African American history: Encyclopedia - African American history

African American history

African American history is the history of an ethnic group in the United States also known as black Americans. The majority of African-Americans are the descendants of enslaved Africans transported from West and Central Africa to the States during the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Others have arrived through more recent immigration from the Caribbean, South America and other areas of the African continent.

African American history - Early history

Like other people of African descent in the Western Hemisphere, the progenitors of the overwhelming majority of African Americans were brought to North America as African slaves between the 1600s and 1807.

They came from eight distinct slave-trading regions in Africa. The regions were Senegambia (Present day Senegal, Gambia, Guinea and Guinea Bissau), Sierra Leone (also includes the area of present day Liberia), Windward Coast (present day Ivory Coast), Gold Coast (present day Ghana and surrounding areas), Bight of Benin (Present day Togo, Benin and western Nigeria), Bight of Biafra (Nigeria south of the Benue River, Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea), Central Africa (Gabon, Angola, Democratic Republic of the Congo) and Southeast Africa (Mozambique and Madagascar).

The majority of slaves that were taken to what would become the United States came from the Senegambian, Sierra Leone, Windward Coast, Bight of Benin, and Bight of Biafra. Certain slaves were more favored than others because of experience in agriculture or perceived docile natures.

Black Americans, like their White counterparts, are not a homogenous population. Just as White Americans descend from Dutch, French, English, German, Irish, Italian, Franco-American, Polish, Scoth-Irish, Scottish, Swedish, Norwegian, and Russian ancestors, Black Americans are composed of multiple ethnic groups. A reliable number of just how many ethnic groups were part of the Atlantic slave trade may never be known. However, there are approximately 40 major ethnic groups Black Americans descend from that can be found in present day African nations:

• Mali: Mandinka, Fulani, Bambara, Songhai, and Dogon

• Senegal, Gambia, & Guinea: Wolof, Serer, Fula, Peuhl, Balante, and Papel

• Sierra Leone & Liberia: Temne, Mende, Kissi, Goree, Kru, and Vai

• Ivory Coast: Gullah, Bassa, and Grebo

• Ghana: Ashanti, Fante, and Ga

• Benin & Togo: Fon, Ewe, and Mina

• Nigeria: Yoruba, Nupe, Edo-Bini, Igbo, Ibibio, Ijaw, Ibani, and Efik

• Cameroon: Duala

• Angola: BaKongo, Imbangala, Mbunda, and Lunda

• Congo: Luba

These ethnic groups were usually sold to European traders by powerful coastal or interior states in exchange for European goods such as textiles and firearms. On occasion Europeans kidnapped Africans but this was rare. As coastal and near-coastal nation states in Africa expanded through military conflicts, the captives of these wars (be they soldiers or villagers) were sold. Slavery had been a staple of African political life long before the coming of Europeans. Another way of becoming a slave was being convicted of a crime. Since most if not all these states did not have a prison system, criminals were usually sold.

The ancestors of Black Americans lived one of two ways. Most lived in moderately autonomous villages or densely populated urban centers within tribal kingdoms that checked a king’s power via some sort of council. These villages or cities paid tribute to the king and fought for him when called upon.

While most Africans lived within a semi-centralized state or kingdom, others lived in small villages with no state protection. Without such protection, these Africans were at higher risk to be enslaved. Since early Europeans had little success against the African states militarily, the non-urbanized Africans became frequent victims. Stateless areas such as Gambia, Guinea and southern Angola quickly fell into the hands of Europeans whom sold the inhabitants as needed to colonies in the New World. The African states also raided these areas selling the inhabitants to Europeans and each other.

(The importation of slaves into the U.S. was outlawed in 1807). In North America, African slaves could be found primarily in the southern half of the British colonies, although slaves also were owned in the Spanish colony of Florida and the French colony of Louisiana. As chattel slaves in perpetuity, African slaves and their progeny were considered the property of their owners and had no rights. Slaves often were considered little more than beasts of burden, or draught horses. Records of slave births, deaths and sales or trade transactions often were maintained in ledgers alongside similar records of farm animals.

