true whether it is a personal problem or a problem with family members. Rather than calling a lawyer first, the African American is most likely to call a friend and seek advice. To some extent, the traditional African notion of retaining and maintaining harmony is at the heart of the matter. Conflicts should be resolved by people, not by law, is one of the adages.

Religion and Expressive Culture

Religious Beliefs. African Americans practice the three main monotheistic religions, as well as Eastern and African religions. The predominant faith is Christian, the second largest group of believers accept the ancestral religions of Africa—Vodun, Santeria, Myal—and a third group of followers practice Islam. Judaism and Buddhism are also practiced by some people within the community. Without understanding the complexity of religion in the African American Community, one should not venture too deeply into the nature of the culture. While the religions of Christianity and Islam seem to attract attention, the African religions are present everywhere, even in the minds of the Christians and Muslims. Thus, traditional practitioners have introduced certain rites that have become a part of the practices of the Christians and Muslims, such as African greetings and libations to ancestors. The African American is spiritually oriented; having given to the American society the spirituals, the master songs, the African American people have learned how to weave religion into everything so that there is no separation between religion and life. Many of the practitioners of the African religions use the founding of Egypt as the starting date for the calendar; thus 6290 a.f.k. (After the Founding of Kernet) is equivalent to 1990. There is no single set of beliefs to which all African Americans subscribe.

Ceremonies. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s, birthday, January 15, and Malcolm X's birthday, May 19, are the two most important days in the African American calendar. Kwanzaa, a celebration of first fruits, initiated by the philosopher Maulana Karenga, is the most joyous occasion in the African American year. Kwanzaa is observed from December 26 to January 1, and each day is named after an important virtue.

Death and Afterlife. There is no wide acceptance of Cremation in the African American culture; the majority of African Americans choose burial. Funerals are often occasions of sadness followed by festivities and joyousness. "When the Saints Go Marching In" was made famous as the song to convey African Americans to the other world by African American musicians in New Orleans. Sung and played with gusto and great vigor, the song summed up the victorious attitude of a people long used to suffering on earth.

See also Black Creoles of Louisiana, Sea Islanders

Bibliography

Asante, Molefi, and Mark Mattson (1990). The Historical and Cultural Atlas of African Americans. New York: Macmillan.

Baughman, E. Earl (1971). Black Americans. New York: Academic Press.

Frazier, Thomas R. (1988). Afro American History: Primary Sources. 2nd ed. Chicago: Dorsey Press.

Harding, Vincent (1981). There Is a River. New York: Vintage.

Henry, Charles (1990). Culture and African American Politics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

McPherson, James, et al. (1971). Blacks in America: Bibliographic Essays. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books.

MOLEFI KETE ASANTE

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

Sources

Black Population. The number of enslaved and free Africans in both New France and the Spanish borderlands was small compared to the slave population of British North America. African slaves accompanied the Spanish who explored and settled the borderlands. In 1763 the Spanish evacuated from Florida eighty-seven free blacks and over three hundred slaves. Black slavery in the Spanish borderlands of the Southwest has not yet been studied extensively. Some black servants and slaves accompanied Juan de Oñate and the colonists he brought into New Mexico in 1598. Their numbers there in the colonial era do not appear to have been great since most slaves were Indian captives, as was the case also in Texas and Arizona. According to a census in 1779 there were 20 slaves out of a population of almost 4,000. Similarly, African slaves trickled into New France, numbering about 1,000 in Canada and 450 in the Illinois Country by 1750. Louisiana had perhaps 4,000 slaves by 1732 and an even larger number by the time France ceded the territory to Spain in 1763. In contrast, of the 1.2 million colonists in British North America perhaps 250,000 were African slaves by 1750. They numbered almost 500,000 by 1776. Most were located in the colonial South, where South Carolina had a black majority by 1730, but slavery existed in the Middle Colonies and New England as well.

