Demography

The approximately 150 million people of African descent who inhabit the Americas are concentrated on the coastal rim of Brazil, the eastern and southern parts of the United States, and the Caribbean region, helping to create a geographical pattern characterized by some people as the "Black Atlantic." Yet important concentrations of these peoples are found throughout the Western Hemisphere, the result of a continuing dispersion or movement of black peoples that continues in the twenty-first century.

With relatively few exceptions, blacks in the Americas are descendants of the slaves transported from Africa in the transatlantic slave trade that lasted from the early sixteenth century to the late nineteenth century. The origins of this trade were nearly simultaneous with the exploration and conquest of the Americas by Europeans. Blacks actively resisted enslavement from the start; as early as 1505, African slaves escaped into the mountains of what is now the Dominican Republic, thereby establishing a free black presence in the Americas that predates the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock by more than a century.

In 1969 the historian Philip Curtin, having researched censuses, ship records, and similar documents, estimated that a total of 9.6 million African slaves were brought across the Atlantic in the four centuries of the slave trade. Subsequent academic work has revised these figures, usually upwards. Taken altogether, these studies reveal the broad contours of the Atlantic slave trade. The overwhelming majority of slaves were from West and West Central African, from Senegal south to Angola. The main destination for African slaves (nearly 40%) was Brazil. African supply patterns and the labor requirements and economic cycles for tropical and subtropical plantation staple crops in the Americas led to an uneven flow of slaves, rather than a continuous movement. The overall numbers of slaves brought to particular regions did not necessarily predict population totals of later years; very high slave imports into the Caribbean, for example, were almost always reduced by the tragically high slave death rates in the region.

Liberation and emancipation movements of the nineteenth century, from Haiti's successful rebellion of 1803 to the last slave emancipations in Brazil and Cuba in the

1880s, led to increased mobility. Since that time, black individuals, families, and groups, have moved from country to city, from one region to another, and internationally. These movements defy simple classification, reflecting at once coercion, opportunity, dissatisfaction, and personal choice, and they have complicated explanations for subsequent black population patterns in the Western Hemisphere and elsewhere.

A further complication is the impossibility of designating a common meaning of who is and is not "black." The intermixing of those of pure African descent with others in the Americas has led to an almost infinite gradation of skin colors and other physical attributes among individuals, so that an individual considered "black" in the United States may not be so designated in Jamaica or Brazil. These varying attributes or features also lead to difficulties and ambiguities in self-identity that often change over time, greatly complicating the tasks of census takers.

North America

The 2000 population census of the United States enumerated 281 million people, of whom 36.4 million (nearly 13%) considered themselves black. Among black Americans, 55 percent resided in the South, 18 percent in both the Midwest and the East, and 9 percent in the West. In the District of Columbia, 61 percent of the residents were black, and the states with the highest black percentages were Mississippi (37%), Louisiana (33%), South Carolina (30%), Georgia (29%), and Maryland (29%).

Whereas the prototypical black American of the early twenty-first century lives in a southern town or small city, the greatest concentrations are in the large urban areas. The 2000 census counted 2.3 million black people (accounting for 28.5% of the city's total population) in New York, while Chicago had over one million black residents. Among the largest cities in the country, Detroit (82%), Philadelphia (44%), and Chicago (37%) had the largest percentages of black people. In Baltimore, Memphis, Washington D.C., and New Orleans over 60 percent of the population was black.

The census data gathered in 2000 contributed to a national statistical profile showing that blacks (36% of males were under eighteen) were younger than non-Hispanic whites (24%). At the other end of the age spectrum, only 7 percent of black males lived past age 65 and were therefore able to collect full social security benefits, whereas their non-Hispanic white counterparts were twice as likely to live beyond 65. A lower percentage of black families were headed by married couples than whites; 43 percent of black families were headed by a single woman and 9 percent of black families headed by a single man. An estimated 32.9 million people in the United States lived below the poverty line, among them 23 percent of blacks (8.1 million) and 8 percent of whites (15.3 million).

The statistical contours of the black American populace delineated by the 2000 census data were, of course, the cumulative result of decades of demographic history. The United States population census of 1790, which showed a total human population of almost four million, enumerated over 757,000 African Americans, roughly 19 percent of the total. And although studies of British colonial demographic history are complicated by conflicting and unreliable data, scholars agree that, beginning around the 1730s, the black population of British North America (later the United States) showed a high rate of natural increase, especially when compared with the British West Indies.

