African Americans

African Americans

From left to right: W.E.B. Du Bois, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Muhammad Ali W.E.B. Du Bois, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Muhammad Ali
Regions with significant populations
North America: USA - 39.9 million Canada - 662,210
Languages
English.
Religion
Predominantly Christian and Muslim.
Related ethnic groups
Sub-saharan Africans and other African groups.

An African American (also Afro-American, Black American) is a member of an ethnic group in the United States whose ancestors, usually in predominant part, were indigenous to Africa. Many African Americans possess European, Native American and, to a lesser degree, Asian ancestry as well. The term refers specifically to black African ancestry, not, for example, to European colonial or Arab African ancestry, such as Arab Moroccan or white South African ancestry. Definitively, African American means an American of black African descent.

The majority of African Americans are the descendants of enslaved Africans transported via the Middle Passage from West and Central Africa to North America and the Caribbean from 1609 through 1807 during the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Others have arrived in the United States through more recent immigration from the Caribbean, South and Central America and Africa. Black immigrants from African and European nations and predominantly black, non-Hispanic Caribbean countries such as Haiti (with its strong Afro-Latin, non-Anglo culture), the Bahamas and Jamaica, though often referred to by their national origins and not culturally defined as African American socially, are demographically classified with black and/or African American by the U.S. Census; however in general, the cultural assumption is that if a person is black, native English-speaking and living in the United States, he or she is African American.

Until the events of the American Civil War (1861–1865) and, in particular, the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution (1865) resulted in the end of slavery in the United States, most Blacks in America were slaves.

Both during and after slavery times, African Americans have made significant contributions to American culture. Their influence has been particularly obvious in popular music and dance—some American musical genres, such as blues, jazz, and hip hop are essentially African American, and the dance forms associated with them are of largely African American origin—but is also enormous in areas ranging from the vocabulary of vernacular American English to religion and theology, both in American Protestantism and American Islam.

During slavery times, and again during the Jim Crow era, African Americans were subject to de jure segregation and discrimination and were kept almost entirely out of political power. The African-American Civil Rights Movement scored a series of victories from the 1940s into the early 1970s that put an end to de jure segregation and discrimination, made inroads against de facto segregation and discrimination, increased opportunities for African Americans to enter the middle class, and brought African American voices into American politics.

Nonetheless, even today African Americans as a group fall well below the country's average in income, wealth, business ownership, and levels of formal education.

PPPPPPPOOOOOOORRRRRRCCCCCCCHHHHHHHMMMMMMMOOOOOOONNNNNNNKKKKKKKEEEEEEEEYYYYYYYSSSSSSSS==Definition and nomenclature== Black Americans descend primarily from enslaved Africans brought to the United States, especially the American South, between the 1619 and 1807, the majority of whom were brought in the 18th century. About three-quarters of the slaves came from West Africa and the remaining quarter came from the Angola-Congo region. Some estimate that the average Black American is 80% African-descended and that 40% of Black Americans also have some Native American ancestry.[2][3]

Blacks in America have been known by various terms at at various points in U.S. history. Previously acceptable terms that are now viewed as archaic (and, outside of historical contexts, even insulting) include Negro and Colored; today, the most common term is probably African American, with Black also commonly accepted since the late 1960s; Afro-American, common from the late 1960s into the 1980s, remains generally acceptable, but less common, and has lately been developing a "period" connotation. Blacks are also included in the broader term "people of color".

The history of the use of these terms is evident in the names of various African American organizations founded over time. The civil rights organization the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), founded 1909, is significantly older than the philanthropic organization the United Negro College Fund, founded in 1944. The term colored had come to be seen as politically incorrect by the time of the UNCF's founding. Nonetheless, both Negro and colored remained common until the late 1960s, especially in the American South.

As the Civil Rights Movement evolved in the 1960s into the Black Power / Black Pride movement, these older terms lost favor and became associated with the pre-civil-rights situation of Blacks in America. Through this movement, the terms Black and Afro-American both emerged into common usage in the late 1960s. Due to this legacy, by 1980, the term Black had become accepted by a majority of Americans of African descent, and had also became the referential term applied by white Americans in general.

