African-American culture

• 1. Introduction

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  African-American culture carries within it the imprint of the entire African continent. Dozens of ethnic groups, drawn from West and Central Africa across the 16th and 17th centuries, arrived in the Americas stripped of language, family, and homeland. What emerged from that crucible was not a diminished thing. It was something entirely new: a culture forged through collective survival, resistance, and creative reinvention. How did a people forbidden from reading and writing preserve history across generations? How did musical forms born in slavery become the United States' most successful cultural exports? And why does this culture continue to shape every corner of American life, from courthouse steps to concert halls? The answers begin with the earliest days of American slavery, and they reach forward to the present moment.

• 2. Roots Under Pressure

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  From the earliest days of American slavery in the 17th century, slaveholders attempted to strip enslaved people of their African identities. They deliberately separated people who spoke the same languages and suppressed independent cultural organization, aware that shared culture could fuel resistance. Slave rebellions took place not only in the United States but also in Brazil, Haiti, and the Dutch Guyanas, and slaveholders throughout the Americas understood the threat that cultural solidarity represented.

  Yet the effort to erase African culture largely failed. The physical isolation of enslaved communities, paradoxically, helped preserve it. In the New World, the societal marginalization of enslaved Africans and later their free descendants allowed significant elements of traditional culture to survive. Various African traditions provided the foundation for spiritual practices. Enslaved individuals blended ancestral beliefs with Christianity to create new forms of worship that were distinctly their own.

  Most African Americans today are descendants of people who lived within the boundaries of the present United States, and their ancestry is primarily West African and coastal Central African, with varying amounts of Western European and Native American heritage. West Central and Central Africans, who were primarily placed in field-based work in the lower southern colonies, brought with them a relatively homogenous culture that played an early defining role in shaping what would become African-American culture. Later, West African influence expressed itself more prominently as well. This layered foundation is what the broader culture built upon.

• 3. The Spoken Word

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  Because slaveholders feared that literacy would inspire emancipatory ambitions, they limited or prohibited education for enslaved people. African-based oral traditions stepped into that void and became the primary means of preserving history, values, and cultural knowledge. This was consistent with the griot practices found in many native African cultures, traditions that did not rely on the written word to transmit what mattered most.

  Folktales gave African Americans the means to inspire and educate one another. Other oral practices developed alongside them: the dozens, signifying, trash talk, rhyming, semantic inversion, and wordplay, many of which eventually found their way into mainstream American popular culture and became international phenomena. Spoken-word poetry drew on the same techniques as African-American preachers, including movement, rhythm, and audience participation.

  Rap music from the 1980s onward has been widely cited as a direct extension of African oral culture. The migration of African-American communities northward placed strain on the retention of these traditions, and anthropologists and sociologists feared that the southern folk aspects of Black popular culture were at risk of being lost. That fear proved unfounded. The oral tradition proved durable enough to cross geography, generating new forms as it traveled.

• 4. Music's Long Arc

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  "Lift Every Voice and Sing" was written by James Weldon Johnson and John Rosamond Johnson in 1900 to be performed at a birthday celebration for Abraham Lincoln. The NAACP adopted it as the "Negro National Anthem" in 1919, and it remains sung in African-American churches, schools, and organizations alongside or in place of "The Star-Spangled Banner".

  African-American music is rooted in the polyrhythmic traditions of ethnic groups in West Africa, the Sahel, and Central and Southern Africa. Its distinctive features, including call and response, syncopation, improvisation, blue notes, and complex multi-part harmony, reflect that inheritance. After drums were outlawed following the Stono Rebellion in South Carolina, African Americans created hamboning, a practice of patting the body to produce rhythm. The banjo was the first African-derived instrument built and played in the United States.

  By the early 20th century, aided by radio and the phonograph, ragtime, jazz, blues, and swing crossed from African-American communities into mainstream American culture and then overseas. The 1920s became known as the Jazz Age. House music emerged from Black communities in Chicago in the 1980s. Lil Nas X's "Old Town Road" achieved historic chart success by merging hip-hop with country music. As of November 2018, Rhythm and Blues was the leading genre listened to by African Americans at 62 percent, followed by Hip Hop at 39 percent, Gospel at 26 percent, Rap at 21 percent, Soul and Funk at 19 percent, and Jazz at 18 percent.