Catholic Colonies. The Catholic Church mightily influenced the nature of slavery and slave education in both the Spanish and French colonies. In the Spanish borderlands the church catechized and baptized black slaves as well as Indian slaves, thereby acknowledging that bondsmen possessed souls and were not mere chattel. Under church law slaves could marry, and their family life was to be respected. Masters were expected to provide minimum care for their slaves and not punish them unreasonably. In Spanish America slaves were often allowed to earn money to buy their freedom, and manumission was rather commonplace. Moreover, because of the lack of Spanish women, Spanish men married African women. These conditions are the reasons there were more free blacks than slaves in Spanish America by the end of the colonial era. Aside from some religious training, slaves were usually educated in a particular calling, whether household servant, cook, carpenter, or other artisan. Their training began in childhood and led naturally into its adult role. Literacy training for all but the elite was scarce in the Spanish borderlands, and one may assume that few blacks, slave or free, received much schooling. A similar situation prevailed in New France, where the Catholic Church was much concerned with both public and private behavior of the colonists. In 1685 Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV’s chief minister, issued a Code Noir (Black Code) for the French West Indies that also applied in Canada and Louisiana. Indians as well as blacks were enslaved in New France, but after 1700 black slaves became the norm. All slaves were to receive religious instruction and be converted to Catholicism. As in the Spanish borderlands, slave marriages were allowed and family life respected. However, frontier conditions, especially in Louisiana, kept the Code Noir from being rigorously enforced. Particularly in Louisiana, some black women who became concubines to white men won their freedom and that of their children born under the union. Such free black children might be schooled and otherwise well educated, but generally slave children seldom got any schooling and were much more apt to learn through formal or informal apprenticeship their life’s work.

New Netherland. Under Roman-Dutch law slavery was a recognized status with certain basic protections for those enslaved. There were both slaves and free blacks in New Netherland, and slavery became quite common, but a slave code was never instituted. Consequently, the status of a slave was more flexible in New Netherland than in most places of colonial America. The Dutch West India Company, which made huge profits importing Africans slaves into Brazil and Spanish America, owned most of the slaves before 1650. The Dutch West India Company was known to manumit bondsmen who served it well. Other slaves were granted “half-freedom” by the company, thus allowing them to live in family groupings and to own property while still working for the company when called upon to do so. As the white population increased in the 1650s, so did the number of privately owned slaves. Whether slave or free, most black parents taught their children the trades they knew, including housekeeping, farming, and craft. Blacks joined the Dutch Reformed Church at New Amsterdam, some of whom may well have been slaves. Whether enslaved or free, Africans were given religious instruction by the domines, though the latter sometimes suspected that slaves wanted baptism for themselves and their children to mitigate the hardship of their bondage. One might assume that few blacks got any schooling in New Netherland, but Peter Stuyvesant hired a schoolmaster for the slave children on his farm, where free blacks’ children probably also received instruction. Free black parents, on occasion, apprenticed their children to whites who promised to treat them well and bring them up in a trade. In 1664, when the English captured New Netherland, there were about five hundred slaves scattered about the colony, concentrated in and around New Amsterdam, where at least seventy-five free blacks lived and worked. Despite the hardships of slavery and racial prejudice, blacks in New Amsterdam shared a community of interest that ran from slavery to freedom in which families and neighbors assisted one another in educating the young as in so much else.

British Colonies. In the Chesapeake colonies slaves were early on taught the laborious tasks that attended growing tobacco, stripping it from the stalk, curing it, and preparing it for shipment to England. Young slaves were also introduced by their elders to household work in the master’s home and to the many arts and crafts that became an integral part of life on the larger plantations. However, literacy training was generally deemed inappropriate for blacks, given racial prejudice and their servile status. Even the issue of religious instruction aroused controversy because of the popular notion that Christians could not enslave fellow Christians. Would not conversion, symbolized by baptism, transform the infidel or heathen slave into a free Christian man or woman? That question made the catechizing of slaves problematic, especially in the colonial South. However, between 1664 and 1706 all the southern colonies, plus New York, passed laws declaring that baptism did not “alter the condition of the person as to his bondage or freedom.”

