Short answers, pulled from the story.
As of the 1st of July 2024, the US Census Bureau estimated the overall Black population at 42,951,595, representing approximately 12.63 percent of the total US population. African Americans are the third-largest racial and ethnic group in the country, following White Americans and Hispanic and Latino Americans.
Africans accompanied Juan Ponce de León's 1513 voyage to Spanish Florida, and the enslaved explorer Esteban arrived with the Narváez expedition in 1528. The first recorded Africans in English America arrived in Jamestown, Virginia in August 1619, described as "20 and odd negroes" who came as indentured servants.
The Great Migration was the movement of more than six million Black people from the South to the North and West, spanning from the 1890s through the 1970s. African Americans left to escape Jim Crow laws, racial violence, and severe economic restriction, seeking better job opportunities and living conditions in northern and western cities.
Emmett Till, a 14-year-old from Chicago, was killed in 1955 while visiting relatives in Money, Mississippi. His mother's decision to hold an open-casket funeral mobilized the Black community nationwide. Rosa Parks later said the photograph of Till's disfigured face in the casket was in her mind when she refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus one hundred days after his murder.
Thurgood Marshall became the first African American Supreme Court Justice in 1967. Shirley Chisholm became the first Black woman elected to Congress in 1968. Barack Obama became the first African American president on the 4th of November 2008, winning at least 95 percent of the African American vote. In 2021, Kamala Harris became the first woman, the first African American, and the first Asian American to serve as Vice President.
In the first quarter of 2021-45.1 percent of African Americans owned their homes, compared to 65.3 percent of all Americans. The rate peaked at 49.7 percent in 2004 and has remained relatively flat since the 1970s despite increases in anti-discrimination housing laws.