African American History
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African-American history is the part of American history that looks at the history of African Americans or Black Americans. Of the 10.7 million Africans who were brought to the Americas until the 1880s, 450 thousand were shipped to what is now the United States.
Slavery
African origins
Most African Americans are descended from Africans who were brought directly from Africa to America and were forced into slavery. The future slaves were originally captured in African wars or raids and transported in the Atlantic slave trade. African Americans are descended from various ethnic groups, mostly from ethnic groups that lived in Western and Central Africa, including the Sahel. A smaller number of African Americans are descended from ethnic groups that lived in Eastern and Southeastern Africa.
The major ethnic groups that the enslaved Africans belonged to included the Hausa, Bakongo, Igbo, Mandé, Wolof, Akan, Fon, Yoruba, and Makua, among many others. Although these different groups varied in customs, religious theology and language, what they had in common was a way of life which was different from that of the Europeans. Originally, a majority of the future slaves came from these villages and societies, however, once they were sent to the Americas and enslaved, these different peoples had European standards and beliefs forced upon them, causing them to do away with tribal differences and forge a new history and culture that was a creolization of their common past, present, and European culture. Slaves who belonged to specific African ethnic groups were more sought after and became more dominant in numbers than slaves who belonged to other African ethnic groups in certain regions of what later became the United States.
Early African-American History
In 1619, the first African slaves were brought to Point Comfort, today's Fort Monroe in Hampton, Virginia, 30 miles downstream from Jamestown, Virginia. The English settlers treated these captives as indentured servants and released them after a number of years. This practice was gradually replaced by the system of race-based slavery used in the Caribbean. As servants were freed, they became competition for resources. Additionally, released servants had to be replaced.
This, combined with the still ambiguous nature of the social status of Blacks and the difficulty in using any other group of people as forced servants, led to the relegation of Blacks into slavery. Massachusetts was the first colony to legalize slavery in 1641. Other colonies followed suit by passing laws that passed slavery on to the children of slaves and making non-Christian imported servants slaves for life.
Africans first arrived in 1619, when a Dutch ship sold 19 blacks to Englishmen at Point Comfort (today's Fort Monroe), thirty miles downstream from Jamestown, Virginia. In all, about 10–12 million Africans were transported to the Western Hemisphere. The vast majority of these people came from that stretch of the West African coast extending from present-day Senegal to Angola; a small percentage came from Madagascar and East Africa. Only 5% (about 500,000) went to the American colonies. The vast majority went to the West Indies and Brazil, where they died quickly. Demographic conditions were highly favorable in the American colonies, with less disease, more food, some medical care, and lighter work loads than prevailed in the sugar fields.
At first the Africans in the South were outnumbered by white indentured servants, who came voluntarily from Britain. They avoided the plantations. With the vast amount of good land and the shortage of laborers, plantation owners turned to lifetime slaves who worked for their keep but were not paid wages and could not easily escape. Slaves had some legal rights (it was a crime to kill a slave, and a few whites were hanged for it.) Generally the slaves developed their own family system, religion and customs in the slave quarters with little interference from owners, who were only interested in work outputs. Before the 1660s, the North American mainland colonies were expanding, but still fairly small in size and did not have a great demand for labour, so the colonists did not import large numbers of African slaves at this point.
Black Population in the 1700s
By 1700 there were 25,000 black slaves in the North American mainland colonies, about 10% of the population. Some had been shipped directly from Africa (most of them were from 1518 to the 1850s), but initially, very often they had been shipped via the West Indies in small cargoes after spending time working on the islands. At the same time, many were native born on the North American mainland. Their legal status was now clear: they were slaves for life and so were the children of slave mothers.
As white settlers began to claim and clear more land for large-scale farming and plantations, the number of slaves imported directly from Africa began to rapidly increase between the 1660s into the 1700s and onward, since the trade in slaves coming in from the West Indies was much too small to meet the huge demand for the now fast-growing North-American mainland slave market. Additionally, most American slave-buyers no longer wanted slaves coming in from the West Indies - by now they were either harder to obtain, too expensive, undesirable, or more often, ruined in many ways by the very brutal regime of the island sugar plantations.
By the end of the seventeenth century, a relaxation of colonial tax laws, and the British Crown's removal of monopolies that had been granted to a very small number of British slave-traders like the Royal African Company, had made the direct slave trade with Africa much easier. As a result, freshly imported, young, and healthy Africans were now much more affordable, cheaper in price, and more readily available in large numbers to American slave buyers, who by now preferred to purchase them, even if it took some time for them to adjust to a new life as plantation slaves.
From about 1700 to 1859, the majority of slaves imported to the North American mainland came directly from Africa in huge cargoes to fill the massive spike in demand for much-needed labour to work the continually expanding plantations in the Southern colonies (later to be states), with most heading to Virginia, South Carolina, and French or Spanish Louisiana. Unlike in the South, the Northern colonies developed into much more urbanized and industrialized societies, and they relied less on agriculture as the main economy, so, therefore, they did not import many African slaves, and the black population there remained fairly low for a very long time. However, big Northern cities like New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, had relatively large black populations (slave or free) for most of the colonial period and thereafter.
From the 1750s, American-born slaves of African descent already began to outnumber African-born slaves. By the time of the American Revolution, a few of the Northern states had begun to consider abolishing slavery, and some Southern states like Virginia had produced such large and self-sustaining locally-born slave populations by natural increase, that they stopped taking in, direct imports of slaves from Africa altogether (but still kept slavery, which continued in the South). However, other Southern states like Georgia and South Carolina still relied on constant, fresh supplies of slave labour to keep up with the demand of their burgeoning plantation economies, so they continued to allow the direct importation of slaves from Africa right up to 1808, only stopping for a few years in the 1770s, because of a temporary lull in the trade brought on by the American Revolutionary War.
The continued, direct importation of slaves from Africa ensured that for most of the eighteenth century, South Carolina's black population remained very high, with blacks outnumbering whites three to one, unlike in Virginia, which had a white majority, despite its large black slave population. It was said that South Carolina in the eighteenth century as a British colony looked much more like an extension of West Africa than it did of Britain. All legal, direct importation of slaves from Africa had stopped by 1808, when the now, newly formed United States finally banned its citizens from participating in the international slave trade altogether by law. Despite the ban, small to moderate cargoes of slaves were occasionally being illegally shipped into the United States directly from Africa for many years, as late as 1859.
Slowly a free black population emerged, concentrated in port cities along the Atlantic coast from Charleston to Boston. Slaves in the cities and towns had many more privileges, but the great majority of slaves lived on southern tobacco or rice plantations, usually in groups of 20 or more. Wealthy plantation owners eventually would become so reliant on slavery that they devastated their own lower class. In years to come the institution of slavery would be so heavily involved in the South's economy it would divide America into two opposing forces.
The most serious slave rebellion was the Stono Uprising, in September 1739 in South Carolina. The colony had about 56,000 slaves, who outnumbered whites 2:1. About 150 slaves rose up, and seizing guns and ammunition, murdered twenty whites, and headed for Spanish Florida. The local militia soon intercepted and killed most of them.
The Antebellum Period
As the United States grew, the institution of slavery became more entrenched in the southern states, while northern states began to abolish it. Pennsylvania was the first, in 1780 passing an act for gradual abolition.
A number of events continued to shape views on slavery. One of these events was the Haitian Revolution, which was the only slave revolt that led to an independent country. Many slave owners fled to the United States with tales of horror and massacre that alarmed Southern whites.
The invention of the cotton gin in the 1790s allowed the cultivation of short staple cotton, which could be grown in much of the Deep South, where warm weather and proper soil conditions prevailed. The industrial revolution in Europe and New England generated a heavy demand for cotton for cheap clothing, which caused an exponential demand for slave labor to develop new cotton plantations. There was a 70% increase in the number of slaves in the United States in only 20 years.