In the late 1980s, Blacks began to abandon the term Afro-American, adopting the autonym African American instead. Some did so out of a desire for an unabbreviated expression of their African heritage that could not be mistaken or derided as an allusion to the afro hairstyle. Others wished to assert their pride in their African origins. The term dated back at least to Black nationalist Malcolm X, who favored African American as more historically and culturally defining over other terms, and used it at an OAAU (Organization of Afro American Unity) meeting in the mid-1960s, saying, "Twenty-two million African Americans - that's what we are - Africans who are in America." However, it did not become widely used at that time. During the 1980s, the most influential proponent of the widespread adoption of the term was Jesse Jackson. Jackson and like-minded persons argued that African American was more in keeping with the United States tradition of "hyphenated Americans", which links people with their ancestors' geographic points of origin, and allows people to assert pride in their immigrant or ethnic heritage, while maintaining an American national identity.

This usage of the term African American refers specifically to black African ancestry and American nationality. It does not include whites or Asians from Africa, nor does it include Africans in Africa, the Caribbean, or elsewhere. Still, there is disagreement as to whether the term should refer only to Blacks who can trace their American roots to the colonial period or slavery, or whether it also should include black immigrants from Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America and their descendants. To some extent, this is a matter of cultural vs. geographic meaning. In the narrow sense, the term refers only to those descended from a small number of colonial indentured servants and the estimated 500,000 Africans taken to British North America (later becoming the United States) as slaves (of approximately 10 - 12 million Africans taken to the Western Hemisphere in general). In a broader usage, the term can include West Indian and Afro-Latino immigrants whose African ancestors also survived the Middle Passage or recent African immigrants/children of immigrants with American citizenship, but these groups tend to use the ethnic terms Latino or Hispanic, or identify themselves by their countries of origin (for example, as Nigerian, Dominican or Jamaican instead of African American). The term does not include predominantly European, Arab or South Asian-descended immigrants from the African continent, and they are not generally considered to be indigenous Africans by the black African majority. Non-blacks from Africa who become permanent residents or citizens of the United States are not generally referred to nor do they generally refer to themselves as African American.

Demographics

African Americans as percent of population, 2000.

African American population density, 2000.

In 1790, when the first census was taken, African Americans numbered about 760,000—about 19% of the population. In 1860, at the start of the American Civil War, the African American population increased to 4.4 million, but the percentage rate dropped to 14% of the overall population of the country. The vast majority were slaves, with only 488,000 counted as "freemen". By 1900, the black population had doubled and reached 8.8 million.

In 1910, about 90% of African Americans lived in the South, but large numbers began migrating north looking for better job opportunities and living conditions, and to escape Jim Crow and racial violence. The Great Migration, as it was called, spanned the 1890s to the 1970s. From 1916 through the 1960s, more than 6 million black people moved north. But in the 1970s and 1980s, that trend reversed, with more African Americans moving south to the Sunbelt than leaving it.

By 1990, the African American population reached about 30 million and represented 12% of the U.S. population, roughly the same proportion as in 1900. In current demographics, according to 2005 U.S. Census figures, some 39.9 million African Americans live in the United States, comprising 13.8 percent of the total population. At the time of the 2000 Census, 54.8 percent of African Americans lived in the South. In that year, 17.6 percent of African Americans lived in the Northeast and 18.7 percent in the Midwest, while only 8.9 percent lived in the western states. Almost 88 percent of African Americans lived in metropolitan areas in 2000. With over 2 million black residents, New York City had the largest black urban population in the United States in 2000. Among cities of 100,000 or more, Gary, Indiana, had the highest percentage of black residents of any U.S. city in 2000, with 85 percent, followed closely by Detroit, Michigan, with 83 percent. Atlanta, Georgia, has a substantial African American population of about 65 percent. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, with 43 percent, and Washington, D.C., with 60 percent, are also large African American population centers.

History

Main article: African American history

W.E.B. Du Bois, notable proponent of Pan-Africanism, prominent intellectual leader and civil rights activist in the African-American community; co-founder of the Niagara Movement and the NAACP.

