What is African American ?

hi

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 nonblack ancestors as well.

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.

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 colored 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 slaves 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.

Of an estimated 10 million Africans brought to the Americas by the slave trade, 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.

At the time of the American Revolution, slaves made up at least 25 percent of the population of North Carolina. In actual numbers, blacks totaled perhaps seventy thousand but no more than 5 percent of them were free. Most blacks, whether slave or free, lived in the countryside and worked the land, planting, harvesting, and preparing crops for market.

African-American culture is primarily rooted in West and Central Africa. Understanding its identity within the culture of the United States it is, in the anthropological sense, conscious of its origins as largely a blend of West and Central African cultures......

Such African cities as Djenné and Timbuktu, both now in Mali, were at one time major commercial and educational centers....

Those who lived in North Carolina’s few towns worked at trades or were servants to slaveholders. A few of them were “hired out” by their owners to work for others who needed their labor. All of their earnings, except perhaps for a small allowance, went to the slaves’ owners.

African-Americans are black people living in the United States who are descended from families that originally came from Africa.......

With the increasing profitability of slavery and the slave trade, 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.....