African American Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
African Americans, also known as American blacks or black Americans, comprise an ethnic group in the United States whose dominant ancestry is from Sub-Saharan West Africa. Many African Americans also claim European, Native American, or Asian ancestors. A variety of names have been used for African Americans at various points in history. African Americans have been referred to as Negroes, colored, blacks, and Afro-Americans, as well as lesser-known terms, such as the 19th-century designation Anglo-African. The terms Negro and colored are now rarely used except in the South. African American, black, and to a lesser extent Afro-American, are used interchangeably today.Recent black immigrants from Africa and the islands of the Caribbean are sometimes classified as African Americans. However, these groups, especially first- and second-generation immigrants, often have cultural practices, histories, and languages that are distinct from those of African Americans born in the United States. For example, Caribbean natives may speak French, British English, or Spanish as their first language. Emigrants from Africa may speak a European language other than English or any of a number of African languages as their first language. Caribbean and African immigrants often have little knowledge or experience of the distinctive history of race relations in the United States. Thus, Caribbean and African immigrants may or may not choose to call themselves African American.
According to 2003 U.S. Census figures, some 37.1 million African Americans live in the United States, comprising 12.5 percent of the total population. At the time of the 2000 Census, 54.8 percent of African Americans lived in the South. In that year, 17.6 percent of African Americans lived in the Northeast and 18.7 percent in the Midwest, while only 8.9 percent lived in the western states. Almost 88 percent of African Americans lived in metropolitan areas in 2000. With over 2 million African American residents, New York City had the largest black urban population in the United States in 2000. Among cities of 100,000 or more, Gary, Indiana, had the highest percentage of black residents of any U.S. city in 2000, with 85 percent, followed closely by Detroit, Michigan, with 83 percent.
Like other blacks in the Western Hemisphere, the progenitors of the overwhelming majority of African Americans were brought to North America as African slaves between the 1600s and 1807 (The importation of slaves into the U.S. was outlawed in 1807). In North America, African slaves could be found primarily in the southern half of the British colonies, although slaves were also owned in the Spanish colony of Florida and the French colony of Louisiana. As chattel slaves in perpetuity, African slaves and their progeny were considered the property of their owners and had no rights.
The twin doctrines of white supremacy and its corollary, a belief in the inherent inferiority of blacks, combined with capitalism to create a powerful rationale for slavery. Nationwide, de facto and de jure segregation and discrimination based on the notion of race were accepted and effective tools to enforce and entrench a pervasive system of white power and privilege and black oppression and disadvantage.
After the American Revolution (1775-1783), changing economic conditions resulted in the decline and end of what limited slavery there was in the North. Conversely, the rapid spread of cotton cultivation in the South encouraged the growth of slavery there. By 1860, 3.8 million slaves accounted for one third of the total population of the southern states.
Contrary to popular belief, however, not all blacks in America were slaves. By the year 1860, well over 11% of the total black population in the U.S. was free. There were approximately 500,000 free blacks who lived throughout the United States, with slightly more than half residing in the South.
After having completed the labor required of them by their masters, some slaves were permitted to perform work for hire. In this way, over time some were able to purchase their freedom. Once free, many then continued to save their incomes in order to purchase their entire families' freedom. Others sometimes were manumitted, usually upon the death of their masters, and still others escaped to freedom. The Underground Railroad was a series of well-traveled escape routes to the North along which people sympathetic to the anti-slavery cause provided refuge, food and directions to safeguard and speed fugitive slaves on their journey North.
In the North, many free blacks joined the abolitionist cause, and tens of thousands of free black men and fugitive slaves enthustiastically joined the ranks of the Union Army after the Civil War began.
In 1863, during the American Civil War (1861-1865), U.S. president Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing slaves in the southern states at war with the North. The 13th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, ratified in 1865, outlawed slavery in the United States. In 1868, the 14th Amendment granted full U.S. citizenship to African-Americans. The 15th amendment, ratified in 1870, extended the right to vote to black males.
After the Union victory over the Confederacy, a brief period of southern black progress, called Reconstruction, followed. From 1865 to 1877, under protection of Union troops, some strides were made toward equal rights for African-Americans. Southern blacks began to vote, were elected to the U.S. Congress, held local public office, established schools and built towns and businesses. However, in the face of mounting violence and intimidation directed at blacks as well as whites sympathetic to their cause, the U.S. government retreated from its pledge to guarantee constitutional protections to freedmen and women. When President Rutherford B. Hayes withdrew Union troops from the South in 1877, white southerners acted quickly to reverse the groundbreaking advances of Reconstruction, and white mob violence against African-Americans intensified. Seeking to return blacks to their subordinate status under slavery, white supremacists resurrected de facto barriers and enacted new laws to further marginalize blacks in southern society, limiting, among other things, black access to transportation, schools, restaurants and other public facilities. Although slavery had been abolished, most southern blacks for decades continued to struggle in grinding poverty as agricultural, domestic and menial laborers. Many were sharecroppers, their economic status little changed by Emancipation.