Blacks in America are descended from many diverse sub-Saharan African ethnic groups. Members of over 40 identifiable ethnic groups from at least 25 different kingdoms were sold to British North America (later becoming the United States) during the Atlantic slave trade. These African slaves were usually sold to European traders by powerful coastal or interior states in exchange for European goods such as textiles and firearms. Africans were very rarely kidnapped by Europeans because they could not penetrate the interior. The danger of fatal disease was ever-present and the coastal areas were dominated by powerful warrior kingdoms. Africans sold and traded into bondage and shipped to the United States came from eight distinct slave-trading regions in Africa, including Senegambia (present-day Senegal, the Gambia, Guinea and Guinea Bissau), Sierra Leone (also includes the area of present-day Liberia), the Windward Coast (present-day Ivory Coast), the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana and surrounding areas), the Bight of Benin (present-day Togo, Benin and western Nigeria), the 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).

Enslaved Africans brought their own religious beliefs, languages, and cultural practices with them when they were forced on ships from Africa to the New World, however, slave traders and owners mounted a systematic and brutal campaign to de-Africanize them, eventually nearly completely stripping them of their original names, languages and religious beliefs. As additional means of subjugation, slave owners often intentionally mixed people who spoke many different African languages to discourage communication in any language other than English on their plantations and it became illegal for slaves to be taught to read or write. Over time, Africans in America formed a new and common identity focused on their mutual condition in America as opposed to cultural and historic ties to Africa.

Booker T. Washington, political leader, educator, author, and one of the dominant figures in African American culture and politics in the early 20th century

By 1860, there were 3.5 million enslaved Africans in the Southern United States, and another 500,000 Africans lived free across the country. Slavery was a controversial issue in American society and politics. The growth of abolitionism, which opposed the institution of slavery, culminated in the 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States, and was one reason for the secession of the Confederate States of America, which lead to the American Civil War (1861 - 1865). After the Civil War, the United States offered certain civil rights to African Americans. The Emancipation Proclamation of 1862 declared all slaves in the Confederacy free under U.S. law. It included exceptions for those held in all territories that had not seceded, however, and thus did not immediately free a single slave, since U.S. law held no sway over the Confederacy at the time. The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1865, freed all slaves, including those in states that had not seceded. During Reconstruction, African Americans in the South obtained the right to vote and to hold public office, as well as a number of other civil rights they previously had been denied. However, when Reconstruction ended in 1877, southern, white landowners reinstituted the "Jim Crow" regime of disenfranchisement and racial segregation, and with it a wave of terrorism and repression, including lynchings and other vigilante violence.

During the Progressive Era, black members of the middle class attempted improving the conditions of their race. This movement was strongest in the Southern United States and it often revolved around black southern universities such as Tuskegee University and Atlanta University, academic journals, and the Episcopal Church. Like white progressives, black progressives helped the working class through charitable means while supporting political changes that increased the role of the state in creating socioeconomic equity, as opposed to equality. Many black progressives were elitist and often condescending towards those they were intent on helping, akin to white progressives' attitudes and actions towards European immigrants. Black progressives were successful in their charitable efforts, but often were not concerned with issues like racial segregation. Instead, they supported a social darwinist mentality with the hope that blacks through hardwork and education could accelerate their social evolution. The plight of most black people did not improve during this time due to racist policies supported by many Whites and white vigilante action.

In the last decade of the nineteenth century in the United States, racially discriminatory laws and racial violence aimed at African Americans began to mushroom. Elected, appointed, or hired government authorities began to require or permit discrimination, specifically in the states of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, Oklahoma, and Kansas. There were four required or permitted acts of discrimination against African Americans. They included racial segregation – upheld by the United States Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 - which was legally mandated by southern states and nationwide at the local level of government, voter suppression or disfranchisement in the southern states, denial of economic opportunity or resources nationwide, and private acts of violence and mass racial violence aimed at African Americans unhindered or encouraged by government authorities. Although racial discrimination was present nationwide, the combination of law, public and private acts of discrimination, marginal economic opportunity, and violence directed toward African Americans in the southern states became known as Jim Crow. The desperate conditions of African Americans in the South that sparked the Great Migration of the early 20th century, combined with a growing African American intellectual and cultural elite in the Northern United States, led to a movement to fight violence and discrimination against African Americans that, like abolitionism before it, crossed racial lines. One of the most prominent of these groups, the NAACP, galvanized by outspoken journalist and activist Ida B. Wells Barnett, led an anti-lynching crusade. In the 1950s, the organization mounted a series of calculated legal challenges to overturn Jim Crow segregation, culminating in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas decision.