They were overwhelmingly concentrated on plantations in the Deep South, and moved west as old cotton fields lost their productivity and new lands were purchased. Unlike the Northern States who put more focus into manufacturing and commerce, the South was heavily dependent on agriculture. Southern political economists at this time supported the institution by concluding that nothing was inherently contradictory about owning slaves and that a future of slavery existed even if the South were to industrialize. Racial, economic, and political turmoil reached an all-time high regarding slavery up to the events of the Civil War.
In 1807, at the urging of President Thomas Jefferson, Congress abolished the international slave trade. While American Blacks celebrated this as a victory in the fight against slavery, the ban increased the demand for slaves. Changing agricultural practices in the Upper South from tobacco to mixed farming decreased labor requirements, and slaves were sold to traders for the developing Deep South. In addition, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 allowed any Black person to be claimed as a runaway unless a White person testified on their behalf. A number of free Blacks, especially indentured children, were kidnapped and sold into slavery with little or no hope of rescue. By 1819 there were exactly 11 free and 11 slave states, which increased sectionalism. Fears of an imbalance in Congress led to the 1820 Missouri Compromise that required states to be admitted to the union in pairs, one slave and one free.
In 1850 after winning the Mexican war a crisis gripped the nation what to do about the territories won from Mexico. Henry Clay, the man behind the compromise of 1820, once more rose to the challenge to craft the compromise of 1850. In this compromise the territories of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Nevada would be organized but the issue of slavery would be decided later. Washington D.C would abolish the slave trade but not slavery itself. California would be admitted as a free state but the South would receive a new fugitive slave act which required Northerners to return slaves who escaped to the North to their owners. The compromise of 1850 would maintain a shaky peace until the election of Lincoln in 1860.
Abolitionism
Abolitionists in Britain and the United States in the 1840-1860 period developed large, complex propaganda campaigns against slavery. Stampp says that, "Though abolitionists never argued that the physical treatment of slaves had any decisive bearing on the issue of the morality of slavery, their propaganda emphasized (and doubtless exaggerated) cruelties and atrocities for the purpose of winning converts." Blight says, "The authenticity of these reports about southern atrocity is questionable. I know of no verification for them. The propaganda uses of such stories, though, were not lost on abolitionist editors such as Douglass."
Kennicott argues that the largest and most effective abolitionist speakers were the blacks who spoke before the countless local meetings of the National Negro Conventions. They used the traditional arguments against slavery, protesting it on moral, economic, and political grounds. Their role in the antislavery movement not only aided abolitionist propaganda but also was a source of pride to the black community.
In 1852 Harriet Beecher Stowe published a novel and play that changed how the North would view slavery. Uncle Tom's Cabin tells the story of the life of a slave and the brutality that is faced by that life day after day. It would sell over 100,000 copies in its first year. The popularity of Uncle Tom's Cabin would solidify the North in its opposition to slavery. Lincoln would later invite Stowe to the White House in honor of this book that changed America.
In 1856 Charles Sumner a Massachusetts congressmen and antislavery leader was assaulted and nearly killed on the House floor by Preston Brooks of South Carolina. Brooks received praise in the South for his actions while being condemned in the North and Sumner became an iconic martyr in the North. Sumner later returned to the Senate where he was a leader of the Radical Republicans in ending slavery and legislating equal rights for freed slaves.
Over 1 million slaves were moved from the older seaboard slave states, with their declining economies to the rich cotton states of the southwest; many others were sold and moved locally. Berlin (2000) argues that this "Second Middle Passage shredded the planters' paternalist pretenses in the eyes of black people and prodded slaves and free people of color to create a host of oppositional ideologies and institutions that better accounted for the realities of endless deportations, expulsions and flights that continually remade their world. Benjamin Quarles' work Black Abolitionists provides the most extensive account of the role of black abolitionists in the American anti-slavery movement.
The Black Community
Blacks generally settled in cities creating the core of black community life in the region. They established churches and fraternal orders. Many of these early efforts were weak and often failed, but they represented the initial steps in the evolution of black communities.
During the early Antebellum period, the creation of free black communities began to expand, laying out a foundation for African Americans' future. At first, only a few thousand African Americans had their freedom. As the years went by, the number of blacks being freed expanded tremendously, building to 233,000 by the 1820s. They sometimes sued to gain their freedom or purchased it. Some slave owners had freed their bondspeople and a few state legislatures abolished slavery.
African Americans tried to take the advantage of establishing homes and jobs in the cities. During the early 1800s free blacks took several steps to establish fulfilling work lives in urban areas. The rise of industrialization, which depended on power-driven machinery more than human labor, might have afforded them employment, but many owners of textile mills refused to hire black workers. These owners considered whites to be more reliable and educable. This resulted in many blacks performing unskilled labor. Black men worked as stevedores, construction worker, and as cellar-, well- and grave-diggers. As for black women workers, they worked as servants for white families. Some women were also cooks, seamstresses, basket-makers, midwives, teachers and nurses. Black women worked as washerwomen or domestic servants for the white families. Some cities had independent black seamstresses, cooks, basketmakers, confectioners and more.
While the African Americans left the thought of slavery behind, they made a priority to reunite with their family and friends. The cause of the Revolutionary War forced many blacks to migrate to the west afterwards, and the scourge of poverty created much difficulty with housing. African Americans competed with the Irish and Germans in jobs and had to share space with them.
While the majority of free blacks lived in poverty, some were able to establish successful businesses that catered to the Black community. Racial discrimination often meant that Blacks were not welcome or would be mistreated in White businesses and other establishments. To counter this, Blacks like James Forten developed their own communities with Black-owned businesses. Black doctors, lawyers and other businessmen were the foundation of the Black middle class.
Blacks organized to help strengthen the Black community and continue the fight against slavery. One of these organizations was the American Society of Free Persons of Colour, founded in 1830. This organization provided social aid to poor blacks and organized responses to political issues. Further supporting the growth of the Black Community was the Black church, usually the first community institution to be established. Starting in the early 1800s with the African Methodist Episcopal Church, African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church and other churches, the Black church grew to be the focal point of the Black community.
The Black church was both an expression of community and unique African-American spirituality, and a reaction to European American discrimination. The church also served as neighborhood centers where free black people could celebrate their African heritage without intrusion by white detractors. The church was the center of the Black communities, but it was also the center of education. Since the church was part of the community and wanted to provide education; they educated the freed and enslaved Blacks. At first, Black preachers formed separate congregations within the existing denominations, such as social clubs or literary societies. Because of discrimination at the higher levels of the church hierarchy, some blacks like Richard Allen (bishop) simply founded separate Black denominations.
Free blacks also established Black churches in the South before 1800. After the Great Awakening, many blacks joined the Baptist Church, which allowed for their participation, including roles as elders and preachers. For instance, First Baptist Church and Gillfield Baptist Church of Petersburg, Virginia, both had organized congregations by 1800 and were the first Baptist churches in the city. Petersburg, an industrial city, by 1860 had 3,224 free blacks (36% of blacks, and about 26% of all free persons), the largest population in the South. In Virginia, free blacks also created communities in Richmond, Virginia and other towns, where they could work as artisans and create businesses. Others were able to buy land and farm in frontier areas further from white control.
The Black community also established schools for Black children, since they were often banned from entering public schools. Richard Allen organized the first Black Sunday school in America; it was established in Philadelphia during 1795. Then five years later, the priest Absalom Jones established a school for black youth. Black Americans regarded education as the surest path to economic success, moral improvement and personal happiness. Only the sons and daughters of the black middle class had the luxury of studying.
The Dred Scott Decision
Dred Scott was a slave whose master had taken him to live in the free state of Illinois. After his master's death, Dred Scott sued in court for his freedom on the basis of his having lived in a free state for a long period. The black community received an enormous shock with the Supreme Court's "Dred Scott" decision in March 1857. Blacks were not American citizens and could never be citizens, the court said in a decision roundly denounced by the Republican Party as well as the abolitionists. Because slaves were property, not people, by this ruling they could not sue in court. The decision was finally reversed by the Civil Rights Act of 1865.
