African Americans

• 1. Introduction

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  African Americans are the third-largest racial and ethnic group in the United States, numbering nearly 43 million people as of July 2024. That figure represents roughly 12.63 percent of the total population. But statistics alone cannot capture the weight of a history that began in chains, survived a century of legal terror, and produced a cultural legacy that reshaped the entire world.

  The story reaches back to the early 16th century, when the first Africans arrived on the shores of what would become the United States. It runs through four million enslaved people liberated only after a civil war. It passes through the systematic disenfranchisement of Jim Crow, the forced migrations that reshaped American cities, and a civil rights movement that transformed the law of the land.

  Along the way, African Americans built churches, schools, banks, and businesses under conditions designed to prevent exactly that. They created musical forms, from gospel to blues to jazz to hip hop, that became the foundation of American popular music. They produced figures who broke through to the highest offices in the land. And they continued to navigate racial and economic disparities that persist into the 21st century.

  How did a people brought here against their will come to shape the country so fundamentally? What were the mechanisms of oppression that held them back, and what were the forces that pushed through? Those questions are at the heart of what follows.

• 2. Arrival and Early Enslavement

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  Africans accompanied Juan Ponce de León on his 1513 voyage to what would become Spanish Florida, making their presence in North America older than many histories acknowledge. The enslaved explorer Esteban arrived in Florida with the Narváez expedition in 1528 and traveled through Spanish Texas and the Southwest before the journey ended in Mexico.

  The first recorded Christian marriage in what is now the continental United States was between Luisa de Abrego, a free Black domestic servant from Seville, and Miguel Rodríguez, a White Segovian conquistador, in 1565 in St. Augustine.

  The first recorded Africans in English America arrived in Jamestown, Virginia, via Cape Comfort in August 1619. Described as "20 and odd negroes," they came as indentured servants, not slaves. An indentured servant, who could be White or Black, worked for several years without wages, typically four to seven. Unlike the enslaved, they were freed after their term expired, and their children did not inherit their status. Upon release they received a year's supply of corn, double sets of clothing, tools, and a small cash payment called freedom dues.

  By the 1640s and 1650s, several African families had purchased their freedom and owned farms around Jamestown, and some had grown wealthy enough by colonial standards to purchase indentured servants of their own. That window closed quickly. In 1640, the Virginia General Court sentenced John Punch, a Negro, to lifetime servitude for running away, the earliest documentation of lifetime slavery in the court record.

  Legal architecture then locked the system in place. Massachusetts became the first English colony to legally recognize slavery in 1641. In 1662, Virginia passed a law making children of enslaved women take the status of the mother, overriding common law. This principle, known as partus sequitur ventrum, meant that every child born to an enslaved woman was enslaved from birth. By 1699, Virginia ordered the deportation of all free Blacks, effectively defining every African who remained as a slave.

  In 1704, South Carolina became the first colony to organize slave patrols, groups of armed White men formed to detect, monitor, and crush any organized meetings among enslaved people. Those patrols would evolve and persist for generations.

• 3. The Machinery of the Slave Trade

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  The vast majority of people transported across the Atlantic were from Central and West African ethnic groups. They had been captured in coastal raids by European traders, or seized and sold by West African slave traders, or by half-European merchant princes. Many brought skills as artisans, farmers, and warriors.

  By 1775, Africans made up 20 percent of the population in the American colonies, the second-largest ethnic group after English Americans. By 1860, the enslaved Black population of the United States had grown to between 3.5 and 4.4 million, with an additional 488,000 to 500,000 Black people living free, though under legislated limits and what Henry Clay described as unconquerable prejudice from Whites.

  Slaves not only represented a financial investment for their owners but were central to producing cotton, the country's most valuable export. Enslaved people built prominent structures including the United States Capitol and the White House.

  By 1815, the domestic slave trade had become a major economic activity. Historians estimate that nearly one million individuals were subjected to this forced internal migration, sometimes called a new Middle Passage. The historian Ira Berlin described this internal movement as the central event in the life of an enslaved person between the American Revolution and the Civil War. Berlin concluded that whether people were directly uprooted or lived in fear that their families would be taken, the massive deportation traumatized Black people throughout the country. Countless individuals lost their connections to families and clans, and many ethnic Africans lost knowledge of their tribal origins.