Nobel Peace Laureate and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., delivering his "I Have a Dream" speech before over 200,000 people in front of the Lincoln Memorial at the 1963 March on Washington.

The Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board was one of defining moments of the modern-day American Civil Rights Movement. It was part of a long-term strategy to strike down Jim Crow segregation in public education, the hospitality industry, public transportation, employment and housing, granting equal access to African Americans and ensuring their right to vote.

The Civil Rights Movement aimed at abolishing public and private acts of racial discrimination against African Americans between 1954 to 1968, particularly in the southern United States. By 1966, the emergence of the Black Power Movement, which lasted from 1966 to 1975, expanded upon the aims of the Civil Rights Movement to include racial dignity, economic and political self-sufficiency, and freedom from white authority. Several scholars have begun to refer to the Civil Rights Movement as the Second Reconstruction. The Civil Rights Movement and subsequent Black Power Movement was the culmination of generations of oppression and contained several key events in American history, including the murder of Emmett Till, Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott, the desegregation of Little Rock, Arkansas, multiple sit-ins and freedom rides, the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and many other notable events. The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom 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.

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Malcolm X holding an M1 Carbine.

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 for Self Defense, 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. The movement reached its peak in the 1960s under leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Whitney Young, and Roy Wilkins, Sr. At the same time, Nation of Islam spokesman Malcolm X and, later, Stokely Carmichael, the Black Panther Party, and the Republic of New Africa called for African Americans to embrace black nationalism and black self-empowerment, propounding ideas of African (black) unity, solidarity and pan-Africanism. By the end of the 1960's, however, several civil rights activists, leaders and pan-africanists were assassinated, including Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. and Fred Hampton. Nevertheless, politically and economically, African Americans have made substantial strides in the post-civil rights era.

Economic Status

The collective economic status of African Americans is a matter of contentious debate, with statistics simultaneously suggesting both the residual effects of historical marginalization and sustained progress for large sections of the population in the United States, and the greater affluence of the group when compared to populations outside of the United States. The median income of African Americans as a group is roughly 65 percent of that of "Western-Europe" people, that is, "people having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa" according to census. The only county in the nation with a population over 65,000 where the median income among black households surpasses that of whites is Queens in New York City (the median income among black households there was close to $52,000 in 2005). Racial economic disparities are greatest of all at the highest levels of income, although this economic super elite does not reflect any American population collective, black or otherwise.

According to Forbes Magazine's wealthiest American lists, a 2000 net-worth of $800 million dollars made Oprah Winfrey the richest African American of the 20th century, in sharp contrast to the 20th century's richest White American Bill Gates whose net-worth briefly hit $100 billion in 1999. However, in Forbes' list of 2006, Gates' net worth decreased to $53 billion USD while Winfrey's net worth increased to $1.5 billion USD, cementing her status as the wealthiest African American of the 20th century, the richest Black person on the face of the planet, and the first African American to make Business Week's 50 greatest philanthropists list.

Philanthropist, talk show host, book critic, actor and magazine publisher Oprah Winfrey, richest African American of the 20th century, the world's only Black billionaire for 3 straight years and elected the Greatest American woman of all time.

Despite the poverty levels of many African American communities, current information points to a continuation of a long-term trend toward parity with national levels and absolutely higher levels of affluence than those experienced by most populations outside the United States. Since the mid to late 1990's, African American incomes have risen at a remarkable pace and the progress shows up at every income level - from the still-large but shrinking underclass, to the fast-developing black middle class, to the growing ranks of wealthy African Americans. Over 1.7 million African Americans have gone off the poverty rolls; earnings by African American women have moved to within a few percentage points of white womens'; and unemployment among blacks in recent years has dropped below the 10 percent mark. The poverty rate among African Americans has dropped from 26.5% in 1998 to 24.7% in 2004. [4] The growth in African American incomes is translating into big gains in buying power and opportunities for black businesses.