Reluctance. Despite such legislative assurance most colonial slave owners remained reluctant to give their slaves religious instruction. In 1724 the Anglican rector of Dorchester, Saint George’s Parish, in South Carolina, reported, “I have hitherto indeavored in vain to prevail with their masters to convince them of the necessity of having their slaves made Christians.” In 1740 South Carolina prohibited teaching slaves to read and write under penalty of £100. Slave and free blacks were less likely to be catechized, or even to attend white Anglican congregations, in South Carolina than elsewhere. Some blacks were also given literacy training, but that was certainly the exception. In Virginia a charity school for orphans, poor children, and Negroes opened in 1750 and operated for a few years in Saint Peter’s Parish, and there is evidence that several schools, especially after 1750, admitted at least some blacks, slave and free. Despite the law prohibiting teaching literacy skills to slaves, blacks were taught at schools in Charleston. Due largely to the work of Commissary Alexander Garden, the most significant of these was founded by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (S.P.G.) in 1743 and functioned for the next twenty years, having as many as sixty students at one time. S.P.G. missionaries scattered throughout the Carolinas and Georgia also provided religious instruction and some literacy training to slaves and free blacks on occasion. Quakers in Virginia and the Carolinas preached the Christian message to blacks and sometimes taught them literacy skills, as did various Presbyterian divines. However, without denigrating the impact upon the individuals involved, both white and black, such religious and educational activities were intermittent and affected relatively few African Americans.

New England. By the time of the American Revolution, less than 3 percent of the population of New England were African Americans; most lived in and around Boston. In the seventeenth century John Eliot was an early advocate of catechizing blacks, though there is little indication that his voice was much heeded in that regard. In 1717 Cotton Mather, who advocated more religious instruction for blacks, was a leading spirit behind the founding of a short-lived charity school for Africans and Indians in Boston. There is also evidence that some children of free blacks attended schooling with white children at various times in New England. Again, though, literacy training for blacks was quite limited and took place largely in the household rather than the classroom. A remarkable prodigy by any standard, the young Phillis Wheatley, a slave girl brought from Africa in 1761, learned both English and Latin in her master’s household and became the leading black poetess of her day.

Middle Colonies. Because of the work of the S.P.G. and the Quakers, there may have been more formal instructions of slaves and free blacks in the Middle Colonies than elsewhere in British America. In New York, Dutch Reformed domines continued their limited ministry to catechizing blacks, slave and free. Much more systematic after 1700 were Anglican efforts, especially in New York City. Under the auspices of the S.P.G., Elias Neau, a Huguenot refugee and merchant by trade, opened a catechetical school in the evening for adult slaves in 1704. Neau was an extraordinary teacher whose success at catechizing was roundly praised and prevailed against strong opposition in the wake of the slave revolt in New York City in 1712. Upon Neau’s death in 1722 William Huddleston, master of the S.P.G.-sponsored charity school, continued Neau’s work. Huddleston was followed by a succession of young Anglican clerics—James Wetmore, James Colgan, Richard Charlton, and Samuel Auchmuty. Between 1728 and 1734 John Beasley conducted an S.P.G. school for whites in Albany, where he also taught blacks reading, writing, and Christianity. Outside New York City S.P.G. ministers reported little instruction among African Americans, whether slave or free. In Pennsylvania prominent Quakers opened a school for black children in 1700. Growing Quaker opposition to slavery produced more opportunities for blacks to obtain schooling in Pennsylvania, though the extent to which this occurred is difficult to determine. In 1738 the Moravian brethren began a short-lived mission to blacks at Bethlehem. In Philadelphia the Anglican Christ’s Church began a school just for black children in 1758, as did another Anglican congregation, Saint Paul’s. The antislavery leader Anthony Benezet prodded Quakers to found a school for both black and white children in 1770.

Sources

John Calam, Parsons and Pedagogues: The S.P.G. Adventure in American Education (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971);

Lawrence A. Cremin, American Education: The Colonial Experience, 1607-1783 (New York: Harper & Row, 1970);

Donald Everett, “Free Persons of Color in Colonial Louisiana,” Louisiana History, 7 (1966): 221-250;

Philip S. Foner, History of Black Americans from Africa to the Emergence of the Cotton Kingdom (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1975);

Joyce Goodfriend, “Burghers and Blacks: The Evolution of a Slave Society at New Amsterdam,” New York History,59 (1978): 125-144;

Lorenzo Greene, The Negro in Colonial New England, 1620-1776 (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1942);

Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992);

Edgar J. McManus, Black Bondage in the North (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1973);

McManus, A History of Negro Slavery in New York (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1966);

Gary B. Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720-1840 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988);

Jean R. Soderlund, Quakers and Slavery: A Divided Spirit (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985);

Robin W. Winks, The Blacks in Canada: A History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1971);

Donald R. Wright, African-Americans in the Colonial Era: From African Origins Through the American Revolution (Arlington Heights, III.: Harlan Davidson, 1990).