In what is sometimes considered mere obiter dictum the Court went on to hold that Congress had no authority to prohibit slavery in federal territories because slaves are personal property and the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution protects property owners against deprivation of their property without due process of law. Although the Supreme Court has never explicitly overruled the Dred Scott case, the Court stated in the Slaughter-House Cases that at least one part of it had already been overruled by the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, which begins by stating, "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside."
The American Civil War and Emancipation
The Emancipation Proclamation was an executive order issued by President Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863. In a single stroke it changed the legal status, as recognized by the U.S. government, of 3 million slaves in designated areas of the Confederacy from "slave" to "free." It had the practical effect that as soon as a slave escaped the control of the Confederate government, by running away or through advances of federal troops, the slave became legally and actually free. The owners were never compensated. Plantation owners, realizing that emancipation would destroy their economic system, sometimes moved their slaves as far as possible out of reach of the Union army. By June 1865, the Union Army controlled all of the Confederacy and liberated all of the designated slaves.
About 200,000 free blacks and former slaves served in the Union Army and Navy, thus providing a basis for a claim to full citizenship. The severe dislocations of war and Reconstruction had a severe negative impact on the black population, with a large amount of sickness and death.
Reconstruction
The Civil Rights Act of 1866 made blacks full U.S. citizens (and this repealed the Dred Scott decision). In 1868, the 14th amendment granted full U.S. citizenship to African-Americans. The 15th amendment, ratified in 1870, extended the right to vote to black males. The Freedmen's Bureau was an important institution established to create social and economic order in southern states.
After the Union victory over the Confederacy, a brief period of southern black progress, called Reconstruction, followed. During the Reconstruction the entire face of the south changed because the remaining states were readmitted into the Union. From 1865 to 1877, under protection of Union troops, some strides were made toward equal rights for African-Americans. Southern black men began to vote and were elected to the United States Congress and to local offices such as sheriff. The safety provided by the troops did not last long, and white southerners frequently terrorized black voters. Coalitions of white and black Republicans passed bills to establish the first public school systems in most states of the South, although sufficient funding was hard to find. Blacks established their own churches, towns and businesses. Tens of thousands migrated to Mississippi for the chance to clear and own their own land, as 90% of the bottomlands were undeveloped. By the end of the 19th century, two-thirds of the farmers who owned land in the Mississippi Delta bottomlands were black.
Hiram Revels became the first African-American Senator in the U.S. Congress in 1870. Other African Americans soon came to Congress from South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. These new politicians supported the Republicans and tried to bring further improvements to the lives of African Americans. Revels and others understood that white people may have felt threatened by the African-American Congressmen. Revels stated, "The white race has no better friend than I. I am true to my own race. I wish to see all done that can be done...to assist [black men]in acquiring property, in becoming intelligent, enlightened citizens...but at the same time, I would not have anything done which would harm the white race," Blanche K. Bruce was the other African American who became a U.S. Senator.
African Americans elected to the House of Representatives during this time included Benjamin S. Turner, Josiah T. Walls, Joseph H. Rainey, Robert Brown Elliot, Robert D. De Large. and Jefferson H. Long. Frederick Douglass also served in the different government jobs during Reconstruction. These jobs included Minister Resident and Counsel General to Hait, Recorder of Deeds, and U.S. Marshall. Bruce became a Senator in 1874 and represented the state of Mississippi. He worked with white politicians from his region in order to hopefully help his fellow African Americans and other minority groups such as Chinese immigrants and Native Americans. He even supported efforts to "end restrictions on former Confederates' political participation.
The aftermath of the Civil War accelerated the process of a national African-American identity formation. Some civil rights activists, such as W. E. B. Du Bois, disagree that identity was achieved after the Civil War. African-Americans in the post-civil war era were faced with many rules and regulations that, even though they were "free", prevented them from living with the same amount of freedom as white citizens had. Tens of thousands of Black northerners left homes and careers and also migrated to the defeated South, building schools, printing newspapers, and opening businesses. As Joel Williamson puts it:
Many of the migrants, women as well as men, came as teachers sponsored by a dozen or so benevolent societies, arriving in the still turbulent wake of Union armies. Others came to organize relief for the refugees.... Still others... came south as religious missionaries... Some came south as business or professional people seeking opportunity on this... special black frontier. Finally, thousands came as soldiers, and when the war was over, many of [their] young men remained there or returned after a stay of some months in the North to complete their education.
The Jim Crow laws were state and local laws in the United States enacted between 1876 and 1965. They mandated de jure segregation in all public facilities, with a supposedly "separate but equal" status for black Americans. In reality, this led to treatment and accommodations that were usually inferior to those provided for white Americans, systematizing a number of economic, educational and social disadvantages.
In the face of years of mounting violence and intimidation directed at blacks as well as whites sympathetic to their cause, the U.S. government retreated from its pledge to guarantee constitutional protections to freedmen and women. When President Rutherford B. Hayes withdrew Union troops from the South in 1877 as a result of a national compromise on the election, blacks lost most of their political power. Men like Benjamin "Pap" Singleton began speaking of leaving the South. This idea culminated in the 1879–80 movement of the Exodusters, who migrated to Kansas, where blacks had much more freedom and it was easier to acquire land.
When Democrats took control of Tennessee in 1888, they passed laws making voter registration more complicated and ended the most competitive political state in the South. Voting by blacks in rural areas and small towns dropped sharply, as did voting by poor whites.
From 1890 to 1908, starting with Mississippi and ending with Georgia, ten of eleven Southern states adopted new constitutions or amendments that effectively disenfranchised most blacks and many poor whites. Using a combination of provisions such as poll taxes, residency requirements and literacy tests, states dramatically decreased black voter registration and turnout, in some cases to zero. The grandfather clause was used in many states temporarily to exempt illiterate white voters from literacy tests. As power became concentrated under the Democratic Party in the South, the party positioned itself as a private club and instituted white primaries, closing blacks out of the only competitive contests. By 1910 one-party white rule was firmly established across the South.
Although African Americans quickly started litigation to challenge such provisions, early court decisions at the state and national level went against them. In Williams v. Mississippi (1898), the US Supreme Court upheld state provisions. This encouraged other Southern states to adopt similar measures over the next few years, as noted above. Booker T. Washington, of Tuskegee Institute secretly worked with Northern supporters to raise funds and provide representation for African Americans in additional cases, such as Giles v. Harris (1903) and Giles v. Teasley (1904), but again the Supreme Court upheld the states.
Segregation for the first time became a standard legal process in the South; it was informal in Northern cities. Jim Crow limited black access to transportation, schools, restaurants and other public facilities. Most southern blacks for decades continued to struggle in grinding poverty as agricultural, domestic and menial laborers. Many became sharecroppers, sharing the crop with the white land owners.
Racial Terrorism
In 1865, the Ku Klux Klan, a secret vigilante organization dedicated to destroying the Republican Party in the South, especially by terrorizing black leaders, was formed. Klansmen hid behind masks and robes to hide their identity while they carried out violence and property damage. The Klan used terrorism, especially murder and threats of murder, arson and intimidation. The Klan's excesses led to the passage of legislation against it, and with Federal enforcement, it was destroyed by 1871.
The anti-Republican and anti-freedmen sentiment only briefly went underground, as violence arose in other incidents, especially after Louisiana's disputed state election in 1872, which contributed to the Colfax and Coushatta massacres in Louisiana in 1873 and 1874. Tensions and rumors were high in many parts of the South. When violence erupted, African Americans consistently were killed at a much higher rate than were European Americans. Historians of the 20th century have renamed events long called "riots" in southern history. The common stories featured whites heroically saving the community from marauding blacks. Upon examination of the evidence, historians have called numerous such events "massacres", as at Colfax, because of the disproportionate number of fatalities for blacks as opposed to whites. The mob violence there resulted in 40–50 blacks dead for each of the three whites killed.