By 2003, sex had replaced race as the primary factor in life expectancy in the United States, with African American females expected to live longer than white males born in that year. In the same year, the gap in life expectancy between American whites (78.0) and blacks (72.8) had decreased to 5.2 years, reflecting a long term trend of this phenomenon. The current life expectancy of African Americans as a group is comparable to those of other groups who live in countries with a high human development index. In 2004, African American workers had the second-highest median earnings of American minority groups after Asian Americans, and African Americans had the highest level of male-female income parity of all ethnic groups in the United States [5]. Also, among American minority groups, only Asian Americans were more likely to hold white collar occupations (management, professional, and related fields) [6], and African Americans were no more or less likely than whites to work in the service industry [7]. In 2001, over half of African American households of married couples earned $50,000 or more [8]. Although in the same year African Americans were over-represented among the nation's poor, this was directly related to the disproportionate percentage of African American families headed by single women; such families are collectively poorer, regardless of ethnicity [9].

Collectively, African Americans are more involved in the American political process than other minority groups in the US, indicated by the highest level of voter registration and participation in elections among these groups in 2004 [10]. African Americans collectively attain higher levels of education than immigrants to the United States [11].

Although the unemployment rate among African Americans (in 2002, approximately 11% [12] has typically been twice the rate among European Americans (app. 5% in the same year, [13]), it is still at or below rates found in France and Spain [14], [15], and is slightly higher than the overall rate of the European Union [16]. When compared to populations outside of the United States and European Union, the collective affluence of African Americans is even more striking and disproportionate. Based on worker income alone (excluding purchasing power parity and extra wealth, both of which would accentuate the comparative affluence of African Americans), African Americans produced $586 billion in 2004[17],[18], slightly smaller than the GDP of Brazil in 2006 (even though Brazil's population is about 5 times the size of the African American one) [19], and approximately 80% the size of Russia's 2005 GDP (even though Russia's population is nearly 4 times the size of the African American one [20]. In 2004 this amount would have been ranked as the 15th largest GDP internationally (out of 177 ranked) [21], compared to a population ranking of 33 in 2005[22].

In 2005, the populations of Poland and African Americans were roughly equal, but the 2004 earnings of the latter group would have been nearly 2.5 times the size of the former's GDP in 2005[23]. In 2005, the Ukraine's population was approximately 10% larger than the African American population, but its GDP was over 8 times smaller than the 2004 earnings of the latter group. Argentina, arguably the most developed country in Latin American (with an overwhelmingly European population (97%)), has an unemployment rate slightly higher than that of African Americans as a group, the poverty rate is almost twice the rate [24], and the 2004 earnings of African American workers were nearly 3.5 times the size of Argentina's 2005 GDP, even though Argentina's population is slightly larger than the African American population [25]. In Mexico, whose human development index is comparable to those of most former Second World countries, and whose economy ranks as a mid-income one, the poverty rate is twice the rate of African Americans as a group [26], and even though its 2005 population was nearly 3 times the population of African Americans, Mexico's GDP from the same year exceeded the 2004 earnings of African American workers by only 25%[27].

Culture

Main article: African American culture

African American culture is a distinct part of American culture.

While African American families share many features with other U.S. families, the African American family has some distinctive features relating to the timing and approaches of marriage and family formation, gender roles, parenting styles, and strategies for coping with adversity.[28] Within African American families, the formation of a household often begins not with marriage, but with the birth of a child. The importance of extended family and kin in maintaining family cohesion is often overshadowed by negative portrayals of African American family life, however, studies have found that African American families display about 70 various structural formations, versus about 40 among white families. This comparison points to the variability of the African American family structure and to the flexibility of family roles.[29]