The U.S. Constitution of 1787 said that slaves, who at no time had the right to vote in any state, should count as part of the population at the ratio of three persons counted per five slaves. Many African-American spokespersons have translated this into a belief that slaves counted as 3/5 of a person, which is a rough approximation of the truth of their status. Students of the abolitionist movement, however, note that slaves would have been better off if they were not counted as people at all: the population counts added pro-slavery members of the House of Representatives and added electoral votes for pro-slavery Presidential nominees.

The twin doctrines of white supremacy and its corollary, a belief in the inherent inferiority of blacks, combined with capitalism to create a powerful rationale for slavery. Nationwide, de facto and de jure segregation and discrimination based on the notion of race were accepted and effective tools to enforce and entrench a pervasive system of white economic power and privilege and black oppression and disadvantage.

After the American Revolution (1775-1783), changing economic conditions resulted in the decline and end of what limited slavery there was in the North. Conversely, the rapid spread of cotton cultivation in the South encouraged the growth of slavery there. By 1860, 3.8 million slaves accounted for one third of the total population of the southern states.

Contrary to popular belief, however, not all blacks in America were slaves. By the year 1860, well over 11% of the total black population in the U.S. was free. There were approximately 500,000 free blacks who lived throughout the United States, with slightly more than half residing in the South. Because of the high monetary value placed on strong, healthy slaves capable of hard physical labor and reproduction, free blacks often lived in constant danger of being kidnapped and sold into slavery.

After having completed the labor required of them by their masters, some slaves were permitted to perform work for hire. In this way, over time some were able to purchase their freedom. Once free, many then continued to save their incomes in order to purchase their entire families' freedom. Others sometimes were manumitted, usually upon the death of their masters, and still others escaped to freedom. The Underground Railroad was a series of well-traveled escape routes to the North along which people, both black and white, sympathetic to the anti-slavery cause provided refuge, food and directions to safeguard and speed fugitive slaves on their journey North.

In the North, many free blacks joined the abolitionist cause, and tens of thousands of free black men and fugitive slaves enthusiastically joined the ranks of the Union Army after the Civil War began.

African American history - The Civil War Reconstruction and its aftermath: 1860-1890

In 1863, during the American Civil War (1861-1865), U.S. president Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing slaves in the southern states at war with the North. The 13th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, ratified in 1865, outlawed slavery in the United States. 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.

After the Union victory over the Confederacy, a brief period of southern black progress, called Reconstruction, followed. From 1865 to 1877, under protection of Union troops, some strides were made toward equal rights for African-Americans. Southern blacks began to vote, were elected to the U.S. Congress, held local public office, established schools and built towns and businesses.

African American history - Cultural integration of former slaves⁵

As will be explained momentarily, the attempt to integrate Black Americans into the U.S. White civic mainstream failed, and so the struggle for equality dominates most accounts of the period. But another aspect of the era was the cultural integration of African-American ethnicity—its absorption of diverse Afro-Southern subcultures. The aftermath of the Civil War accelerated the process of national African-American identity formation. In the same way that White Northern entrepreneurs (carpetbaggers) flooded the Reconstruction South seeking business opportunities, tens of thousands of Black Yankees left homes and careers and also migrated to the defeated South. They built the schools, printed the newspapers, and opened the businesses that taught the newly freed to flourish as Americans. As Joel Williamson puts it:

The channels though which mulatto leadership moved from the North to the lower South are clearly visible. 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 [Black Yankees in regiments that served in the South], 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.

At first, culture clash with former slaves made bumpy times for the volunteers. Slave religious services were characterized by the ring-shout ceremony. In a ring-shout, as Daniel Payne had noticed, the outdoor congregation shuffles, dances, claps, and sings as they circle the preacher, loudly responding to his or her every utterance. Although the ring-shout is ostensibly Christian, the old Yoruba orixas Exu, Ogun, Xango, Oxossi often make an appearance by taking possession of a dancer, especially in the Sea Islands and in Louisiana bayous. Black Yankees, in contrast, were staid Methodist Episcopalians. Slave music had exceedingly simple melodies and harmony was unknown, but the music gloried in dazzling rhythmic syncopation. Black Yankee music was characterized by the subtle and changing harmonies of Anglican hymns and a steady British beat.