While not as widely known as the Klan, the paramilitary organizations that arose in the South during the mid-1870s as the white Democrats mounted a stronger insurgency, were more directed and effective than the Klan in challenging Republican governments, suppressing the black vote and achieving political goals. Unlike the Klan, paramilitary members operated openly, often solicited newspaper coverage, and had distinct political goals: to turn Republicans out of office and suppress or dissuade black voting in order to regain power in 1876. Groups included the White League, that started from white militias in Grant Parish, Louisiana, in 1874 and spread in the Deep South; the Red Shirts, that started in Mississippi in 1875 but had chapters arise and was prominent in the 1876 election campaign in South Carolina, as well as in North Carolina; and other White Line organizations such as rifle clubs.
The Jim Crow era accompanied the most cruel wave of "racial" suppression that America has yet experienced. Between 1890 and 1940, millions of African Americans were disenfranchised, killed, and brutalized. According to newspaper records kept at the Tuskegee Institute, about 5,000 men, women, and children were murdered in documented extrajudicial mob violence -called "lynchings." The journalist Ida B. Wells estimated that lynchings not reported by the newspapers, plus similar executions under the veneer of "due process", may have amounted to about 20,000 killings.
Of the tens of thousands of lynchers and onlookers during this period, it is reported that fewer than 50 whites were ever indicted for their crimes, and only four were sentenced. Because blacks were disenfranchised, they could not sit on juries or have any part in the political process, including local offices. Meanwhile, the lynchings were used as a weapon of terror to keep millions of African-Americans living in a constant state of anxiety and fear. Most blacks were denied their right to keep and bear arms under Jim Crow laws, and they were therefore unable to protect themselves or their families.
Civil Rights
In response to these and other setbacks, in the summer of 1905, W. E. B. Du Bois and 28 other prominent, African-American men met secretly at Niagara Falls, Ontario. There, they produced a manifesto calling for an end to racial discrimination, full civil liberties for African Americans and recognition of human brotherhood. The organization they established came to be called the Niagara Movement. After the notorious Springfield, Illinois race riot of 1908, a group of concerned Whites joined with the leadership of the Niagara Movement and formed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) a year later, in 1909. Under the leadership of Du Bois, the NAACP mounted legal challenges to segregation and lobbied legislatures on behalf of black Americans.
While the NAACP use the court system to promote equality, at the local level African Americans adopted a self-help strategy. They pooled their resources to create independent community and institutional lives for themselves. They established schools, churches, social welfare institutions, banks, African-American newspapers and small businesses to serve the needs of their communities. The main organizer of national and local self-help organizations was Alabama educator Booker T. Washington.
Progressive Era reformers were often concerned with the black condition. In 1908 after the 1906 Atlanta Race Riot got him involved, Ray Stannard Baker published the book Following the Color Line: An Account of Negro Citizenship in the American Democracy, becoming the first prominent journalist to examine America's racial divide; it was extremely successful.
Civil rights groups such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) organized across the South with tactics such as boycotts, voter registration campaigns, Freedom Rides and other nonviolent direct action, such as marches, pickets and sit-ins to mobilize around issues of equal access and voting rights. Southern segregationists fought back to block reform. The conflict grew to involve steadily escalating physical violence, bombings and intimidation by Southern whites. Law enforcement responded to protesters with batons, electric cattle prods, fire hoses, attack dogs and mass arrests.
In Virginia, state legislators, school board members and other public officials mounted a campaign of obstructionism and outright defiance to integration called Massive Resistance. It entailed a series of actions to deny state funding to integrated schools and instead fund privately run "segregation academies" for white students. Farmville, Virginia, in Prince Edward County, was one of the plaintiff African-American communities involved in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision.
As a last-ditch effort to avoid court-ordered desegregation, officials in the county shut down the county's entire public school system in 1959 and it remained closed for five years. White students were able to attend private schools established by the community for the sole purpose of circumventing integration. The largely black rural population of the county had little recourse. Some families were split up as parents sent their children to live with relatives in other locales to attend public school; but the majority of Prince Edward's more than 2,000 black children, as well as many poor whites, simply remained unschooled until federal court action forced the schools to reopen five years later.
Perhaps the high point of the Civil Rights Movement was the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which brought more than 250,000 marchers to the grounds of the Lincoln Memorial and the National Mall in Washington, D.C., to speak out for an end to southern racial violence and police brutality, equal opportunity in employment, equal access in education and public accommodations.
The organizers of the march were called the "Big Six" of the Civil Rights Movement: Bayard Rustin the strategist who has been called the "invisible man" of the Civil Rights Movement; labor organizer and initiator of the march, A. Phillip Randolph; Roy Wilkins of the NAACP; Whitney Young, Jr., of the National Urban League; Martin Luther King, Jr., of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC); James Farmer of the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE); and John Lewis of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Also active behind the scenes and sharing the podium with Dr. King was Dorothy Height, head of the National Council of Negro Women. It was at this event, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, that King delivered his historic "I Have a Dream" speech.
In 1965 the Selma Voting Rights Movement, its Selma to Montgomery marches, and the tragic murders of two activists associated with the march, inspired President Lyndon B. Johnson to call for the full Voting Rights Act of 1965, which struck down barriers to black enfranchisement. In 1966 the Chicago Open Housing Movement, followed by the passage of the 1968 Fair Housing Act, was a capstone to more than a decade of major legislation during the civil rights movement.
By this time, African Americans who questioned the effectiveness of nonviolent protest had gained a greater voice. More militant black leaders, such as Malcolm X of the Nation of Islam and Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panther Party, called for blacks to defend themselves, using violence, if necessary. From the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, the Black Power movement urged African Americans to look to Africa for inspiration and emphasized black solidarity, rather than integration.
Politically and economically, blacks have made substantial strides in the post-civil rights era. Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson, who ran for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination in 1984 and 1988, brought unprecedented support and leverage to blacks in politics.
In 1989, Douglas Wilder became the first African-American elected governor in U.S. history. In 1992 Carol Moseley-Braun of Illinois became the first black woman elected to the U.S. Senate. There were 8,936 black officeholders in the United States in 2000, showing a net increase of 7,467 since 1970. In 2001 there were 484 black mayors.
The 39 African-American members of Congress form the Congressional Black Caucus, which serves as a political bloc for issues relating to African Americans. The appointment of blacks to high federal offices-including General Colin Powell, Chairman of the U.S. Armed Forces Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1989–93, United States Secretary of State, 2001–05; Condoleezza Rice, Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, 2001–04, Secretary of State in, 2005–09; Ron Brown, United States Secretary of Commerce, 1993–96; and Supreme Court justices Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas-also demonstrates the increasing visibility of blacks in the political arena.
Economic progress for blacks' reaching the extremes of wealth has been slow. According to Forbes richest lists, Oprah Winfrey was the richest African American of the 20th century and has been the world's only black billionaire in 2004, 2005, and 2006. Not only was Winfrey the world's only black billionaire but she has been the only black on the Forbes 400 list nearly every year since 1995. BET founder Bob Johnson briefly joined her on the list from 2001 to 2003 before his ex-wife acquired part of his fortune; although he returned to the list in 2006, he did not make it in 2007. With Winfrey the only African American wealthy enough to rank among America's 400 richest people, blacks currently comprise 0.25% of America's economic elite and comprise 13% of the U.S. population.
The dramatic political breakthrough came in the 2008 election, with the election of Barack Obama, the son of a black Kenyan father and a white American mother. He won overwhelming support from African-American voters in the Democratic primaries, even as his main opponent Hillary Clinton had the support of many black politicians. African Americans continued to support Obama throughout his term. After completing his first term, Obama ran for a second term. In 2012, he won the presidential election against candidate Mitt Romney and was re-elected as the president of the United States.
The post-civil rights era is also notable for the New Great Migration, in which millions of African Americans have returned to the South including Texas, Georgia, Florida and North Carolina, often to pursue increased economic opportunities in now-desegregated southern cities.