After its founding in 1867, the Ku Klux Klan, a clandestine organization sworn to perpetuate white supremacy, became a power in the South and beyond, eventually establishing a northern headquarters in Greenfield, Indiana. The Klan employed lynching, cross burnings and other forms of terrorism, violence and intimidation. Lynchings escalated dramatically in a period that marked the bleakest era in U.S. black-white race relations. It was reported that nearly 3,100 black men and women were lynched from 1889 to 1930. Of the tens of thousands of lynchers and onlookers during this period, it is reported that less than 50 whites were ever indicted for their crimes, and only four sentenced.
In response to these and other setbacks, in the summer of 1905, W.E.B. DuBois and 28 other prominent, African-American men met secretly at Niagara Falls, Ontario. There, they produced a manifesto calling for an end to racial discrimination, full civil liberties for African-Americans and recognition of human brotherhood. The organization they established came to be called the Niagara Movement. After the notorious Springfield, Illinois race riot of 1908, a group of concerned whites joined with the leadership of the Niagara Movement and formed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) a year later, in 1909. Under the leadership of DuBois, the NAACP mounted legal challenges to segregation and lobbied legislatures on behalf of black Americans. During this period, African Americans continued to create independent community and institutional lives for themselves. They established schools, churches, social welfare institutions, banks, newspapers and small businesses to serve the needs of their communities.
During the first half of the 20th century, the largest internal population shift in U.S. history took place. During the Great Migration, over 5 million African Americans moved from the South to northern cities, the West and Midwest in hopes of finding better jobs and greater equality. In the 1920s, the concentration of blacks in urban areas led to the cultural movement known as the Harlem Renaissance. Black intellectual and cultural circles were influenced by thinkers such as Aime Cesaire and Leopold Sedar Senghor, who celebrated blackness, or negritude; and arts and letters flourished. Writers Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay and Richard Wright; and artists Lois Mailou Jones, William H. Johnson, Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence and Archibald Motley gained prominence. A new generation of powerful African American political leaders and organizations also came to the fore. Membership in the NAACP rapidly increased as it mounted an anti-lynching campaign in reaction to ongoing southern white violence against blacks. Marcus Garvey's UNIA, the Nation of Islam and union organizer A. Philip Randolph's Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters all were established during this period and found support among urban African Americans.
In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a landmark decision in the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. This decision led to the dismantling of legal segregation in all areas of southern life, from schools to restaurants to public restrooms. The ruling also brought new momentum to the Civil Rights Movement. Boycotts against segregated public transportation systems sprang up in the South, the most notable of which was the Montgomery bus boycott. Civil rights groups organized other boycotts, voter registration campaigns, freedom rides and other nonviolent direct action, such as marches, pickets and sit-ins to mobilize around issues of equal access and voting rights.
Southern segregationists fought back with steadily escalating physical violence, bombings and intimidation; and southern law enforcement responded with batons, electric cattle prods, fire hoses, attack dogs and mass arrests.
Perhaps, the high point of the Civil Rights Movement was the 1963 "March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom," which brought more than 200,000 marchers to the grounds of the Lincoln Memorial and the National Mall in Washington, D.C., to speak out for an end to southern racial violence and police brutality, equal opportunity in employment, equal access in education and public accommodations. The organizers of the march were the "Big Six" of the Civil Rights Movement: labor organizer and initiator of the march, A. Phillip Randolph; Roy Wilkins of the NAACP; Whitney Young, Jr., of the National Urban League; Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC); James Farmer of the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE); and John Lewis of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Also active behind the scenes and sharing the podium with Dr. King was Dorothy Height, head of the National Council of Negro Women. It was at this event, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial that King delivered his historic "I Have a Dream" speech. This march 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.
