African American

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

African American




Frederick Douglass • Michael Jordan • Harriet Tubman
Condoleezza Rice • M. L. King, Jr. • Colin Powell
Malcolm X • Barack Obama • W. E. B. Du Bois
Oprah Winfrey • Miles Davis • Ronald McNair
Total population

African American
37,334,570[1]
12.38% of the total U.S. population
Non-Hispanic Black
36,657,280[1]
12.15% of the U.S. population
Black Hispanic
677,290[1]
0.23% of the U.S. population

Regions with significant populations
United States
(predominantly Southern) 38,662,569 [2][3]
Sierra Leone
(called Krios) 340,000
Liberia
(called Americo-Liberians) 150,000
United Kingdom
(African American Britons) 30,000
Nova Scotia, Canada
(Black Nova Scotians) 19,230
Languages
American English · African American Vernacular English · minorities of Spanish · French · indigenous African languages
Religion
Christianity (mostly Protestantism or Roman Catholicism) · Islam · others
Related ethnic groups

African-Native Americans · Americo-Liberian · Afro-Latin American

---

African Americans or Black Americans are citizens or residents of the United States who have origins in any of the black populations of Africa.[4] In the United States, the term is generally used for Americans with at least partial Sub-Saharan African ancestry. Most African Americans are the direct descendants of captive Africans who survived the slavery era within the boundaries of the present United States, although some are—or are descended from—voluntary immigrants from African, Caribbean, Central American or South American nations.[5] African Americans make up the single largest racial minority in the United States.[6]

History

The first recorded Africans in British North America (including most of the future United States) arrived in 1619 as indentured servants who settled in Jamestown, Virginia. They for many years were similar in legal position to poor English indenturees, who traded several years labor in exchange for passage to America.[7] Africans could legally raise crops and cattle to purchase their freedom.[8] They raised families, marrying other Africans and sometimes intermarrying with Native Americans or English settlers.[9] By the 1640s and 1650s, several African families owned farms around Jamestown and some became wealthy by colonial standards. The popular conception of a race-based slave system did not fully develop until the 1700s. During the 1770s Africans, both enslaved and free, helped rebellious English colonists secure American Independence by defeating the British in the American Revolution.[10] Africans and Englishmen fought side by side and were fully integrated.[11] James Armistead, an African American, played a large part in making possible the 1781 Yorktown victory that established the United States as an independent nation.[12] Other prominent African Americans were Prince Whipple and Oliver Cromwell, who are both depicted in the front of the boat in George Washington's famous 1776 Crossing the Delaware portrait. By 1860, there were 3.5 million enslaved Africans in the United States due to the Atlantic slave trade, and another 500,000 Africans lived free across the country.[13] In 1863, during the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. The proclamation declared all slaves in states that had seceded from the Union were free.[14] Advancing Union troops enforced the proclamation with Texas being the last state to be emancipated in 1865.[15] While the post-war reconstruction era was initially a time of progress for African Americans, in the late 1890s, Southern states enacted Jim Crow laws to enforce racial segregation and disenfranchisement.[16] Most African Americans followed the Jim Crow laws and assumed a posture of humility and servility to prevent becoming victims of racially motivated violence. To maintain self-esteem and dignity, middle-class African Americans created their own schools, churches, banks, social clubs, and other businesses.[17]

In the last decade of the nineteenth century, racially discriminatory laws and racial violence aimed at African Americans began to mushroom in the United States. These discriminatory acts included racial segregation—upheld by the United States Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896[18]—which was legally mandated by southern states and nationwide at the local level of government, voter suppression or disenfranchisement in the southern states, denial of economic opportunity or resources nationwide, and private acts of violence and mass racial violence aimed at African Americans unhindered or encouraged by government authorities. The desperate conditions of African Americans in the South that sparked the Great Migration of the early 20th century,[19] combined with a growing African-American intellectual and cultural elite in the Northern United States, led to a movement to fight violence and discrimination against African Americans that, like abolitionism before it, crossed racial lines. The Civil Rights Movement aimed at abolishing public and private acts of racial discrimination against African Americans between 1954 to 1968, particularly in the southern United States. By 1966, the emergence of the Black Power movement, which lasted from 1966 to 1975, expanded upon the aims of the Civil Rights Movement to include racial dignity, economic and political self-sufficiency, and freedom from white authority. The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and the conditions which brought it into being are credited with putting pressure on President John F. Kennedy and then Lyndon B. Johnson that culminated in the passage the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that banned discrimination in public accommodations, employment, and labor unions.[20]

In 2008, Democratic Sen. Barack Obama defeated Republican Sen. John McCain becoming the first African-American elected to the office of President of the United States, and making Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, and daughters Malia and Sasha the first African American First Family of the United States. Ninety-five percent of African American voters voted for Obama.[21]

Demographics

In 1790, when the first U.S. Census was taken, Africans (including slaves and free people) numbered about 760,000—about 19.3% of the population. In 1860, at the start of the American Civil War, the African-American population increased to 4.4 million, but the percentage rate dropped to 14% of the overall population of the country. The vast majority were slaves, with only 488,000 counted as "freemen". By 1900, the black population had doubled and reached 8.8 million.