African History is American History.

African-American history started with the arrival of Africans to North America in the 16th and 17th centuries. Former Spanish slaves who had been freed by Francis Drake arrived aboard the Golden Hind at New Albion in California in 1579.

The European colonization of the Americas, and the resulting Atlantic slave trade, led to a large-scale transportation of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic; of the roughly 10–12 million Africans who were sold by the Barbary slave trade, either to European slavery or to servitude in the Americas, approximately 388,000 landed in North America.

After arriving in various European colonies in North America, the enslaved Africans were sold to white colonists, primarily to work on cash crop plantations. A group of enslaved Africans arrived in the English Virginia Colony in 1619, marking the beginning of slavery in the colonial history of the United States; by 1776, roughly 20% of the British North American population was of African descent, both free and enslaved.

Due to post-slavery (and some during slavery) African American achievements, however, contemporary African American history can now highlight a more positive direction.

The history of African-Americans has been a paradox of incredible triumph in the face of tremendous human tragedy.

Black history in the United States is a rich and varied chronicle of slavery and liberty, oppression and progress, segregation and achievement. Though captive and free Africans were likely present in the Americas by the 1400s, the kidnapped men, women and children from Africa who were sold first to European colonists in 1619, and later to American citizens, became symbolic of the early years of Black history in the United States.

The fate of enslaved people in the United States divided the nation during the Civil War. And after the war, the racist legacy of slavery persisted, spurring movements of resistance, including the Underground Railroad, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Selma to Montgomery March, and, later, the Black Lives Matter movement. Through it all, Black leaders, artists and writers have emerged to shape the character and identity of a nation.

African Americans, one of the largest of the many ethnic groups in the United States. African Americans are mainly of African ancestry, but many have non-Black ancestors as well.

African Americans are largely the descendants of enslaved people who were brought from their African homelands by force to work in the New World. Their rights were severely limited, and they were long denied a rightful share in the economic, social, and political progress of the United States. Nevertheless, African Americans have made basic and lasting contributions to American history and culture.

At the turn of the 21st century, more than half the country’s more than 36 million African Americans lived in the South; 10 Southern states had Black populations exceeding 1 million. African Americans were also concentrated in the largest cities, with more than 2 million living in New York City and more than 1 million in Chicago. Detroit, Philadelphia, and Houston each had a Black population between 500,000 and 1 million.

Names and labels.

As Americans of African descent reached each new plateau in their struggle for equality, they reevaluated their identity. The slaveholder labels of black and negro (Spanish for “black”) were offensive, so they chose the euphemism coloured when they were freed. Capitalized, Negro became acceptable during the migration to the North for factory jobs.

Afro-American was adopted by civil rights activists to underline pride in their ancestral homeland, but Black—the symbol of power and revolution—proved more popular. All these terms are still reflected in the names of dozens of organizations. To reestablish “cultural integrity” in the late 1980s, Jesse Jackson proposed African American, which—unlike some “baseless” colour label—proclaims kinship with a historical land base. In the 21st century the terms Black and African American both were widely used.

The early history of Blacks in the Americas.

Africans assisted the Spanish and the Portuguese during their early exploration of the Americas. In the 16th century some Black explorers settled in the Mississippi valley and in the areas that became South Carolina and New Mexico. The most celebrated Black explorer of the Americas was Estéban, who traveled through the Southwest in the 1530s.

The uninterrupted history of Blacks in the United States began in 1619, when 20 Africans were landed in the English colony of Virginia. These individuals were not enslaved people but indentured servants—persons bound to an employer for a limited number of years—as were many of the settlers of European descent (whites). By the 1660s large numbers of Africans were being brought to the English colonies. In 1790 Blacks numbered almost 760,000 and made up nearly one-fifth of the population of the United States.

Attempts to hold Black servants beyond the normal term of indenture culminated in the legal establishment of Black chattel slavery in Virginia in 1661 and in all the English colonies by 1750. Black people were easily distinguished by their skin colour (the result of evolutionary pressures favouring the presence in the skin of a dark pigment called melanin in populations in equatorial climates) from the rest of the populace, making them highly visible targets for enslavement.

Moreover, the development of the belief that they were an “inferior” race with a “heathen” culture made it easier for whites to rationalize Black slavery. Enslaved Blacks were put to work clearing and cultivating the farmlands of the New World.