File:Blackp1.jpg

African American families tend to be more hierarchical and are more likely to be strict, to hold demanding behavioral standards, and to use physical discipline.[30] Grandparents, especially grandmothers, often play a crucial role in the maintenance of the family. When mothers cannot fulfill their roles, grandmothers often step in to parent children. In 1998, 1.4 million African American children (12%) lived in their grandparents' home (either with or without their parents). Grandparents care is often reciprocated in old age - African American families are much more likely to care for aging or dying family members.[31] The cultural resources for African American families consists of spirituality, mutual support, ethnic identity, adaptive extended family structures, and church as offering both ideological and instrumental support.[32] African American foods reflect creative responses to racial and economic oppression. Under slavery, African Americans were not allowed to eat better cuts of meat, and after Emancipation many often were too poor to afford them. Soul food, a hearty cuisine commonly associated with African Americans in the South (but also common among blacks nationwide), makes creative use of inexpensive products procured through farming and subsistence hunting and fishing.

Pig intestines are boiled and sometimes battered and fried to make "chitterlings", or "chitlins". Hamhocks and neck bones provide seasoning to soups; beans and boiled greens (turnip greens, collard greens, and mustard greens). Other common foods, such as fried chicken and fish, cornbread and "hoppin’ John" (black-eyed peas and rice), are prepared simply. When the African American population was considerably more rural than it generally is today, rabbit, possum, and squirrel, as well as waterfowl, were important additions to the diet. Many of these food traditions are especially predominant in many parts of the rural South. In culturally diverse urban areas, however, urban African Americans, like other ethnic groups, may eat and cook differently from their rural counterparts. Many African Americans have also begun to incorporate Caribbean and African cuisine into their diets.

African American music (also called black music) is a strong presence in African American and American culture in general. In the 21st century, African American genres have become some of the most dominant in mainstream popular music throughout the world. In African American communities across the United States, its music reflects multiple and diverse aspects of African American historical and contemporary life and culture.

Contemporary issues

Main article: African American contemporary issues

Many African Americans have improved their social economic standing significantly since the Civil Rights Movement and recent decades have witnessed the expansion of a robust, African American middle class across the United States. Unprecedented access to higher education and employment has been gained by African Americans in the post-civil rights era, however, due in part to the legacy of slavery, racism and discrimination, African Americans as a group remain at a pronounced economic, educational and social disadvantage in many areas relative to whites. Persistent social, economic and political issues for many African Americans include inadequate health care access and delivery; institutional racism and discrimination in housing, education, policing, criminal justice and employment; crime, poverty and substance abuse. One of the most serious and long standing issues within African American communities is poverty. Poverty itself is a hardship as it is related to marital stress and dissolution, health problems, low educational attainment, deficits in psychological functioning, and crime. In 2004, 24.7% of African American families lived below the poverty level.

Crime, particularly in impoverished, urban communities, is a serious and ongoing issue in America. The African-American population is heavily urbanized and disproportionately poor, two factors which resonate in the nation's crime statistics.

With no system of universal healthcare, access to medical care in the U.S. generally is mediated by income level and employment status. As a result, African-Americans, who as a group are disproportionately poor and unemployed, are more often unsured than non Hispanic whites or Asians. For a great many African-Americans healthcare delivery is limited, or nonexistent. And when they receive healthcare, they are more likely than others in the general population to receive substandard, even injurious medical care. African Americans have a higher prevalence of some chronic health conditions, and a higher rate of out-of-wedlock births relative to the general population. 56% of African American children are born into families where the mother is not married to the biological father. In 1998, single women headed 54% of African American households.

Many of these contemporary issues, problems and potential remedies have been the subject of intense public policy debate in the United States in general, and within the African American community in particular.

Impact on America and the world

From their earliest presence in North America, Africans and African Americans have contributed literature, art, agricultural skills, foods, clothing styles, music, language, social and technological innovation to American culture. The cultivation and use of many agricultural products in the U.S., such as yams, peanuts, rice, okra, sorghum, grits, watermelon, indigo dyes, and cotton, can be traced to African and African American influences. A couple of notable examples include George Washington Carver, who created 300 products from peanuts, 118 products from sweet potatoes, and 75 from pecans; and George Crum, who invented the potato chip in 1853.[33]

African American music is one of the most pervasive African American cultural influences in the United States today and is among the most dominant in mainstream popular music. Hip hop, R&B, funk, rock and roll soul, techno and other contemporary American musical forms originated in black communities and evolved from other black forms of music including blues, jazz, and gospel music. African American derived musical forms have also influenced and been incorporated into virtually every other popular musical genre in the world. African American genres are the most important ethnic vernacular tradition in America as they have developed independent of African traditions from which they arise more so than any other immigrant groups, including Europeans; make up the broadest and longest lasting range of styles in America; and have, historically, been more influential, interculturally, geographically, and economically, than other American vernacular traditions (Stewart 1998, p.3).