AME ministers sent south often insisted on an educated ministry, undercutting the authority of self-taught slave-born preachers, and demanded more sedate services than new freed-men were used to. "The old people were not anxious to see innovations introduced in religious worship," one wrote home, telling how a Black Yankee preacher was mocked as a "Presbyterian" by his new flock. Nevertheless, the overall attitude of the Black Yankees reflected solidarity with their charges. New England Black Yankee teacher Virginia C. Greene wrote home, "I class myself with the freedmen. Though I have never known servitude they are in fact my people." Some of the southbound migrants even married white southern Republicans during Congressional Reconstruction. Carrie Highgate, a Black Yankee schoolteacher from New York married White Mississippi state senator Albert T. Morgan.

African American history - Cultural integration of former bi-racial slaveowners

In South Carolina and the Gulf Coast, the newcomers also had to confront the old slave-owning biracial Hispanic and Creole elite.

For years, Louisiana had been under pressure to change from the Franco-American three-caste system (White, Coloured Creole, and Free Black) to the Anglo-American dichotomous color line (White and Black with no in-between). Even before the war the Colored Creole community had begun to split into two groups. Light-complexioned ones urged their darker relatives to emigrate. Those who were too dark to prosper under Anglo-American rule began to leave. Two groups went to Haiti shortly before 1850. In 1857, two shiploads went to Tampico. Another ship left for Vera Cruz a few months later. In one parish alone, the number of Colored Creoles too dark to pass into the White world fell from 351 in 1855, to 153 in 1860.

Nevertheless, by the war's outbreak, the Colored Creoles still owned property worth $2 million ($100 million in today's money), and their working class still dominated such skilled crafts as bricklaying, cigarmaking, carpentry, and shoemaking. When the shooting started, a substantial majority of Colored Creoles formed up their traditional militia units on behalf of the Confederacy. Light complexioned ones were accepted. West Point graduate P.G.T. Beauregard of St. Bernard Parish became a Confederate general. But the Confederacy did not accept free Blacks in combat roles, so most Colored Creoles were turned away. Nevertheless, as in Brazil or Cuba today, money whitened. Coloured Creoles could escape the free Black label if they had enough money. Jean-Baptiste Pierre-Auguste, Charles Lutz, and Leufroy Pierre-Auguste of St. Landry's Parish joined the Confederate army as combat soldiers. They saw action at Shiloh, Fredericksburg, and Vicksburg.

As the war ground on to its conclusion, wealthy Colored Creoles adopted a certain noblesse oblige towards the Black freedmen. As officers, they had once commanded their own slaves in the state militia. Now they expected to resume a position of power. In 1864 they were horrified to learn that, far from granting them suffrage, the Union occupation forces under General Nathaniel Banks restricted their movement and civil rights, treating them as if they were freedmen themselves. In numbers, they dominated the New Orleans Equal Rights League of 1865, but found their political power hampered by the language barrier. English, it seems, had become the language of politics.

The tension between the Colored Creoles and the Black freedmen became evident even as the war was ending. The Colored Creole-backed New Orleans Tribune supported the idea that the elite should lead and the freedmen should follow. The competing liberal newspaper, The Black Republican, editorialized that "We all know that not one in a hundred of our brethren on the plantations would ever receive his just earnings if the [Colored] planter were left to himself." During postwar Reconstruction, many Colored Creoles refused to send their children to school with former slaves. Although this may have been due to language difference, it exacerbated tension between them and the freedmen, and this led to a self-perceived distinction between Colored Creoles and freedmen politicians. During the Constitutional Convention, a freedman delegate vowed that he did not intend "to have the whip of slavery cracked over us by no [Colored] slaveholder's son."