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 )

Bibliography

Airhihenbuwa, C. O. (1989). "Health Education for African Americans: A Neglected Task." Health Education 20(5):9–14.

Charatz-Litt, C. (1992). "A Chronicle of Racism: The Effects of the White Medical Community on Black Health." The Journal of the National Medical Association 84:717–725.

Collier-Thomas, B., and Turner, J. (1994). "Race, Class and Color: The African American Discourse on Identity." Journal of American Ethnic History 14:5–31.

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Gould, S. J. (1996). The Mismeasure of Man. New York: Norton Press.

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African Americans

Sources

Slavery. During the early national period, most African Americans were slaves. Of more than 750, 000 black Americans in 1790, all but 60, 000 were enslaved. Their enslavement was the single most important feature of African American religious life in this period. Black Americans used religion to find some relief from slavery even as the forms of religion they practiced were shaped by this “peculiar institution.” Because they were in bondage, the religious history of African Americans is a telling example of the limitations of religious freedom in early America, as well as of its growth. For despite the limitations and deprivations slavery and racism imposed on many African Americans, a richly varied religious culture evolved that was a powerful force in black life and was just as complex as the religions of white Americans.

African Religions. Africans brought their own religions with them from Africa, although we cannot know how many traditional practices and beliefs survived or how they changed once in America. The importation of these religions continued well into the early national period. Traffic in slaves was heavy from the Revolution to 1808, when the slave trade ended, with as many Africans being imported into the United States in these years as had arrived over the entire colonial period. Although the native-born black population was quickly growing, there was a steady infusion of African traditions into the slave communities. This meant that for many blacks, religion meant not Christianity, but some variant of African folk traditions. These included ideas such as reincarnation and the veneration of ancestors shared by many West African religions, as well as a wide variety of healing practices and magical beliefs, often called conjure. Conjuring was widely and informally practiced, often including such things as herbal medicines, charms, aphrodisiacs, and witchcraft lore. Sometimes conjuring became a set of more-formal practices, as was the case with the voodoo cults of French Louisiana. But usually it was extremely flexible and open to all who could find meaning in the various practices it included. African Americans were by no means alone in having such beliefs at the center of their religious lives. Many white Americans held similar beliefs, and folk traditions were a primary area of interchange between the races. Many whites took up the healing traditions of Africa, and the African American witchcraft stories that have come down to us show the important influence of the European witchcraft traditions that easily survived the Salem witch-hunts of 1692.

Christians. The presence of African traditions did not mean there was no room for Christianity in the black community. With the emergence of the revivals in the South, Christianity made important gains in the African American population during the early national period. The emotionalism and egalitarianism of the evangelical churches of the Baptists and the Methodists appealed to many black Americans. These religions resonated with their cultural legacy from Africa and spoke to their condition as slaves or, at best, second-class free people. As the numbers of black Christians grew and the racism of European Americans persisted, African Americans began to assert themselves as independent religious leaders. Black pastors emerged, and they contributed to the growth of black Christianity with their greater willingness to pursue mission work among the black community. This process was not an easy one, especially in the South, as the example of Andrew Bryan shows.