• 5. Renaissance to Black Arts

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  Alain Locke pioneered the first major public recognition of African-American culture during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s. Authors Zora Neale Hurston and Nella Larsen, poets Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Countee Cullen wrote works describing the African-American experience to audiences that had previously ignored it. Artists such as William H. Johnson, Aaron Douglas, and Palmer Hayden created visual art that placed African Americans at the center. Two major political movements took shape in the same period: the Universal Negro Improvement Association and the NAACP, along with the Nation of Islam, which began in the early 1930s.

  The Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s followed the non-violent Civil Rights Movement with a more militant posture and a focus on racial pride rather than integration. It sparked what became known as the Black Arts Movement, a second renaissance in literary and artistic expression. Recording artists Nina Simone with "Young, Gifted and Black" and The Impressions with "Keep On Pushing" shaped and reflected the growing political consciousness. Among the most prominent writers of that period were poet Nikki Giovanni; poet and publisher Don L. Lee, who later became known as Haki Madhubuti; and Leroi Jones, who later became known as Amiri Baraka.

  In 1967, Melvin Charles and Gleason T. Jackson created the Black American Heritage Flag, with black representing pride and race, red representing the blood shed for freedom and dignity, and gold representing intellect, prosperity, and peace. Natural hairstyles such as the afro and African clothing such as the dashiki gained popularity in this period, as the movement encouraged personal pride and political awareness together.

• 6. Literature and Visual Art

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  African-American literature traces back to the oral traditions of enslaved Africans, and its earliest written voices emerged in the 18th century. Phillis Wheatley and Olaudah Equiano were among the first writers to set the experience of slavery onto the page. During the Civil Rights Movement, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Gwendolyn Brooks wrote about racial segregation and oppression. Later works, including Alex Haley's Roots: The Saga of an American Family, Alice Walker's The Color Purple, and Toni Morrison's Beloved, which earned Morrison the Nobel Prize, achieved both bestselling and award-winning status.

  Visual art followed a parallel course. Between the 17th century and the early 19th century, art in enslaved communities took the form of small drums, quilts, wrought-iron figures, and ceramic vessels in the southern United States; objects that shared clear similarities with crafts from West and Central Africa. In 19th-century rural Georgia, Harriet Powers made quilts now considered among the finest examples of Southern quilting from that era. Later, the women of Gee's Bend developed a bold quilting style rooted in African-American tradition but with a geometric simplicity that developed separately and yet resembled both Amish quilts and modern art.

  During the Great Depression, the Works Progress Administration created new opportunities for African-American artists. In the 1950s and 1960s, 27 African-American artists from Fort Pierce, Florida, known as The Highwaymen, created images of the Florida landscape and sold roughly 50,000 of them directly from the trunks of their cars. Rediscovered in the mid-1990s, their original pieces now fetch thousands of dollars. Sculptor Martin Puryear received a 30-year retrospective of his work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in November 2007.

• 7. Food, Faith, and Celebration

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  Gumbo is described as "an invention of enslaved Africans and African Americans" in Louisiana, with no written recipe surviving because the dish traveled entirely through oral tradition. Soul food more broadly reflects creative responses to racial and economic oppression. Under slavery, African Americans were not permitted the better cuts of meat, and after emancipation many could not afford them. Less desirable cuts and vegetables were prepared into dishes shared in churches as an act of both sustenance and community. Rice common to the Lowcountry of South Carolina and Georgia was imported from Madagascar. Okra came from Ethiopia and Eritrea. Many agricultural products fundamental to the United States economy, including yams, peanuts, sorghum, indigo dyes, and cotton, trace directly to African influences.

  The spiritual life of African-American culture is anchored primarily in Black Protestant Christianity, which accounts for 59 percent of the community, with Evangelical Protestant at 15 percent. The AME Church, founded by Richard Allen in 1787, was the first organized African-American denomination. The National Baptist Convention, which formed from the merger of three smaller Baptist groups after the Civil War, is the largest African-American Christian denomination and the second largest Baptist denomination in the United States. A 2008 Pew Forum survey found that 12 percent of African Americans described themselves as religiously unaffiliated in some form.

  Kwanzaa was invented in 1966 by scholar and activist Maulana Ron Karenga as an alternative to what he saw as the increasing commercialization of Christmas. Observed from December 26 through January 1, the festival derives from African harvest rituals. Participants drink from a unity cup, light red, black, and green candles, and exchange heritage symbols. Juneteenth, observed on June 19, commemorates the official reading of the Emancipation Proclamation in Texas on that date in 1865; it was recognized as a federal holiday in 2021 and first observed as such on June 19 of that year.