After the war, Afro-Louisianans found themselves in a three-way struggle for power among: Colored Creoles, Black freedmen, and incoming Black Yankees. According to the New Orleans Tribune, the elite were subject to "innumerable petty antagonisms," and prey to scheming [Black Yankee] carpetbaggers who took "advantage of the apparent jealousy existing between free colored people and freedmen to assert political leadership among rural blacks." The Tribune's editor, spokesman of the "old free population" insisted that only the Colored Creole elite had the education and breeding to rule. Reconstruction's shaky start and premature collapse in Louisiana was, in part, due to the Colored Creoles' difficulty in making common cause with the Black freedmen—a difficulty exacerbated by their French-English language barrier.

Although the Colored Creoles did not gracefully join common cause with their former slaves, they were pushed into it by Northern attitudes towards the color line. They found themselves compelled to defend newly won Black rights, like it or not. As Eric Foner puts it, "The civil rights struggle [in Louisiana] was waged, for the most part, by the [Creole] elite. The issue had little meaning for the freedmen-farmers whose life-style precluded dinner at hotels or first-class seats on trains."

In 1864, General Nathaniel Banks of the occupying U.S. Army in New Orleans tried one last time to preserve the Jamaica-like class-based alliance between the White and the Colored elite on the one hand, against the incoming Black Yankees and newly freed former slaves on the other. Lincoln had asked Banks to satisfy the Abolitionist Congress while at the same time cultivating a single color line (rather than Louisiana's traditional two lines) separating only two endogamous groups (rather than the traditional three). Banks secured the agreement of a Louisiana federal judge named Durrell to rule that anyone with "a major part of white blood, should possess all the rights of a white man." But the attempt failed before the forced solidarity that was growing among Black Yankees, former biracial slave-owners, and former slaves. "As far as the law is concerned," declared the Mobile Nationalist, "the [Colored] Creole and freedman stand upon the same level.... They must, in the future, rise or fall together." Many dark-skinned freeborn Colored Creoles realized that their future was in the hands of Yankees, Black and White. They refused to dissociate themselves from the freedmen because the freedmen were the only source of political power still open to them. Banks's plan failed. As Banks put it, "a few men, who wanted to break the bundle of sticks without loosening the band, defeated [the plan]."

South Carolina saw a similar struggle for African-American cultural integration. At war's end, South Carolina's local Mulatto elite quickly moved to seize power. Across the South, only one fourth of the delegates of Reconstruction constitutional conventions were of the Black endogamous group. In South Carolina they were in the majority—seventy-six out of 124. At first, they were ambiguous about the future role of freedmen, their former slaves and inferiors. The conflict was felt in all social institutions. In 1866, Rev. Henry M. Turner wrote about his parishioners, "the blacks were arrayed against the brown or mulattoes, and the mulattoes in turn against the blacks." The educated Mulatto elite found freedmen's religious practices alien and were appalled by the anti-intellectualism of freedmen leaders. Although many welcomed slavery's end, most resented their loss of status and felt, correctly, that they were being submerged in a sea of freedmen. Most "avoided politics either because their business commitments took precedence, or so as not to jeopardize the personal connections with wealthy whites on which their economic standing depended." There were exceptional leaders, however, and their influence soon became decisive. Francis L. Cardozo, the son of a Jewish businessman and a free biracial mother, had attended the University of Glasgow and in 1865 took charge of the American Missionary Association's largest Charleston school. He made no distinction between freeborn and freed children and ridiculed the elitist idea that biracial children were more intelligent than more African-looking ones. His influence was strong. Soon, the sons and daughters of elite South Carolina Mulatto families fanned out across the state to teach former slaves, a mission closed to the Louisiana Creoles, trapped behind their language barrier. Many South Carolina Mulattos then gained political power among working class freedmen and were elected as Constitutional Convention delegates and later as state legislators. And so, despite a few initial clashes between freedmen and the Mulatto elite, the latter soon came to throw their lot in with the former, as in Louisiana.

African American history - The collapse of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow

In the face 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 Hayes withdrew Union troops from the South in 1877, white southerners acted quickly to reverse the groundbreaking advances of Reconstruction, and European American mob violence against African-Americans intensified.