Andrew Bryan. A former slave living in Savannah, Georgia, Bryan in the late 1780s began to preach and gathered a following among other blacks. They began to meet together to worship but were harassed by whites who feared the slaves were meeting to plot their escape. Bryan and others were imprisoned and whipped, but Bryan turned persecution into opportunity and praised the chance to suffer for Christ. Finally, in 1788 Bryan was able to organize the First African Baptist Church, with the help of a white Baptist sponsor. The church had 40 members at first and grew quickly; by 1790 there were 225 communicants and 350 other baptized members. Persecution by neighboring whites let up by 1800, but it was an uneasy truce. Despite the survival of Bryan’s church and the founding of two other black Baptist churches in Savannah in the early 1800s, slavery was a fact of life for most black congregants. Some were forbidden by their owners to become full members. Bryan’s brother Sampson assisted in his duties while remaining a slave. And Bryan himself, despite his experiences, was a slave holder. He reported to English Baptists in 1800 that he was “well provided for … having a house and a

lot … and a fifty-six acre tract of land … and eight slaves; for whose education and happiness, I am enabled thro’ mercy to provide.”

Richard Allen. In the North the gradual abolition of slavery may have made it easier for African Americans to assert religious independence, but those assertions were still shaped by the oppression of blacks by whites. Like Andrew Bryan, Richard Allen was a former slave who had converted to Christianity and become a preacher. Despite his piety and his long membership in Saint George’s Methodist Church in Philadelphia, Allen suffered the effects of discrimination against blacks. In 1787 he and two other black members of Saint George’s were forced from their knees and told to go to the church’s gallery by white members angry that blacks had presumed to leave their assigned area. Allen and his friends responded by separating from Saint George’s and founding an independent black congregation, eventually called Bethel Methodist Church. Once again separation did not mean the end of troubles. Saint George’s later tried to take control of Bethel Church’s property, leading the black congregation to sue for their rights, a legal struggle that lasted until 1816, when Allen and his group were finally successful. In the meantime Allen had initiated an even more important step in securing religious independence for black Christians. Tensions continued between white church leaders and the black Methodist congregations growing up with Allen’s help in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, and Delaware. The discord led Allen to call a meeting of the black churches in 1816. When the delegates gathered, they formed the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the first African American denomination, and elected Allen as their bishop. This move gave black Christians a stronger institutional voice and was a mark of how important these new churches were becoming to African American life and identity. Black Methodists were not alone in forming such churches. The first black Episcopal Church, established in Philadelphia in 1794, was joined in 1807 by a black Presbyterian congregation. Black Baptist churches were formed in New York City, Philadelphia, and Boston between 1804 and 1809. These institutions offered significant opportunities for leadership and public presence, and they became centers of the free black communities in these cities. They had social, economic, and political significance in addition to supporting the spiritual lives of their members. Black churches began to find their place as a key expression of African American independence and resistance to white racism, a role that continued through the civil rights movement of the twentieth century.

The “Invisible Institution.” Despite these important developments in the northern states, most African Americans lived in the South. This meant that slavery was at the heart of their religious lives, in one way or another. For some whites and blacks alike, the southern evangelical emphasis on an intensely individual conversion experience gave an African American Christian a dignity that was hard to reconcile with slave status. Within the black communities slavery prompted much soul-searching. Leading black ministers such as Richard Allen were early public opponents of slavery. They articulated religious as well as political arguments against the institution and sought to ease its effects through the missionary work they sponsored. They struggled with the theological question of why God permitted the evil of slavery to exist. In the South, where black churches were not as strongly established and where the slave codes limited the public presence of black preaching, the response to slavery took a different tack. Many slaves made Christianity into a religion that spoke to their condition. They gathered together outside the view of white missionaries and their churches, creating an “invisible institution” beyond the sight of their masters. In these meetings the slaves rejected their owners’ view that the Bible justified slavery and developed their own view that emphasized themes of freedom and deliverance by Christ, though for their safety they cast this in ambiguous terms. Slaves expressed these beliefs in the sermons they preached, the Bible stories they told each other, and, most dramatically, in the songs they sang. These spirituals are the deepest expressions of both their painful position and the hope they found in their form of Christianity. They expressed how their religion let African Americans accept their condition at the same time as they were resisting it. The performance of these songs, in dances called “shouts” that dramatized the stories they told, was much like the enthusiasm of many participants in the revivals of the era. In these songs African Amerians were participating in one of the most important developments of American religion, while at the same time making that development distinctively their own.

Sources

Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977);

Donald G. Mathews, Religion in the Old South (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977);

Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978).