Slavery
African origins
Most African Americans are descended from Africans who were brought directly from Africa to America and were forced into slavery. The future slaves were originally captured in African wars or raids and transported in the Atlantic slave trade. African Americans are descended from various ethnic groups, mostly from ethnic groups that lived in Western and Central Africa, including the Sahel. A smaller number of African Americans are descended from ethnic groups that lived in Eastern and Southeastern Africa.
The major ethnic groups that the enslaved Africans belonged to included the Hausa, Bakongo, Igbo, Mandé, Wolof, Akan, Fon, Yoruba, and Makua, among many others. Although these different groups varied in customs, religious theology and language, what they had in common was a way of life which was different from that of the Europeans. Originally, a majority of the future slaves came from these villages and societies, however, once they were sent to the Americas and enslaved, these different peoples had European standards and beliefs forced upon them, causing them to do away with tribal differences and forge a new history and culture that was a creolization of their common past, present, and European culture. Slaves who belonged to specific African ethnic groups were more sought after and became more dominant in numbers than slaves who belonged to other African ethnic groups in certain regions of what later became the United States.
Early African-American History
In 1619, the first African slaves were brought to Point Comfort, today's Fort Monroe in Hampton, Virginia, 30 miles downstream from Jamestown, Virginia. The English settlers treated these captives as indentured servants and released them after a number of years. This practice was gradually replaced by the system of race-based slavery used in the Caribbean. As servants were freed, they became competition for resources. Additionally, released servants had to be replaced.
This, combined with the still ambiguous nature of the social status of Blacks and the difficulty in using any other group of people as forced servants, led to the relegation of Blacks into slavery. Massachusetts was the first colony to legalize slavery in 1641. Other colonies followed suit by passing laws that passed slavery on to the children of slaves and making non-Christian imported servants slaves for life.
Africans first arrived in 1619, when a Dutch ship sold 19 blacks to Englishmen at Point Comfort (today's Fort Monroe), thirty miles downstream from Jamestown, Virginia. In all, about 10–12 million Africans were transported to the Western Hemisphere. The vast majority of these people came from that stretch of the West African coast extending from present-day Senegal to Angola; a small percentage came from Madagascar and East Africa. Only 5% (about 500,000) went to the American colonies. The vast majority went to the West Indies and Brazil, where they died quickly. Demographic conditions were highly favorable in the American colonies, with less disease, more food, some medical care, and lighter work loads than prevailed in the sugar fields.
At first the Africans in the South were outnumbered by white indentured servants, who came voluntarily from Britain. They avoided the plantations. With the vast amount of good land and the shortage of laborers, plantation owners turned to lifetime slaves who worked for their keep but were not paid wages and could not easily escape. Slaves had some legal rights (it was a crime to kill a slave, and a few whites were hanged for it.) Generally the slaves developed their own family system, religion and customs in the slave quarters with little interference from owners, who were only interested in work outputs. Before the 1660s, the North American mainland colonies were expanding, but still fairly small in size and did not have a great demand for labour, so the colonists did not import large numbers of African slaves at this point.
Black Population in the 1700s
By 1700 there were 25,000 black slaves in the North American mainland colonies, about 10% of the population. Some had been shipped directly from Africa (most of them were from 1518 to the 1850s), but initially, very often they had been shipped via the West Indies in small cargoes after spending time working on the islands. At the same time, many were native born on the North American mainland. Their legal status was now clear: they were slaves for life and so were the children of slave mothers.
As white settlers began to claim and clear more land for large-scale farming and plantations, the number of slaves imported directly from Africa began to rapidly increase between the 1660s into the 1700s and onward, since the trade in slaves coming in from the West Indies was much too small to meet the huge demand for the now fast-growing North-American mainland slave market. Additionally, most American slave-buyers no longer wanted slaves coming in from the West Indies - by now they were either harder to obtain, too expensive, undesirable, or more often, ruined in many ways by the very brutal regime of the island sugar plantations.
By the end of the seventeenth century, a relaxation of colonial tax laws, and the British Crown's removal of monopolies that had been granted to a very small number of British slave-traders like the Royal African Company, had made the direct slave trade with Africa much easier. As a result, freshly imported, young, and healthy Africans were now much more affordable, cheaper in price, and more readily available in large numbers to American slave buyers, who by now preferred to purchase them, even if it took some time for them to adjust to a new life as plantation slaves.
From about 1700 to 1859, the majority of slaves imported to the North American mainland came directly from Africa in huge cargoes to fill the massive spike in demand for much-needed labour to work the continually expanding plantations in the Southern colonies (later to be states), with most heading to Virginia, South Carolina, and French or Spanish Louisiana. Unlike in the South, the Northern colonies developed into much more urbanized and industrialized societies, and they relied less on agriculture as the main economy, so, therefore, they did not import many African slaves, and the black population there remained fairly low for a very long time. However, big Northern cities like New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, had relatively large black populations (slave or free) for most of the colonial period and thereafter.
From the 1750s, American-born slaves of African descent already began to outnumber African-born slaves. By the time of the American Revolution, a few of the Northern states had begun to consider abolishing slavery, and some Southern states like Virginia had produced such large and self-sustaining locally-born slave populations by natural increase, that they stopped taking in, direct imports of slaves from Africa altogether (but still kept slavery, which continued in the South). However, other Southern states like Georgia and South Carolina still relied on constant, fresh supplies of slave labour to keep up with the demand of their burgeoning plantation economies, so they continued to allow the direct importation of slaves from Africa right up to 1808, only stopping for a few years in the 1770s, because of a temporary lull in the trade brought on by the American Revolutionary War.
The continued, direct importation of slaves from Africa ensured that for most of the eighteenth century, South Carolina's black population remained very high, with blacks outnumbering whites three to one, unlike in Virginia, which had a white majority, despite its large black slave population. It was said that South Carolina in the eighteenth century as a British colony looked much more like an extension of West Africa than it did of Britain. All legal, direct importation of slaves from Africa had stopped by 1808, when the now, newly formed United States finally banned its citizens from participating in the international slave trade altogether by law. Despite the ban, small to moderate cargoes of slaves were occasionally being illegally shipped into the United States directly from Africa for many years, as late as 1859.
Slowly a free black population emerged, concentrated in port cities along the Atlantic coast from Charleston to Boston. Slaves in the cities and towns had many more privileges, but the great majority of slaves lived on southern tobacco or rice plantations, usually in groups of 20 or more. Wealthy plantation owners eventually would become so reliant on slavery that they devastated their own lower class. In years to come the institution of slavery would be so heavily involved in the South's economy it would divide America into two opposing forces.
The most serious slave rebellion was the Stono Uprising, in September 1739 in South Carolina. The colony had about 56,000 slaves, who outnumbered whites 2:1. About 150 slaves rose up, and seizing guns and ammunition, murdered twenty whites, and headed for Spanish Florida. The local militia soon intercepted and killed most of them.
The Antebellum Period
As the United States grew, the institution of slavery became more entrenched in the southern states, while northern states began to abolish it. Pennsylvania was the first, in 1780 passing an act for gradual abolition.
A number of events continued to shape views on slavery. One of these events was the Haitian Revolution, which was the only slave revolt that led to an independent country. Many slave owners fled to the United States with tales of horror and massacre that alarmed Southern whites.
The invention of the cotton gin in the 1790s allowed the cultivation of short staple cotton, which could be grown in much of the Deep South, where warm weather and proper soil conditions prevailed. The industrial revolution in Europe and New England generated a heavy demand for cotton for cheap clothing, which caused an exponential demand for slave labor to develop new cotton plantations. There was a 70% increase in the number of slaves in the United States in only 20 years.