Seeking to return blacks to their subordinate status under slavery, white supremacists resurrected de facto barriers and enacted new laws to further marginalize blacks in southern society, limiting, among other things, black access to transportation, schools, restaurants and other public facilities. White supremists also created the myth that black's participation in government in the south was ended due to black's incompetence, this racist view was disseminated in school texbooks and movies such as The Birth of a Nation in 1915. Although slavery had been abolished, most southern blacks for decades continued to struggle in grinding poverty as agricultural, domestic and menial laborers. Many were sharecroppers, their economic status little changed by Emancipation.

After its founding in 1867, the Ku Klux Klan, a clandestine organization sworn to perpetuate white supremacy, became a power in the South and beyond, eventually establishing a northern headquarters in Greenfield, Indiana. The Klan employed lynching, cross burnings and other forms of terrorism, violence and intimidation.

The Jim Crow era saw the cruelest wave of "racial" hatred that America has yet experienced. Between 1890 and 1940, Millions of African Americans were disfranchised, killed, brutalized, and discouraged even from their children learning the three Rs. According to newspaper records kept at the Tuskegee Institute, about 5,000 men, women, and children were murdered outright by the system, tortured to death in documented extrajudicial public rituals—human sacrifices called "lynchings." Public murders not reported by the newspapers plus similar executions under the veneer of due process were estimated by Ida B. Wells to have added up to about 20,000 killings. A comparison comes to mind. Although the sheer number of deaths was much less, the duration of the terror (over half a century) and the number of people ultimately affected (about ten million African Americans in 1920) are comparable to the Nazi holocaust. In contrast to the holocaust, of the tens of thousands of lynchers and onlookers during this period, it is reported that less than 50 whites were ever indicted for their crimes, and only four sentenced.⁶

African American history - The Great Migration and the Harlem Renaissance

In response to these and other setbacks, in the summer of 1905, W.E.B. DuBois 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 European Americans 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 DuBois, the NAACP mounted legal challenges to segregation and lobbied legislatures on behalf of black Americans. During this period, African Americans continued to create independent community and institutional lives for themselves. They established schools, churches, social welfare institutions, banks, newspapers and small businesses to serve the needs of their communities.

During the first half of the 20th century, the largest internal population shift in U.S. history took place. During the Great Migration, over 5 million African Americans moved from the South to northern cities, the West and Midwest in hopes of finding better jobs and greater equality. In the 1930's, the concentration of blacks in urban areas led to the cultural movement known as the Harlem Renaissance. Black intellectual and cultural circles were influenced by thinkers such as Aime Cesaire and Leopold Sedar Senghor, who celebrated blackness, or negritude; and arts and letters flourished. Writers Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay and Richard Wright; and artists Lois Mailou Jones, William H. Johnson, Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence and Archibald Motley gained prominence. A new generation of powerful African American political leaders and organizations also came to the fore. Membership in the NAACP rapidly increased as it mounted an anti-lynching campaign in reaction to ongoing southern white violence against blacks. Marcus Garvey's UNIA, the Nation of Islam and union organizer A. Philip Randolph's Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters all were established during this period and found support among urban African Americans.

African American history - Two World Wars

Many soldiers of color served their country with distinction during World War I and World War II. Famous segregated units, such as the Tuskegee Airmen and U.S. 761st Tank Battalion proved their value in combat, leading to desegregation of all US Armed Forces by order of President Harry S. Truman in July of 1948 via Executive Order 9981.

African American history - The Civil Rights Movement

In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a landmark decision in the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. This decision led to the dismantling of legal segregation in all areas of southern life, from schools to restaurants to public restrooms. The ruling also brought new momentum to the Civil Rights Movement. Boycotts against segregated public transportation systems sprang up in the South, the most notable of which was the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Civil rights groups organized other 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; and southern law enforcement responded with batons, electric cattle prods, fire hoses, attack dogs and mass arrests.