Many African American authors have written stories, poems, and essays influenced by their experiences as African Americans, and African American literature is a major genre in American literature. Famous examples include Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and Maya Angelou. African American inventors have created many widely used devices in the world and have contributed to international innovation. Though most slave inventors were nameless, such as the slave owned by the Confederate President Jefferson Davis who designed the ship propeller used by the entire Confederate navy, but following the Civil War, the growth of industry in the United States was tremendous and much of this was made possible with inventions by ethnic minorities. By 1913 over 1,000 inventions were patented by Black Americans. Among the most notable inventors were Jan Matzeliger, who developed the first machine to mass-produce shoes, and Elijah McCoy, who invented automatic lubrication devices for steam engines. Granville Woods had 35 patents to improve electric railway systems including the first system to allow moving trains to communicate. He even sued Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison for stealing his patents and won both cases. Garrett Morgan developed the first automatic traffic signal and gas mask, and Norbert Rilleux who created the technique for converting sugar cane juice into white sugar crystals. Moreover, Rillieux was so brilliant that in 1854 he left Louisiana and went to France where he spent ten years working with the Champollions deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics from the Rosetta Stone. [34]

Lewis Latimer created an inexpensive cotton-thread filament, which made electric light bulbs practical because Edison's original light bulb only burned for a few minutes. More recent inventors include McKinley Jones, who invented the movable refrigeration unit for food transport in trucks and trains and Lloyd Quarterman who with six other Black scientists, worked on the creation of the atomic bomb along (code named the Manhattan Project.) Quaterman also helped develop the first nuclear reactor, which was used in the atomically powered submarine called the Nautilus. [35]

A few other notable examples include the first successful open heart surgery, performed by Dr. Daniel Hale Williams, the conceptualization and establishment of blood banks around the world by Dr. Charles Drew, the air conditioner, patented by Frederick M. Jones. More current contributors include Otis Bodkin, who invented an electrical device used in all guided missiles and all IBM computers, and Colonel Frederick Gregory, who was not only the first Black astronaut pilot but the person who also redesigned the cockpits for the last three space shuttles. Gregory was also on the team that pioneered the microwave instrumentation landing system. In 2000, Bendix Aircraft Company began a worldwide promotion of this microwave instrumentation landing system that can land planes without a pilot. [36]

Political legacy

The gains made by African Americans in the civil rights and Black Power movements not only obtained certain rights for African Americans, but changed American society in far-reaching and fundamentally important ways. Prior to the 1950s, Americans were still living in the shadow of slavery and Jim Crow, when, in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., African Americans and their supporters challenged the nation to "rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed that all men are created equal…."[37]

The Civil Rights Movement marked a sea-change in American social, political, economic and civic life. It brought with it boycotts, sit-ins, demonstrations, court battles, bombings and other violence; prompted worldwide media coverage and intense public debate; forged enduring civic, economic and religious alliances; disrupted and realigned the nation's two major political parties; and over time has changed in fundamental ways the manner in which blacks and whites interact with and relate to one another. Ultimately, the movement resulted in the removal of codified, de jure racial segregation and discrimination from American life and law and heavily influenced the civil and social liberties that many Americans of varied cultural backgrounds expect for themselves. The precedents set by the Civil Rights Movement in terms of strategies and tactics, as well as goals achieved, influenced the Free Speech Movement, the struggles of farm workers and migrant laborers in the United Farm Workers union, the American Indian Movement, the effort to secure equal rights for women, the physically handicapped, the hearing impaired, and other ethnic minorities. Further, the struggle of African Americans for constitutional and human rights endures as a model for disenfranchised and oppressed groups worldwide in their struggles for civil and human rights and self-determination.