Roughly 95 percent of the blacks enumerated in the 1790 census were slaves, about the same percentage as in 1810, by which time the black population of the United States had nearly doubled to 1,378,000. This dramatic rise came from a combination of slave imports (until the trade was abolished in 1807) and natural increases. In the next half century, as plantation cotton came to dominate the U.S. Gulf Coast states all the way to Texas, the black slave population grew accordingly. In 1870, the year of the first U.S. census taken since slave emancipation in 1862, the black American population had grown to 4,880,000.

This figure grew in the next half century, and in 1920 there were 10,463,000 blacks in the United States. Yet because of the remarkably high immigration rates of Europeans into the United States in the latter part of the nineteenth century, the percentage of African Americans in 1920 was just under 10 percent, down from the nearly 20 percent in colonial days. The early and middle decades of the twentieth century saw an expansion of black America into the country's heartland. From border states such as Kentucky and Missouri, African Americans began migrating north in substantial numbers during World War I, followed by larger numbers from the Deep South in subsequent decades to Chicago, Detroit, and other industrial cities. The overall percentages of blacks in the country's total population increased somewhat by the end of the century; the 1980 U.S. census enumerated a total of 226.5 million Americans, of whom 26.5 million (11.7%) were black; there were 30 million African Americans (12.1%) among the overall total of 249 million in 1990; and in 2000, the census counted almost 35 million African Americans (12.3%) among the 281 million U.S. residents.

Black immigrants coming to the United States have augmented natural population increases in the latter decades of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Notably, Caribbean peoples have come in the thousands—some to Miami and other large cities, but the great majority to New York. Perhaps two million black people of Caribbean descent inhabited the New York area at the start of the twenty-first century, but any such figure is an estimate because many have come without formal documentation and because there is much back-and-forth movement between the Caribbean and New York.

Perhaps one million Canadians are black. The 2001 census, enumerating nearly 30 million Canadians, included "Black" as a category, but it also included categories such as "Jamaican," "Haitian," and "West Indian," which include black people. Blacks have lived in Canada since colonial days. Their numbers were increased by the Underground Railroad traffic in the 1800s during U.S. slavery. In the latter decades of the twentieth century, thousands of black West Indian immigrants settled mainly in the eastern part of Canada, with English-speakers concentrated in Ontario and French-speakers in Quebec. A few tens of thousands of noticeably black peoples live in the coastal areas of Mexico's Vera Cruz state and also in the Pacific "Costa Chica" zone of Guerrero and Oaxaca states. An important presence of descendants of black slaves in Mexico has been reduced, however, apparently through absorption into the larger population.

The Caribbean and Central America

Probably two-thirds of the 35 to 40 million people inhabiting the Caribbean region in the early twenty-first century are of African descent. The region's relatively small population does not square with the estimate that 50 percent of all African slaves brought to the Western Hemisphere during the four centuries of the slave trade came to the Caribbean. The slaves' high death rates in the region, and their subsequent inability to sustain their own populations, came from overwork, an alien disease environment,

and precarious food sources that often depended upon imports.

Although most people in the Caribbean are black and consider themselves so, the region is characterized by ethnic and racial complexity. An estimated 62 percent of Cuba's 11 million people are black or Mulatto. Well over 90 percent of the 2.5 million Jamaicans and 7 million Haitians are black. The 11 percent black population among the nearly 9 million people in the Dominican Republic, Haiti's neighbor on the eastern side of the island of Hispaniola, does not include the nation's very high percentage of mixed-blood peoples. Only 8 percent of the 3.8 million Puerto Ricans counted in the 2000 U.S. population census considered themselves "Black," yet an additional 11 percent were of "some other race." Among the islands of the eastern Caribbean, most people are black—on some of the smallest islands almost every person could be classified as Afro-Caribbean. Yet among the 1.5 million Trinidadians, only half are of African ancestry; this is because of the presence of hundreds of thousands who descend from indentured laborers from India.