  In 1863, photographs of Wilson Chinn, a branded slave from Louisiana, and the image of Gordon with his scarred back, became among the earliest and most powerful uses of photography to document the brutality of slavery. The newborn medium made visible what words alone had struggled to convey.

• 4. Revolution, Resistance, and Reconstruction

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  During the 1770s, Africans both enslaved and free fought on both sides of the American Revolution. Activists in the Patriot cause included James Armistead, Prince Whipple, and Oliver Cromwell. Around 15,000 Black Loyalists left with the British after the war, most ending up as free Black people in England or its colonies, including communities that became the Black Nova Scotians and the Sierra Leone Creole people.

  In Spanish Louisiana, Governor Bernardo de Gálvez organized free Black men into militia companies that fought in the 1779 battle in which Spain captured Baton Rouge from the British. Gálvez pledged to free anyone seriously wounded in his service, and promised low coartación prices for those with lesser wounds. Later, Governor Francisco Luis Héctor, baron of Carondelet, doubled the number of free Black men in those militias, creating two additional companies.

  The Constitution that emerged from the revolution carried slavery within it. Article I, Section 2, Clause 3, the so-called three-fifths compromise, counted enslaved people as three-fifths of a person for apportionment purposes. Congress could not act against the slave trade until Section 9, Clause 1's restrictions expired, and passed the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves only in 1807. Fugitive slave laws passed in 1793 and again in 1850 made it a federal crime to help any person who had escaped enslavement.

  In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing slaves in Confederate-held territory. Union troops enforced it as they advanced, with Texas being the last state to be reached, in 1865. Slavery in border states persisted until the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified in December 1865. The Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 gave Black people citizenship, and the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870 gave Black men the right to vote.

  During Reconstruction, African Americans rapidly built congregations, schools, and civic associations. That progress was reversed when Southern states enacted Jim Crow laws by the late 1890s, segregating every aspect of public life and disenfranchising Black voters. The Supreme Court's 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson upheld segregation under the doctrine of separate but equal. The period that followed has been called the nadir of American race relations.

• 5. The Great Migration and Civil Rights

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  The Red Summer of 1919 saw hundreds of deaths and higher casualties across more than three dozen cities, including the Chicago race riot and the Omaha race riot, as the rapid influx of Black migrants into northern cities met White hostility.

  At the 1900 Hampton Negro Conference, Reverend Matthew Anderson observed that in many avenues of wage earning, the lines are more rigidly drawn in the North than in the South. Black workers were routed to the lowest-status jobs with the least mobility. In housing, violence, restrictive covenants, redlining, and racial steering all combined to contain the growing Black urban population.

  Despite those conditions, African Americans in northern cities built new institutions: the Urban League, the NAACP, Black-oriented churches and newspapers, and intellectual movements including the Harlem Renaissance and the Chicago Black Renaissance. The Cotton Club in Harlem allowed Black performers such as Duke Ellington to play, but only for White audiences.

  A 1955 lynching catalyzed the civil rights movement in a way that no legal argument had managed. Emmett Till, a 14-year-old from Chicago visiting relatives in Money, Mississippi, was killed for allegedly whistling at a White woman. He had been badly beaten, one eye gouged out, and he was shot in the head. His mother's decision to hold an open-casket funeral mobilized the Black community nationwide. The two defendants were acquitted by an all-White jury. One hundred days after Till's murder, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus in Alabama; Parks later said that the photograph of Till's disfigured face in the casket was in her mind when she made that choice.

  The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom put pressure on presidents Kennedy and Johnson. Johnson pushed through the Civil Rights Act of 1964, banning discrimination in public accommodations, employment, and labor unions. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 followed, expanding federal authority to protect voter registration and elections. The Black Power movement, which ran from 1966 to 1975, then pushed further, toward economic and political self-sufficiency.