They were overwhelmingly concentrated on plantations in the Deep South, and moved west as old cotton fields lost their productivity and new lands were purchased. Unlike the Northern States who put more focus into manufacturing and commerce, the South was heavily dependent on agriculture. Southern political economists at this time supported the institution by concluding that nothing was inherently contradictory about owning slaves and that a future of slavery existed even if the South were to industrialize. Racial, economic, and political turmoil reached an all-time high regarding slavery up to the events of the Civil War.
In 1807, at the urging of President Thomas Jefferson, Congress abolished the international slave trade. While American Blacks celebrated this as a victory in the fight against slavery, the ban increased the demand for slaves. Changing agricultural practices in the Upper South from tobacco to mixed farming decreased labor requirements, and slaves were sold to traders for the developing Deep South. In addition, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 allowed any Black person to be claimed as a runaway unless a White person testified on their behalf. A number of free Blacks, especially indentured children, were kidnapped and sold into slavery with little or no hope of rescue. By 1819 there were exactly 11 free and 11 slave states, which increased sectionalism. Fears of an imbalance in Congress led to the 1820 Missouri Compromise that required states to be admitted to the union in pairs, one slave and one free.
In 1850 after winning the Mexican war a crisis gripped the nation what to do about the territories won from Mexico. Henry Clay, the man behind the compromise of 1820, once more rose to the challenge to craft the compromise of 1850. In this compromise the territories of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Nevada would be organized but the issue of slavery would be decided later. Washington D.C would abolish the slave trade but not slavery itself. California would be admitted as a free state but the South would receive a new fugitive slave act which required Northerners to return slaves who escaped to the North to their owners. The compromise of 1850 would maintain a shaky peace until the election of Lincoln in 1860.
Abolitionism
Abolitionists in Britain and the United States in the 1840-1860 period developed large, complex propaganda campaigns against slavery. Stampp says that, "Though abolitionists never argued that the physical treatment of slaves had any decisive bearing on the issue of the morality of slavery, their propaganda emphasized (and doubtless exaggerated) cruelties and atrocities for the purpose of winning converts." Blight says, "The authenticity of these reports about southern atrocity is questionable. I know of no verification for them. The propaganda uses of such stories, though, were not lost on abolitionist editors such as Douglass."
Kennicott argues that the largest and most effective abolitionist speakers were the blacks who spoke before the countless local meetings of the National Negro Conventions. They used the traditional arguments against slavery, protesting it on moral, economic, and political grounds. Their role in the antislavery movement not only aided abolitionist propaganda but also was a source of pride to the black community.
In 1852 Harriet Beecher Stowe published a novel and play that changed how the North would view slavery. Uncle Tom's Cabin tells the story of the life of a slave and the brutality that is faced by that life day after day. It would sell over 100,000 copies in its first year. The popularity of Uncle Tom's Cabin would solidify the North in its opposition to slavery. Lincoln would later invite Stowe to the White House in honor of this book that changed America.
In 1856 Charles Sumner a Massachusetts congressmen and antislavery leader was assaulted and nearly killed on the House floor by Preston Brooks of South Carolina. Brooks received praise in the South for his actions while being condemned in the North and Sumner became an iconic martyr in the North. Sumner later returned to the Senate where he was a leader of the Radical Republicans in ending slavery and legislating equal rights for freed slaves.
Over 1 million slaves were moved from the older seaboard slave states, with their declining economies to the rich cotton states of the southwest; many others were sold and moved locally. Berlin (2000) argues that this "Second Middle Passage shredded the planters' paternalist pretenses in the eyes of black people and prodded slaves and free people of color to create a host of oppositional ideologies and institutions that better accounted for the realities of endless deportations, expulsions and flights that continually remade their world. Benjamin Quarles' work Black Abolitionists provides the most extensive account of the role of black abolitionists in the American anti-slavery movement.
The Black Community
Blacks generally settled in cities creating the core of black community life in the region. They established churches and fraternal orders. Many of these early efforts were weak and often failed, but they represented the initial steps in the evolution of black communities.
During the early Antebellum period, the creation of free black communities began to expand, laying out a foundation for African Americans' future. At first, only a few thousand African Americans had their freedom. As the years went by, the number of blacks being freed expanded tremendously, building to 233,000 by the 1820s. They sometimes sued to gain their freedom or purchased it. Some slave owners had freed their bondspeople and a few state legislatures abolished slavery.
African Americans tried to take the advantage of establishing homes and jobs in the cities. During the early 1800s free blacks took several steps to establish fulfilling work lives in urban areas. The rise of industrialization, which depended on power-driven machinery more than human labor, might have afforded them employment, but many owners of textile mills refused to hire black workers. These owners considered whites to be more reliable and educable. This resulted in many blacks performing unskilled labor. Black men worked as stevedores, construction worker, and as cellar-, well- and grave-diggers. As for black women workers, they worked as servants for white families. Some women were also cooks, seamstresses, basket-makers, midwives, teachers and nurses. Black women worked as washerwomen or domestic servants for the white families. Some cities had independent black seamstresses, cooks, basketmakers, confectioners and more.
While the African Americans left the thought of slavery behind, they made a priority to reunite with their family and friends. The cause of the Revolutionary War forced many blacks to migrate to the west afterwards, and the scourge of poverty created much difficulty with housing. African Americans competed with the Irish and Germans in jobs and had to share space with them.
While the majority of free blacks lived in poverty, some were able to establish successful businesses that catered to the Black community. Racial discrimination often meant that Blacks were not welcome or would be mistreated in White businesses and other establishments. To counter this, Blacks like James Forten developed their own communities with Black-owned businesses. Black doctors, lawyers and other businessmen were the foundation of the Black middle class.
Blacks organized to help strengthen the Black community and continue the fight against slavery. One of these organizations was the American Society of Free Persons of Colour, founded in 1830. This organization provided social aid to poor blacks and organized responses to political issues. Further supporting the growth of the Black Community was the Black church, usually the first community institution to be established. Starting in the early 1800s with the African Methodist Episcopal Church, African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church and other churches, the Black church grew to be the focal point of the Black community.
The Black church was both an expression of community and unique African-American spirituality, and a reaction to European American discrimination. The church also served as neighborhood centers where free black people could celebrate their African heritage without intrusion by white detractors. The church was the center of the Black communities, but it was also the center of education. Since the church was part of the community and wanted to provide education; they educated the freed and enslaved Blacks. At first, Black preachers formed separate congregations within the existing denominations, such as social clubs or literary societies. Because of discrimination at the higher levels of the church hierarchy, some blacks like Richard Allen (bishop) simply founded separate Black denominations.
Free blacks also established Black churches in the South before 1800. After the Great Awakening, many blacks joined the Baptist Church, which allowed for their participation, including roles as elders and preachers. For instance, First Baptist Church and Gillfield Baptist Church of Petersburg, Virginia, both had organized congregations by 1800 and were the first Baptist churches in the city. Petersburg, an industrial city, by 1860 had 3,224 free blacks (36% of blacks, and about 26% of all free persons), the largest population in the South. In Virginia, free blacks also created communities in Richmond, Virginia and other towns, where they could work as artisans and create businesses. Others were able to buy land and farm in frontier areas further from white control.
The Black community also established schools for Black children, since they were often banned from entering public schools. Richard Allen organized the first Black Sunday school in America; it was established in Philadelphia during 1795. Then five years later, the priest Absalom Jones established a school for black youth. Black Americans regarded education as the surest path to economic success, moral improvement and personal happiness. Only the sons and daughters of the black middle class had the luxury of studying.
The Dred Scott Decision
Dred Scott was a slave whose master had taken him to live in the free state of Illinois. After his master's death, Dred Scott sued in court for his freedom on the basis of his having lived in a free state for a long period. The black community received an enormous shock with the Supreme Court's "Dred Scott" decision in March 1857. Blacks were not American citizens and could never be citizens, the court said in a decision roundly denounced by the Republican Party as well as the abolitionists. Because slaves were property, not people, by this ruling they could not sue in court. The decision was finally reversed by the Civil Rights Act of 1865.