Caribbean demography is further complicated by high rates of migration. Since British slave emancipation in the 1830s, black men and women have traveled away—permanently and temporarily—in quest of better opportunities elsewhere, to improve conditions at home, as an antidote to the boredom of insularity, and for many other reasons. The probable majority of these movements have been within the Caribbean itself, resulting in enclaves of outsiders residing on nearly every island. But Caribbean migrants have moved internationally as well. When attractive prospects elsewhere have combined with economic distress at home, these migrations have taken on sizable proportions. Tens of thousands of black West Indians traveled to work on the Panama Canal in the early twentieth century and to Cuban and Dominican sugar cane fields thereafter. Similar numbers have migrated to Europe since the mid-twentieth century.

The historically recent movements of black peoples from the Caribbean to New York and elsewhere in the United States has reinforced an earlier African presence that is centuries old and has greatly affected American culture. Early-twentieth-century labor and cultural movements (such as the Harlem Renaissance) were heavily influenced by black Caribbean migrants. Music and sport in the United States in the late twentieth century would be very different without black West Indians. Important personalities all along the black American political spectrum—including Harry Belafonte, Shirley Chisholm, Louis Farrakhan, Malcolm X, and Colin Powell—trace their heritage to the Caribbean.

Caribbean migrants have also traveled to work destinations in Central America, both as individuals and as groups of laborers. In some cases they have encountered black descendants of earlier enslavement there. The resulting black presence in Central America is most noticeable along the Caribbean rim of the isthmus. In any case, population estimates of Afro–Central American peoples are contested and unreliable. Conservative estimates for other black populations in the region are Honduras: 110,000; Nicaragua: 379,000; Costa Rica: 103,000; and Panama: 379,000.

South America

As one would assume from historical slavery estimates, by far the largest numbers of Afro–South Americans are Brazilian. Brazil's estimated total population of 182 million in 2003 included 6 percent black and 38 percent of mixed black ancestry—percentages that many consider too low, owing to a widespread desire to be considered white for purposes of socioeconomic advancement. Like most people in the country, Afro-Brazilians are mainly urban dwellers, and high percentages of black people reside in the enormous cities of southern Brazil; an estimated 25 percent of the 18 million people residing in São Paolo are of African descent, and 66 percent of Rio de Janeiro's 10 million people are black. In the same way that many U.S. blacks continue to inhabit the nineteenth-century tobacco and cotton zones of the U.S. South, many Afro-Brazilians reside in the former sugar cane zones in the northeastern part of the country. Bahia (or Salvador), the principal city in that region, and Brazil's third largest urban area at 2.5 million people, is estimated to have a black populace nearing 80 percent.

Brazilian demographic data show a distressing disparity in well-being between whites and blacks, and thereby run counter to exuberant claims that the country is a "racial democracy." Infant mortality rates among white Brazilians are 37 per 1000 live births, but 62 per 1,000 for Afro-Brazilians; white life expectancy is 66 years, while for blacks it is 59; and literacy rates are 85 percent for whites but only 65 percent for blacks. Brazilian education, income, and employment figures show similar disparities between blacks and whites.

After Brazil, Colombia (with an estimated total population of 41 million in 2001) has the largest black populace in South America. An estimated 7 million (18% of all Colombians) are of African ancestry, and probably twothirds of them are mixed-blood peoples. Black Colombians descend from slaves brought by the Spaniards to work in colonial mines and plantations. Early in the twenty-first century, Afro-Colombians inhabit the nation's Caribbean coastal areas and the Cauca and Magdalena river valleys farther south. In both Venezuela (where 2.3 million people of black ancestry reside) and Ecuador (1.2 million blacks), people of African ancestry make up about 3 to 5 percent of national populations. An estimated 750,000 blacks live in Peru, and smaller numbers of Afro–South Americans are found elsewhere on the continent.

A numerically tiny yet culturally significant black group lives in the rainforests of northern South America. The so-called "Bush Negro" peoples of interior Suriname inhabit river settlements inland from the coastal zone of the small country. Numbering only a few thousand, they are direct descendants of slaves who escaped from Dutch colonial plantations. Their material culture is thus heavily influenced by their African heritage, and their oral history tells of their escapes from plantation control and a centuries-long resistance to European domination. These small African village settlements along the rapids of Suriname's rivers are thereby a living microcosm of the historical sweep of a black African presence in the Western Hemisphere for five hundred years.

See also African Diaspora; Identity and Race in the United States; Migration; Mortality and Morbidity, Latin America and the Caribbean; Mortality and Morbidity, United States; Slave Trade

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bonham c. richardson (2005)