Of an estimated 10 million Africans brought to the Americas by the trade of enslaved peoples, about 430,000 came to the territory of what is now the United States. The overwhelming majority were taken from the area of western Africa stretching from present-day Senegal to Angola, where political and social organization as well as art, music, and dance were highly advanced.

On or near the African coast had emerged the major kingdoms of Oyo, Ashanti, Benin, Dahomey, and the Congo. In the Sudanese interior had arisen the empires of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai; the Hausa states; and the states of Kanem-Bornu. Such African cities as Djenné and Timbuktu, both now in Mali, were at one time major commercial and educational centres.

With the increasing profitability of slavery and the trade of enslaved peoples, some Africans themselves sold captives to the European traders. The captured Africans were generally marched in chains to the coast and crowded into the holds of slave ships for the dreaded Middle Passage across the Atlantic Ocean, usually to the West Indies.

Shock, disease, and suicide were responsible for the deaths of at least one-sixth during the crossing. In the West Indies the survivors were “seasoned”—taught the rudiments of English and drilled in the routines and discipline of plantation life.

Slavery in the United States.

Black slaves played a major, though unwilling and generally unrewarded, role in laying the economic foundations of the United States—especially in the South. Blacks also played a leading role in the development of Southern speech, folklore, music, dancing, and food, blending the cultural traits of their African homelands with those of Europe. During the 17th and 18th centuries, African and African American (those born in the New World) slaves worked mainly on the tobacco, rice, and indigo plantations of the Southern seaboard. Eventually slavery became rooted in the South’s huge cotton and sugar plantations.

Although Northern businessmen made great fortunes from the trade of enslaved peoples and from investments in Southern plantations, slavery was never widespread in the North.

Crispus Attucks, a former slave killed in the Boston Massacre of 1770, was the first martyr to the cause of American independence from Great Britain. During the American Revolution, some 5,000 Black soldiers and sailors fought on the American side. After the Revolution, some slaves—particularly former soldiers—were freed, and the Northern states abolished slavery.

But with the ratification of the Constitution of the United States, in 1788, slavery became more firmly entrenched than ever in the South. The Constitution counted a slave as three-fifths of a person for purposes of taxation and representation in Congress (thus increasing the number of representatives from slave states), prohibited Congress from abolishing the African trade of enslaved peoples before 1808, and provided for the return of fugitive slaves to their owners.

In 1807 Pres. Thomas Jefferson signed legislation that officially ended the African trade of enslaved peoples beginning in January 1808. However, this act did not presage the end of slavery. Rather, it spurred the growth of the domestic trade of enslaved peoples in the United States, especially as a source of labour for the new cotton lands in the Southern interior.

Increasingly, the supply of slaves came to be supplemented by the practice of “slave breeding,” in which women slaves were raped as early as age 13 and forced to give birth as often as possible.

Laws known as the slave codes regulated the slave system to promote absolute control by the master and complete submission by the slave. Under these laws the slave was chattel—a piece of property and a source of labour that could be bought and sold like an animal. The slave was allowed no stable family life and little privacy.

Slaves were prohibited by law from learning to read or write. The meek slave received tokens of favour from the master, and the rebellious slave provoked brutal punishment. A social hierarchy among the plantation slaves also helped keep them divided. At the top were the house slaves; next in rank were the skilled artisans; at the bottom were the vast majority of field hands, who bore the brunt of the harsh plantation life.

With this tight control there were few successful slave revolts. Slave plots were invariably betrayed. The revolt led by Cato in Stono, South Carolina, in 1739 took the lives of 30 whites. A slave revolt in New York City in 1741 caused heavy property damage. Some slave revolts, such as those of Gabriel Prosser (Richmond, Virginia, in 1800) and Denmark Vesey (Charleston, South Carolina, in 1822), were elaborately planned.

The slave revolt that was perhaps most frightening to slave owners was the one led by Nat Turner (Southampton, Virginia, in 1831). Before Turner and his co-conspirators were captured, they had killed about 60 whites.

Individual resistance by slaves took such forms as mothers killing their newborn children to save them from slavery, the poisoning of slave owners, the destruction of machinery and crops, arson, malingering, and running away. Thousands of runaway slaves were led to freedom in the North and in Canada by Black and white abolitionists who organized a network of secret routes and hiding places that came to be known as the Underground Railroad.

One of the greatest heroes of the Underground Railroad was Harriet Tubman, a former slave who on numerous trips to the South helped hundreds of slaves escape to freedom.