What is African American ?

But it has had a profound impact on American life. At the time it was passed, the foreign-born proportion of the American population had fallen to historic lows—about 5 percent—in large measure because of the old immigration restrictions.

Not since the 1830s had the foreign-born made up such a tiny proportion of the American people. By 1965, the United States was no longer a nation of immigrants.

During the next four decades, forces set in motion by the Immigration and Nationality Act changed that. The number of immigrants entering the United States legally rose sharply, from some 3.3 million in the 1960s to 4.5 million in the 1970s. During the 1980s, a record 7.3 million people of foreign birth came legally to the United States to live.

In the last third of the 20th century, America’s legally recognized foreign-born population tripled in size, equal to more than one American in ten. By the beginning of the 21st century, the United States was accepting foreign-born people at rates higher than at any time since the 1850s. The number of illegal immigrants added yet more to the total, as the United States was transformed into an immigrant society once again.

Black America was similarly transformed. Before 1965, black people of foreign birth residing in the United States were nearly invisible. According to the 1960 census, their percentage of the population was to the right of the decimal point.

But after 1965, men and women of African descent entered the United States in ever-increasing numbers. During the 1990s, some 900,000 black immigrants came from the Caribbean; another 400,000 came from Africa; still others came from Europe and the Pacific rim

By the beginning of the 21st century, more people had come from Africa to live in the United States than during the centuries of the slave trade. At that point, nearly one in ten black Americans was an immigrant or the child of an immigrant.

African-American society has begun to reflect this change. In New York, the Roman Catholic diocese has added masses in Ashanti and Fante, while black men and women from various Carib­bean islands march in the West Indian-American Carnival and the Dominican Day Parade.

In Chicago, Cameroonians celebrate their nation’s independence day, while the DuSable Museum of African American History hosts a Nigerian Festival. Black immigrants have joined groups such as the Egbe Omo Yoruba (National Association of Yoruba Descendants in North America), the Association des Sénégalais d’Amérique and the Fédération des Associations Régionales Haïtiennes à l’Étranger rather than the NAACP or the Urban League.

To many of these men and women, Juneteenth celebrations—the commemoration of the end of slavery in the United States—are at best an afterthought. The new arrivals frequently echo the words of the men and women I met outside the radio broadcast booth.

Cathay Williams was the one and only female Buffalo Soldier, posing as a man named William Cathay to enlist in the 38th infantry in 1866. She served for two years before a doctor discovered that she was a woman, leading to her discharge

Some have struggled over the very appellation “African-American,” either shunning it—declaring themselves, for instance, Jamaican-Amer­icans or Nigerian-Americans—or denying native black Americans’ claim to it on the ground that most of them had never been to Africa. At the same time, some old-time black residents refuse to recognize the new arrivals as true African-Americans

Both Condoleezza Rice and Martin Luther King, Jr. started college when they were just 15 years old. She studied political science at the University of Denver; he majored in sociology at Morehouse College in Atlanta.

I am African and I am an American citizen; am I not African-American?” a dark-skinned, Ethiopian-born Abdulaziz Kamus asked at a community meeting in suburban Maryland in 2004.

Journalist Ida Wells-Barnett refused to give up her railcar seat for a white man in 1884, and bit a conductor on the hand when he tried to force her. She was dragged off the train. She sued the railroad and initially won, but the decision was overturned.

To his surprise and dismay, the overwhelmingly black audience responded no. Such discord over the meaning of the African-American experience and who is (and isn’t) part of it is not new, but of late has grown more intense.

In 2008, Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt became the first man to ever set three world records in a single Olympic games.

After devoting more than 30 years of my career as a historian to the study of the American past, I’ve concluded that African-American history might best be viewed as a series of great migrations, during which immigrants—at first forced and then free—transformed an alien place into a home, becoming deeply rooted in a land that once was foreign, even despised.

. The media made the Black Panthers notorious for their Afros, dark apparel, and willingness for armed self-defense, but their manifesto for change launched programs that benefited Black communities nationwide, like free dental care, breakfast for low-income children, even drama classes.

Lincoln University in Pennsylvania is the first institution of higher education founded for African-Americans. It paved the way for the 104 other historically Black colleges, which have produced distinguished alums like Thurgood Marshall, Spike Lee, and the almighty Oprah.

After each migration, the newcomers created new understandings of the African-American experience and new definitions of blackness. Given the numbers of black immigrants arriving after 1965, and the diversity of their origins, it should be no surprise that the overarching narrative of African-American history has become a subject of contention.

That narrative, encapsulated in the title of John Hope Franklin’s classic text From Slavery to Freedom, has been reflected in everything from spirituals to sermons, from folk tales to TV docudramas. Like Booker T.

Black ingenuity helped devise creative — and effective — plans to escape enslavement. In 1848, husband-and-wife team William and Ellen Craft made it to the North, and eventually England, when she dressed as a white man and he posed as one of her slaves. A year later, Henry “Box” Brown literally mailed himself to freedom in a shipping box during a 27-hour trip from Richmond to Philadelphia.

Liberia was founded and colonized by expatriates. The West African country is one of two sovereign states in the world started as a colony for ex-slaves and marginalized Black people. Sierra Leone is the other.

Washington’s Up from Slavery, Alex Haley’s Roots and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, it retells the nightmare of enslavement, the exhilaration of emancipation, the betrayal of Reconstruction, the ordeal of disfranchisement and segregation, and the pervasive, omnipresent discrimination, along with the heroic and ultimately triumphant struggle against second-class citizenship.