In what is sometimes considered mere obiter dictum the Court went on to hold that Congress had no authority to prohibit slavery in federal territories because slaves are personal property and the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution protects property owners against deprivation of their property without due process of law. Although the Supreme Court has never explicitly overruled the Dred Scott case, the Court stated in the Slaughter-House Cases that at least one part of it had already been overruled by the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, which begins by stating, "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside."
The American Civil War and Emancipation
The Emancipation Proclamation was an executive order issued by President Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863. In a single stroke it changed the legal status, as recognized by the U.S. government, of 3 million slaves in designated areas of the Confederacy from "slave" to "free." It had the practical effect that as soon as a slave escaped the control of the Confederate government, by running away or through advances of federal troops, the slave became legally and actually free. The owners were never compensated. Plantation owners, realizing that emancipation would destroy their economic system, sometimes moved their slaves as far as possible out of reach of the Union army. By June 1865, the Union Army controlled all of the Confederacy and liberated all of the designated slaves.
About 200,000 free blacks and former slaves served in the Union Army and Navy, thus providing a basis for a claim to full citizenship. The severe dislocations of war and Reconstruction had a severe negative impact on the black population, with a large amount of sickness and death.
Reconstruction
The Civil Rights Act of 1866 made blacks full U.S. citizens (and this repealed the Dred Scott decision). In 1868, the 14th amendment granted full U.S. citizenship to African-Americans. The 15th amendment, ratified in 1870, extended the right to vote to black males. The Freedmen's Bureau was an important institution established to create social and economic order in southern states.
After the Union victory over the Confederacy, a brief period of southern black progress, called Reconstruction, followed. During the Reconstruction the entire face of the south changed because the remaining states were readmitted into the Union. From 1865 to 1877, under protection of Union troops, some strides were made toward equal rights for African-Americans. Southern black men began to vote and were elected to the United States Congress and to local offices such as sheriff. The safety provided by the troops did not last long, and white southerners frequently terrorized black voters. Coalitions of white and black Republicans passed bills to establish the first public school systems in most states of the South, although sufficient funding was hard to find. Blacks established their own churches, towns and businesses. Tens of thousands migrated to Mississippi for the chance to clear and own their own land, as 90% of the bottomlands were undeveloped. By the end of the 19th century, two-thirds of the farmers who owned land in the Mississippi Delta bottomlands were black.
Hiram Revels became the first African-American Senator in the U.S. Congress in 1870. Other African Americans soon came to Congress from South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. These new politicians supported the Republicans and tried to bring further improvements to the lives of African Americans. Revels and others understood that white people may have felt threatened by the African-American Congressmen. Revels stated, "The white race has no better friend than I. I am true to my own race. I wish to see all done that can be done...to assist [black men]in acquiring property, in becoming intelligent, enlightened citizens...but at the same time, I would not have anything done which would harm the white race," Blanche K. Bruce was the other African American who became a U.S. Senator.
African Americans elected to the House of Representatives during this time included Benjamin S. Turner, Josiah T. Walls, Joseph H. Rainey, Robert Brown Elliot, Robert D. De Large. and Jefferson H. Long. Frederick Douglass also served in the different government jobs during Reconstruction. These jobs included Minister Resident and Counsel General to Hait, Recorder of Deeds, and U.S. Marshall. Bruce became a Senator in 1874 and represented the state of Mississippi. He worked with white politicians from his region in order to hopefully help his fellow African Americans and other minority groups such as Chinese immigrants and Native Americans. He even supported efforts to "end restrictions on former Confederates' political participation.
The aftermath of the Civil War accelerated the process of a national African-American identity formation. Some civil rights activists, such as W. E. B. Du Bois, disagree that identity was achieved after the Civil War. African-Americans in the post-civil war era were faced with many rules and regulations that, even though they were "free", prevented them from living with the same amount of freedom as white citizens had. Tens of thousands of Black northerners left homes and careers and also migrated to the defeated South, building schools, printing newspapers, and opening businesses. As Joel Williamson puts it:
Many of the migrants, women as well as men, came as teachers sponsored by a dozen or so benevolent societies, arriving in the still turbulent wake of Union armies. Others came to organize relief for the refugees.... Still others... came south as religious missionaries... Some came south as business or professional people seeking opportunity on this... special black frontier. Finally, thousands came as soldiers, and when the war was over, many of [their] young men remained there or returned after a stay of some months in the North to complete their education.
The Jim Crow laws were state and local laws in the United States enacted between 1876 and 1965. They mandated de jure segregation in all public facilities, with a supposedly "separate but equal" status for black Americans. In reality, this led to treatment and accommodations that were usually inferior to those provided for white Americans, systematizing a number of economic, educational and social disadvantages.
In the face of years of mounting violence and intimidation directed at blacks as well as whites sympathetic to their cause, the U.S. government retreated from its pledge to guarantee constitutional protections to freedmen and women. When President Rutherford B. Hayes withdrew Union troops from the South in 1877 as a result of a national compromise on the election, blacks lost most of their political power. Men like Benjamin "Pap" Singleton began speaking of leaving the South. This idea culminated in the 1879–80 movement of the Exodusters, who migrated to Kansas, where blacks had much more freedom and it was easier to acquire land.
When Democrats took control of Tennessee in 1888, they passed laws making voter registration more complicated and ended the most competitive political state in the South. Voting by blacks in rural areas and small towns dropped sharply, as did voting by poor whites.
From 1890 to 1908, starting with Mississippi and ending with Georgia, ten of eleven Southern states adopted new constitutions or amendments that effectively disenfranchised most blacks and many poor whites. Using a combination of provisions such as poll taxes, residency requirements and literacy tests, states dramatically decreased black voter registration and turnout, in some cases to zero. The grandfather clause was used in many states temporarily to exempt illiterate white voters from literacy tests. As power became concentrated under the Democratic Party in the South, the party positioned itself as a private club and instituted white primaries, closing blacks out of the only competitive contests. By 1910 one-party white rule was firmly established across the South.
Although African Americans quickly started litigation to challenge such provisions, early court decisions at the state and national level went against them. In Williams v. Mississippi (1898), the US Supreme Court upheld state provisions. This encouraged other Southern states to adopt similar measures over the next few years, as noted above. Booker T. Washington, of Tuskegee Institute secretly worked with Northern supporters to raise funds and provide representation for African Americans in additional cases, such as Giles v. Harris (1903) and Giles v. Teasley (1904), but again the Supreme Court upheld the states.
Segregation for the first time became a standard legal process in the South; it was informal in Northern cities. Jim Crow limited black access to transportation, schools, restaurants and other public facilities. Most southern blacks for decades continued to struggle in grinding poverty as agricultural, domestic and menial laborers. Many became sharecroppers, sharing the crop with the white land owners.
Racial Terrorism
In 1865, the Ku Klux Klan, a secret vigilante organization dedicated to destroying the Republican Party in the South, especially by terrorizing black leaders, was formed. Klansmen hid behind masks and robes to hide their identity while they carried out violence and property damage. The Klan used terrorism, especially murder and threats of murder, arson and intimidation. The Klan's excesses led to the passage of legislation against it, and with Federal enforcement, it was destroyed by 1871.
The anti-Republican and anti-freedmen sentiment only briefly went underground, as violence arose in other incidents, especially after Louisiana's disputed state election in 1872, which contributed to the Colfax and Coushatta massacres in Louisiana in 1873 and 1874. Tensions and rumors were high in many parts of the South. When violence erupted, African Americans consistently were killed at a much higher rate than were European Americans. Historians of the 20th century have renamed events long called "riots" in southern history. The common stories featured whites heroically saving the community from marauding blacks. Upon examination of the evidence, historians have called numerous such events "massacres", as at Colfax, because of the disproportionate number of fatalities for blacks as opposed to whites. The mob violence there resulted in 40–50 blacks dead for each of the three whites killed.