The "Mississippi Freedom Summer" of 1964 brought thousands of idealistic youth, black and white, to the state to run "freedom schools," to teach basic literacy, history and civics. Other volunteers were involved in voter registration drives. The season was marked by harassment, intimidation and violence directed at Civil Rights workers and their host families. The disappearance of three youth, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner in Philadelphia, Mississippi, captured the attention of the nation. Six weeks later, searchers found the savagely beaten body of Chaney, a black man, in a muddy dam alongside the remains of his two white companions, who had been shot to death. Outrage at the escalating injustices of the "Mississippi Blood Summer," as it by then had come to be known, and at the brutality of the murders brought about the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Act struck down barriers to black enfranchisement and was the capstone to more than a decade of major civil rights legislation.
By this time, African Americans who questioned the effectiveness of nonviolent protest had gained a greater voice. More militant black leaders, such as Malcolm X of the Nation of Islam and Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panther Party, called for blacks to defend themselves, using violence, if necessary. From the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, the Black Power movement urged African Americans to look to Africa for inspiration and emphasized black solidarity, rather than integration.
Politically and economically, blacks have made substantial strides in the post-civil rights era. Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson, who ran for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 1984 and 1988, brought unprecedented support and leverage to blacks in politics. In 1989, Virginia became the first state in U.S. history to elect a black governor, Douglas Wilder. In 1992 Carol Moseley-Braun of Illinois became the first black woman elected to the U.S. Senate. There were 8,936 black officeholders in the United States in 2000, showing a net increase of 7,467 since 1970. In 2001 there were 484 mayors and 38 members of Congress. The Congressional Black Caucus serves as a political bloc in Congress for issues relating to African Americans. The appointment of blacks to high federal offices—including Colin Powell, Chairman of the U.S. Armed Forces Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1989-1993; Dr. Condoleezza Rice, Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, 2001-present; Dr. Ron Brown, Secretary of Commerce, 1993-1996); and Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas—also demonstrates the increasing power of blacks in the political arena.
Economically, blacks also have benefited from the advances made during the Civil Rights era. The racial disparity in poverty rates has narrowed slightly. The black middle class has grown substantially. In 2000, some 47 percent of African Americans owned their homes. However, African Americans are still underrepresented in government and employment. In 1999, median income of African American households was $27,910 compared to $44,366 of non-Hispanic whites.
There is, however, a growing African-American underclass, undereducated, unemployed and marginalized. In times of economic hardship for the nation, African-Americans suffer disproportionately from job loss and underemployment, with the black underclass being hardest hit. The phrase "last hired and first fired" is reflected in the Bureau of Labor Statistics unemployment figures. Nationwide, the September 2004 unemployment rate for blacks was 10.3 percent, more than twice that of their white counterparts, who were unemployed at the rate of 4.7 percent. In early 2004, black male unemployment in New York City soared to 48.2 percent. At the time of this writing, that figure is slightly higher at approximately 50 percent. Nearly one-fourth of the African-American population lives in poverty, a rate three times that of white Americans. In 2000, 19.1 percent of blacks lived below poverty level, as compared to 6.9 percent of whites.
The income gap between black and white families also continues to widen. Employed blacks earn only 77 percent of the wages of whites in comparable jobs, down from 82 percent in 1975. In 2000, only 16.6 percent of blacks 25 years and older earned bachelor’s or higher degrees, in contrast to 28.1 percent of whites. Although rates of births to unwed mothers among both blacks and whites have risen since the 1950s, the rate of such births among African Americans is three times the rate of whites.
Black Americans have shorter life expectancies than the national average and often higher mortality rates for certain disease conditions. They suffer disproportionately from heart disease, acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), hypertension, stroke, and diabetes. Blacks also require a disproportionately higher number of organ and tissue transplants, but the black donor rate is lower than that for whites. Lower-income blacks’ lack of access to quality health care; a general and well-documented pattern of race-based discrimination in health care delivery; as well as deep-seated distrust of the medical establishment occasioned, in part, by the Tuskegee Syphilis Study all are contributing factors to these trends.
Black experiences with and attitudes towards the criminal justice system differ markedly from whites. Although the of violent crime is dropping among blacks, more than one million African American men are currently in jail or prison. Homicide remains the leading cause of death among black men between the ages of 15 and 34. African Americans distrust the criminal justice system much more than do whites. In 1991, the brutal beating of an unarmed black motorist, Rodney King, by four Los Angeles police officers was captured on videotape. An all-white jury later acquitted the police officers, sparking riots in Los Angeles and protests around the country. Ten years later in June 2001, thousands of protesters in Cincinnati's Over-the-Rhine community gathered to protest what they charged was an ongoing pattern of police brutality that culminated in the death of an unarmed teenager a few weeks before. Issues of unnecessary or excessive force, police harassment, police corruption, racial profiling, suspicious deaths of black detainees while in police custody, and illegal detainment and interrogation are common problems that perpetuate black distrust of, and antipaty toward, public law enforcement.
African American culture is both part of and distinct from American culture. From their earliest presence in North America, Africans and African Americans have contributed literature, art, agricultural skills, foods, clothing styles, music, and language to American culture.
Distinctive patterns of language use among African Americans arose as creative responses to the hardships imposed on the African American community. Slave-owners often intentionally mixed people who spoke many different African languages to discourage communication in any language other than English on their plantations. Moreover, many whites were unwilling to allow blacks to learn proper English. One response to these conditions was the development of pidgins, simplified mixtures of two or more languages that speakers of different languages could use to communicate with each other. Some of these pidgins eventually became fully developed Creole languages spoken by certain groups as a native language. Significant numbers of people still speak some of these Creole languages, notably Gullah on the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia. African American Vernacular English, also called black English or Ebonics, is a dialect of English spoken by many African Americans that shares some features with Creole languages.
The cultivation and use of many agricultural products, such as yams, peanuts, rice, okra, grits, watermelon, indigo dyes, and cotton, can be traced to African and African American influences. African American foods reflect creative responses to racial and economic oppression. Under slavery, African Americans were not allowed to eat better cuts of meat, and after Emancipation many often were too poor to afford them. “Soul food,” a hearty cuisine commonly associated with African Americans in the South, makes creative use of inexpensive products. Pig intestines are boiled and sometimes battered and fried to make “chitterlings,” or "chitlins." Ham hocks and neck bones provide seasoning to soups; beans and boiled turnip, collard and mustard greens. Other common foods, such as fried chicken, cornbread and “hoppin’ John,” (black-eyed peas and rice), are prepared simply.
Enslaved Africans brought their own religious beliefs and practices with them to the New World, but slaveowners mounted a systematic and sometimes brutal campaign to de-Africanize them and strip them of their mostly animist or Muslim beliefs and indoctrinate them with Christian religious dogma. African religious practices were considered "heathen" and strictly forbidden, and drums were outlawed for fear that the talking drum would be used by slaves to communicate over distances to plot rebellions.
Christianity was used as a tool to subjugate slaves and make them easier to control. Whites emphasized passages of the Bible that urged obedience to one's master and piety. However, slaves seized upon and held dear the story of Moses leading the "children of Israel" out of Egypt to the "Promised Land," and Old Testament notions of a fierce, warrior God who protected and avenged his "chosen people." They crafted these and other elements of Christian dogma, Protestant and Catholic, into a kind of syncretic liberation theology that predated the Second Vatican Council by centuries. The version of Christianity embraced by African slaves included such elements of West African religions as ring shouts; call and response; shape-shifting spirits, magic; and the existence of the Kalunga Line, the unseen line beneath bodies of water where one could commune with the spirits of deceased ancestors, and related river cults. The practice of some captives snatching up their children and hurling themselves into the sea during the Middle Passage is regarded by some as not simply suicide, but an act of fear and desperation committed in the hope that, in death, they would join their ancestors at "home on the other side."
Many of these African influences persist today in mainstream African-American religious worship: the "amen corner," praise shouts, "gettin' happy," and gospel music; altered states of consciousness and speaking in tongues; and the resonance of the Jordan River in spirituals and liturgical imagery, including river and full-immersion baptism. The persistence of Islamic religious practice and culture can be seen in the continuing custom among older women of the Georgia Sea Islands and elsewhere in the South to cover their heads with hats or scarves during worship. The so-called "hat queens" of the Church of God in Christ, women known for their striking millinery in worship, also may be, at least in part, a continuation of this Islamic tradtion.
Richard Allen was a former slave and an influential deacon and elder at the integrated and affluent St. George's Methodist Church in Philadelphia. In 1787, Allen founded the all-black Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church after St. George's white members, increasingly uncomfortable with the large number of blacks the charismatic Allen had attracted to the church, began relegating black worshipers to the church balcony. Over time, growing numbers of African-American congregations withdrew from the Methodist Episcopal Church. In 1816, representatives of these congregations convened to establish the African Methodist Episcopal Church, consecrating Allen is their bishop. The AME Church became the first national black Church in U.S. history.
Historically, separate churches have enabled blacks to worship in their own culturally distinct ways and assume positions of leadership denied to them in mainstream America. In addition to their religious role, African American churches traditionally have provided political leadership and served social welfare functions, such as providing for the indigent and establishing schools, orphanages and other social service institutions.
The comment by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, that, "...eleven o'clock Sunday morning is the most segregated hour, and Sunday school is still the most segregated school of the week," remains true today. The polarization of American society along racial lines is, perhaps, starkest when it comes to religious worship.
Today, the vast majority of African Americans practice some form of Protestantism, with evangelical churches, such as the pentecostal COGIC; A.M.E, Baptist and Methodist churches accounting for the majority of church membership. Because of the persistence of separation and separatist choice, and because of their fundamentally more African styles of worship, generally, African Americans historically have established and maintained churches separate from those of whites.
A number of African Americans are Black Muslims, or members of the Nation of Islam, a quasi-religious organization with a black nationalist liberation theology and a philosophy of economic and educational self-reliance, founded by W.D. Fard and Elijah Poole in 1935. Poole, who changed his name to Elijah Muhammad, soon emerged as the leader of the Nation of Islam. Elijah Muhammad established temples in Detroit, Chicago, and other northern cities. The Nation of Islam reached the height of its power in the 1960's and early 1970s, steadily declining in popularity after the assassination of Malcolm X. Today, Louis Farrakhan leads the Nation of Islam. Other African American Muslims worship in individual masjids with a black nationalist bent, but an increasing number of African American Muslims worship independently of these groups as adherents of mainstream Islam.
Other African Americans continue the centuries old practice of Voodoo, or Vodun, a heavily syncretic melding of elements of Catholicism and the Yoruba and Akan religions of Nigeria and Ghana, the points of origin of many of their ancestors. Still others have begun to explore and embrace Akan and Yoruba in their purer forms. Vodun in the U.S. in the past has been most prevalent in New Orleans among adherents who were nominally Catholic. But now free to express their spirituality within a distinctly African context, many practitioners of Vodun have dropped the cloak of Catholicism completely. As with Yoruba and Akan, there are Vodun devotees in various cities nationwide. Most notably, in cities with large black and Hispanic populations, there is sometimes a confluence of these three religions in expatriate African and African-American communities and in the Latino community, with the practice of Santeria, the Hispanic version of Vodun.
In 1926 African American scholar Carter Godwin Woodson organized the first Negro History week, to focus attention on previously neglected aspects of the black experience in the United States. Woodson chose February to coincide with the birthdays of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, as well as the anniversary of the founding of the NAACP. Renamed Black History Week in 1972, the observance was extended to become Black History Month in 1976. During February, lectures, exhibitions, banquets, cultural events, and television and radio programming celebrate the achievements of African Americans. Since 1978 the U.S. Postal Service has participated in Black History Month by issuing commemorative stamps honoring notable African Americans.
Within days of the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., Congressman John Conyers of Detroit introduced a bill calling for a national holiday honoring Dr. King. Throughout the 1970's and early 1980's, various states enacted such a holiday,but Congress did not.
Finally, in 1983 the U.S. Congress established a national holiday in honor of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. The holiday is observed annually on the third Monday in January, a day that falls on or near King’s birthday of January 15. Like Black History Month, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day emphasizes educational and cultural observances, such as lectures and exhibits about King’s life and philosophy. As in many states, the political price for getting support for a holiday in honor of Dr. King was the merging of the holidays honoring George Washington, the military leader of the American revolution, and Abraham Lincoln, the issuer of the Emancipation Proclamation during the Civil War, in a generic Presidents Day.
African American scholar and activist "Maulana" Ron Karenga invented the festival of Kwanzaa in 1966, as an alternative to the increasing commercialization of Christmas. Derived from the harvest rituals of Africans, Kwanzaa is observed each year from December 26 through January 1. Participants in Kwanzaa celebrations affirm their African heritage by drinking from a unity cup; lighting red, black, and green candles; exchanging heritage symbols, such as African art; and recounting the lives of people who struggled for African and African American freedom. People who celebrate Kwanzaa hope to strengthen the black community by adhering to seven guiding principles, designated by terms from the Swahili language: umoja (unity), kujichagulia (self-determination), ujima (collective work and responsibility), ujamaa (cooperative economics), nia (purpose), kuumba (creativity), and imani’ (faith).
This is an Article on African American. Page Contains Information, Facts Details or Explanation Guide About African American African American experience
Early history
The Civil War, Reconstruction and its aftermath
The Great Migration and the Harlem Renaissance
The Civil Rights Movement
Political empowerment
Contemporary issues
Economics and employment
Health
The criminal justice system
Culture
Language
Agriculture and food
Religion, past and present
Holidays
See also
External links