  The economic numbers document what the movement was fighting against. Average Black income stood at 54 percent of White worker income in 1947. In 1959, the median income for White families was $5,600, compared with $2,900 for non-White families. By 1965 to 1969, Black family income rose from 54 to 60 percent of White family income, and the share of Black families earning under $3,000 a year fell from 41 percent in 1960 to 23 percent in 1968.

• 6. Political and Economic Ground Gained

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  In 1967, Thurgood Marshall became the first African American Supreme Court Justice. In 1968, Shirley Chisholm became the first Black woman elected to the US Congress. In 1989, Douglas Wilder became the first African American elected governor in US history. In 1992, Carol Moseley-Braun of Illinois became the first African American woman elected to the US Senate.

  In 2000, there were 8,936 Black officeholders in the United States, a net increase of 7,467 since 1970. In 2001, there were 484 Black mayors. On the 4th of November 2008, Democratic Senator Barack Obama, the son of a White American mother and a Kenyan father, defeated Republican Senator John McCain to become the first African American elected president, receiving at least 95 percent of the African American vote. He was reelected on the 6th of November 2012. In 2021, Kamala Harris became the first woman, the first African American, and the first Asian American to serve as Vice President. In June 2021, Juneteenth, which commemorates the end of slavery, became a federal holiday.

  In the economic sphere, African Americans had a combined buying power of over $1.6 trillion as of 2021, a 171 percent increase over their buying power in 2000. Yet that growth lagged significantly behind American Latinos at 288 percent and Asian Americans at 383 percent in the same period. African American net worth had actually shrunk 14 percent in the previous year despite strong growth in property prices.

  In the first quarter of 2021-45.1 percent of African Americans owned their homes, compared to 65.3 percent of all Americans. The African American homeownership rate peaked at 49.7 percent in 2004. In 2005, employed Blacks earned 65 percent of the wages of Whites, down from 82 percent in 1975.

  The public sector remains the single most important source of employment for African Americans. During 2008 to 2010-21.2 percent of all Black workers were public employees, compared with 16.3 percent of non-Black workers. For both men and women, median wages for Black employees are significantly higher in the public sector than in other industries, which partly explains why cuts to government employment fall disproportionately on the Black workforce.

• 7. Culture, Religion, and Identity

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  African Americans have contributed to virtually every form of American popular music. Gospel, blues, jazz, rock and roll, R&B, soul, funk, disco, hip hop, and house all trace their origins either partially or entirely to the African American community. That influence has traveled far beyond American borders.

  Religion has been central to African American life since the earliest congregations were established by freed slaves at the end of the 17th century. The largest Protestant denomination among African Americans is the Baptists, distributed across four denominations, the largest being the National Baptist Convention, USA. The second-largest grouping is the Methodists, primarily in the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church.

  Historically, between 15 and 30 percent of enslaved Africans brought to the Americas were Muslims, but most were converted to Christianity during slavery. During the 20th century, some African Americans converted to Islam, often through Black nationalist organizations. The Nation of Islam, founded in the 1930s, attracted at least 20,000 people by 1963, with prominent members including Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali. Malcolm X later left the Nation, made the pilgrimage to Mecca, and is considered the first person to start a movement among African Americans toward mainstream Islam. In 1975, Warith Deen Mohammed guided the majority of Nation members toward orthodox Islam after taking control following his father Elijah Muhammad's death.

  A 2025 Pew Research Center study found that the share of Black adults identifying as Christian had fallen from 85 percent in 2007 to 73 percent in 2021, though Black adults remain more likely than US adults overall to identify as Christian, at 73 percent versus 62 percent. Among those who retain religious affiliation, 58 percent say religion is very important in their lives, and 64 percent pray daily, rates that are higher than for other racial and ethnic groups.

  "Lift Every Voice and Sing" has been called the Black national anthem. The NAACP dubbed it the Negro national anthem as early as 1919, recognizing its power in voicing both a cry for liberation and a statement of affirmation. It is a living artifact of the long arc this history has traced, from the colonies of the 16th century to the present.