In Virginia, a campaign of obstructionism and outright defiance, called Massive Resistance, entailed a series of actions by state legislators, school board members and other public officials to deny state funding to integrated schools and 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 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.[1] White students were able to attend private schools established 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 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 200,000 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 the "Big Six" 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; Dr. 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 Non-violent 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. This march and the conditions which brought it into being are credited with putting pressure on President John F. Kennedy and then Lyndon B. Johnson that culminated in the passage the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that banned discrimination in public accommodations, employment, and labor unions.

The "Mississippi Freedom Summer" of 1964 brought thousands of idealistic youth, black and white, to the state to run "freedom schools," to teach basic literacy, history and civics. Other volunteers were involved in voter registration drives. The season was marked by harassment, intimidation and violence directed at Civil Rights workers and their host families. The disappearance of three youths, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner in Philadelphia, Mississippi, captured the attention of the nation. Six weeks later, searchers found the savagely beaten body of Chaney, a black man, in a muddy dam alongside the remains of his two white companions, who had been shot to death. Outrage at the escalating injustices of the "Mississippi Blood Summer," as it by then had come to be known, and at the brutality of the murders brought about the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Act struck down barriers to black enfranchisement and was the capstone to more than a decade of major civil rights legislation.

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.

African American history - Political empowerment

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, Virginia became the first state in U.S. history to elect a black governor, Douglas Wilder. 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 mayors and 38 members of Congress. The Congressional Black Caucus serves as a political bloc in Congress 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, 1989-1993, United States Secretary of State, 2001 - 2005; Dr. Condoleezza Rice, Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, 2001-2004, confirmed Secretary of State in January, 2005; Dr. Ron Brown, Secretary of Commerce, 1993-1996; and Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas—also demonstrates the increasing visibility of blacks in the political arena.

African American history - Historians

• John Henrik Clarke
• John Hope Franklin
• Eugene Genovese
• Lorenzo Greene
• Vincent Harding
• William Loren Katz
• Rayford Logan
• Sterling Stuckey
• Carter G. Woodson

African American history - Footnotes

1. The section was adapted from "Chapter 13. The Color Line Created African-American Ethnicity in the North" of Legal History of the Color Line: The Rise and Triumph of the One-Drop Rule by Frank W. Sweet, ISBN 0939479230, which contains the detailed citations and sources. A summary of this chapter, with endnotes, is also available online at The Color Line Created African-American Ethnicity in the North.
2. Slave-owning planter Kingsley was not impartial regarding either race relations or slavery. His slave-trading wife (she had her own plantations) was from Senegal, and so his children (who were also slave-owning planters) were of 40-50 percent sub-Saharan genetic admixture. By the turn of the twentieth century, most of their descendants had assimilated into upper-crust White Florida society.
3. Black Yankee ethnicity was also not the same thing as membership in America’s Black endogamous group. The difference between Black Yankee ethnicity and Black endogamous group membership is that ethnicity is to some extent voluntary whereas which side of the color line you are on is usually involuntary. Mainstream America assigns to the Black side of the endogamous color line people of many different ethnicities whose only common trait is a dark-brown skin tone. These include West Indians, some East Indians (sometimes), recent African immigrants, and (until recently) African-looking Muslims and Hispanics. Finally, the endogamous color line was imposed in 1691 but the earliest evidence of Black Yankee ethnicity dates from the mid 1700s.
4. Although Lincoln apparently believed this, its accuracy is questionable. DNA admixture studies do not show sexual asymmetry between U.S. matrilineal and patrilineal continent-of-origin markers as great as that found in Latin America, where no endogamous color line ever existed.
5. This section and the next were adapted from chapters 13 and 19 of Legal History of the Color Line: The Rise and Triumph of the One-Drop Rule by Frank W. Sweet, ISBN 0939479230, which contains the detailed citations and sources.
6. For the story of the lynchings, see Philip Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America (New York: Random House, 2002). For the systematic oppression and terror inflicted, see Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York, 1998).

See also

• Timeline of the American Civil Rights Movement
• Black history in Puerto Rico
• Nicodemus, Kansas

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "African American history", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki