Short answers, pulled from the story.
African-American culture emerged from the violent rupture of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, where hundreds of distinct ethnic groups from West and Central Africa were forcibly amalgamated into a single, oppressed population on the North American continent.
When slaveholders outlawed the use of drums after the Stono Rebellion in South Carolina during the 1700s, enslaved Africans developed hamboning, a percussive art form involving the rhythmic patting of their own bodies to create complex musical patterns.
The first of these organized denominations, the AME Church, was founded by Richard Allen in 1787, and the National Baptist Convention, the largest African-American Christian denomination, was formed after the Civil War.
The cultural calendar of African Americans is marked by holidays such as Juneteenth, which commemorates the end of slavery in the U.S. on the 19th of June 1865, and Kwanzaa, a festival invented by Maulana Ron Karenga in 1966 to celebrate African heritage and the importance of family and community.
The Black Arts Movement also saw the creation of the Black American Heritage Flag in 1967 by Melvin Charles and Gleason T Jackson, a symbol of ethnic pride that remains in use today.