While not as widely known as the Klan, the paramilitary organizations that arose in the South during the mid-1870s as the white Democrats mounted a stronger insurgency, were more directed and effective than the Klan in challenging Republican governments, suppressing the black vote and achieving political goals. Unlike the Klan, paramilitary members operated openly, often solicited newspaper coverage, and had distinct political goals: to turn Republicans out of office and suppress or dissuade black voting in order to regain power in 1876. Groups included the White League, that started from white militias in Grant Parish, Louisiana, in 1874 and spread in the Deep South; the Red Shirts, that started in Mississippi in 1875 but had chapters arise and was prominent in the 1876 election campaign in South Carolina, as well as in North Carolina; and other White Line organizations such as rifle clubs.
The Jim Crow era accompanied the most cruel wave of "racial" suppression that America has yet experienced. Between 1890 and 1940, millions of African Americans were disenfranchised, killed, and brutalized. According to newspaper records kept at the Tuskegee Institute, about 5,000 men, women, and children were murdered in documented extrajudicial mob violence -called "lynchings." The journalist Ida B. Wells estimated that lynchings not reported by the newspapers, plus similar executions under the veneer of "due process", may have amounted to about 20,000 killings.
Of the tens of thousands of lynchers and onlookers during this period, it is reported that fewer than 50 whites were ever indicted for their crimes, and only four were sentenced. Because blacks were disenfranchised, they could not sit on juries or have any part in the political process, including local offices. Meanwhile, the lynchings were used as a weapon of terror to keep millions of African-Americans living in a constant state of anxiety and fear. Most blacks were denied their right to keep and bear arms under Jim Crow laws, and they were therefore unable to protect themselves or their families.
Civil Rights
In response to these and other setbacks, in the summer of 1905, W. E. B. Du Bois and 28 other prominent, African-American men met secretly at Niagara Falls, Ontario. There, they produced a manifesto calling for an end to racial discrimination, full civil liberties for African Americans and recognition of human brotherhood. The organization they established came to be called the Niagara Movement. After the notorious Springfield, Illinois race riot of 1908, a group of concerned Whites joined with the leadership of the Niagara Movement and formed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) a year later, in 1909. Under the leadership of Du Bois, the NAACP mounted legal challenges to segregation and lobbied legislatures on behalf of black Americans.
While the NAACP use the court system to promote equality, at the local level African Americans adopted a self-help strategy. They pooled their resources to create independent community and institutional lives for themselves. They established schools, churches, social welfare institutions, banks, African-American newspapers and small businesses to serve the needs of their communities. The main organizer of national and local self-help organizations was Alabama educator Booker T. Washington.
Progressive Era reformers were often concerned with the black condition. In 1908 after the 1906 Atlanta Race Riot got him involved, Ray Stannard Baker published the book Following the Color Line: An Account of Negro Citizenship in the American Democracy, becoming the first prominent journalist to examine America's racial divide; it was extremely successful.
Civil rights groups such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) organized across the South with tactics such as boycotts, voter registration campaigns, Freedom Rides and other nonviolent direct action, such as marches, pickets and sit-ins to mobilize around issues of equal access and voting rights. Southern segregationists fought back to block reform. The conflict grew to involve steadily escalating physical violence, bombings and intimidation by Southern whites. Law enforcement responded to protesters with batons, electric cattle prods, fire hoses, attack dogs and mass arrests.
In Virginia, state legislators, school board members and other public officials mounted a campaign of obstructionism and outright defiance to integration called Massive Resistance. It entailed a series of actions to deny state funding to integrated schools and instead fund privately run "segregation academies" for white students. Farmville, Virginia, in Prince Edward County, was one of the plaintiff African-American communities involved in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision.
As a last-ditch effort to avoid court-ordered desegregation, officials in the county shut down the county's entire public school system in 1959 and it remained closed for five years. White students were able to attend private schools established by the community for the sole purpose of circumventing integration. The largely black rural population of the county had little recourse. Some families were split up as parents sent their children to live with relatives in other locales to attend public school; but the majority of Prince Edward's more than 2,000 black children, as well as many poor whites, simply remained unschooled until federal court action forced the schools to reopen five years later.
Perhaps the high point of the Civil Rights Movement was the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which brought more than 250,000 marchers to the grounds of the Lincoln Memorial and the National Mall in Washington, D.C., to speak out for an end to southern racial violence and police brutality, equal opportunity in employment, equal access in education and public accommodations.
The organizers of the march were called the "Big Six" of the Civil Rights Movement: Bayard Rustin the strategist who has been called the "invisible man" of the Civil Rights Movement; labor organizer and initiator of the march, A. Phillip Randolph; Roy Wilkins of the NAACP; Whitney Young, Jr., of the National Urban League; Martin Luther King, Jr., of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC); James Farmer of the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE); and John Lewis of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Also active behind the scenes and sharing the podium with Dr. King was Dorothy Height, head of the National Council of Negro Women. It was at this event, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, that King delivered his historic "I Have a Dream" speech.
In 1965 the Selma Voting Rights Movement, its Selma to Montgomery marches, and the tragic murders of two activists associated with the march, inspired President Lyndon B. Johnson to call for the full Voting Rights Act of 1965, which struck down barriers to black enfranchisement. In 1966 the Chicago Open Housing Movement, followed by the passage of the 1968 Fair Housing Act, was a capstone to more than a decade of major legislation during the civil rights movement.
By this time, African Americans who questioned the effectiveness of nonviolent protest had gained a greater voice. More militant black leaders, such as Malcolm X of the Nation of Islam and Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panther Party, called for blacks to defend themselves, using violence, if necessary. From the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, the Black Power movement urged African Americans to look to Africa for inspiration and emphasized black solidarity, rather than integration.
Politically and economically, blacks have made substantial strides in the post-civil rights era. Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson, who ran for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination in 1984 and 1988, brought unprecedented support and leverage to blacks in politics.
In 1989, Douglas Wilder became the first African-American elected governor in U.S. history. In 1992 Carol Moseley-Braun of Illinois became the first black woman elected to the U.S. Senate. There were 8,936 black officeholders in the United States in 2000, showing a net increase of 7,467 since 1970. In 2001 there were 484 black mayors.
The 39 African-American members of Congress form the Congressional Black Caucus, which serves as a political bloc for issues relating to African Americans. The appointment of blacks to high federal offices-including General Colin Powell, Chairman of the U.S. Armed Forces Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1989–93, United States Secretary of State, 2001–05; Condoleezza Rice, Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, 2001–04, Secretary of State in, 2005–09; Ron Brown, United States Secretary of Commerce, 1993–96; and Supreme Court justices Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas-also demonstrates the increasing visibility of blacks in the political arena.
Economic progress for blacks' reaching the extremes of wealth has been slow. According to Forbes richest lists, Oprah Winfrey was the richest African American of the 20th century and has been the world's only black billionaire in 2004, 2005, and 2006. Not only was Winfrey the world's only black billionaire but she has been the only black on the Forbes 400 list nearly every year since 1995. BET founder Bob Johnson briefly joined her on the list from 2001 to 2003 before his ex-wife acquired part of his fortune; although he returned to the list in 2006, he did not make it in 2007. With Winfrey the only African American wealthy enough to rank among America's 400 richest people, blacks currently comprise 0.25% of America's economic elite and comprise 13% of the U.S. population.
The dramatic political breakthrough came in the 2008 election, with the election of Barack Obama, the son of a black Kenyan father and a white American mother. He won overwhelming support from African-American voters in the Democratic primaries, even as his main opponent Hillary Clinton had the support of many black politicians. African Americans continued to support Obama throughout his term. After completing his first term, Obama ran for a second term. In 2012, he won the presidential election against candidate Mitt Romney and was re-elected as the president of the United States.
The post-civil rights era is also notable for the New Great Migration, in which millions of African Americans have returned to the South including Texas, Georgia, Florida and North Carolina, often to pursue increased economic opportunities in now-desegregated southern cities.