Historical controversies

African presence in pre-Columbian America

Main article: Pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact

Though the majority of contemporary African Americans are the descendents of enslaved Africans from West and Central Africa, some researchers have claimed that African presence in North America predates the arrival of Christopher Columbus. Writers on the African presence in pre-Columbian America include Ivan van Sertima, Leo Wiener, Kofi Wangara, R.A. Jairazbhoy, Legrand H. Clegg II, and Floyd W. Hayes III. According to Van Sertima, "The African presence in America before Columbus is of importance not only to African and American history, but to the history of world civilizations. The African presence is proven by stone heads, terra cottas, skeletons, artifacts, techniques and inscriptions, by oral traditions and documented history, by botanical, linguistic and cultural data." Among the evidence commonly cited is an immense carved head with supposedly African-like features found in Central America in 1862. Similar carvings dating back to around 800 B.C have been found since. Step pyramids, such as were built in Egypt, and Peruvian looms resembling those found in Africa have also been found. Certain species of plants once only indigenous to Africa, including strains of cotton and bananas, appear to have been introduced into the Americas from Africa prior to 1492. Numerous Native American words are similar to African ones, and early European explorers such as Vasco Núñez de Balboa wrote of seeing African captives in Indian villages and of hearing of isolated tribes of blacks. These theories are considered inaccurate by some mainstream historians who find the evidence unpersuasive. Van Sertima has also suggested that Malian prince Abubakari II may have led a voyage to the New World around 1312; Abubakari certainly did abdicate the Malian throne to explore the Atlantic, but there is no proof he made it to the Americas.

The Black Statue of Liberty?

Recent research indicates that one of the most famous landmarks in the United States, the Statue of Liberty was originally intended to represent the end of American slavery and originally modeled after a black woman. According to various studies, including research by indepedent scholars and acclaimed publications such as the New York Times and the New York Post, the liberation of African American slaves may have been the primary inspiration for the creation of a Statue of Liberation for Edouard Rene LeFebvre DeLaboulaye. He recruited a young sculptor, Frederic Auguste Bartholdi, to create a Black female slave statue holding a broken chain in her left hand and with broken chains of slavery at her feet. The official web site of the Statue of Liberty states that the statue was given to the people of the United States by the people of France as an expression of friendship and to commemorate the centennial of American Independence (1776). The Encyclopedia Britannica states Bartholdi designed the Statue of Liberty as a monument to the Franco-American alliance of 1778. However, there is controversy by some scholars about whether this is true.

Edouard Rene LeFebvre DeLaboulaye, an internationally renowned lawyer and author of a three-volume history of the United States, first discussed the idea of a symbol to represent the end of U.S. slavery at a dinner party in 1865, at his country home near Versailles, France. In attendance at the dinner party were many abolitionists including Victor Hugo and Frederick Auguste Bartholdi, who had initially been retained to create a sculptured bust of Mr. DeLaboulaye. Victor Hugo and Edouard DeLaboulaye were leaders of the French abolitionist movement. They hated slavery and were in strong support of John Brown when he attempted to arm slaves in West Virginia for rebellion by raiding the armory at Harpers Ferry in 1859. After John Brown failed and was hanged, Hugo and DeLaboulaye took up a collection among the French people and presented a gold medal to John Brown’s widow.

After Abraham Lincoln was elected president of the United States in 1861, the French liberals and abolitionists including Hugo, Bartholdi, and DeLaboulaye urged Lincoln to free the slaves even if civil war resulted. Lincoln was told: "You would become the first country in history to have fought a war against itself to free the internal slave and you would go down in history as a truly great country and a beacon of light to all freedom loving people." The French abolitionists saw the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 as a worthless piece of paper since it only freed slaves in the Confederate controlled states where Lincoln had no jurisdiction and not in Union controlled states where Lincoln was still in authority. When the war ended in 1865, French abolitionists were extremely happy and in addition to again urging Lincoln to free all slaves, DeLaboulaye and Bartholdi requested permission to build and dedicate a monument or colossal statuary to that freeing of all slaves in America. When Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, DeLaboulaye again headed the abolitionists’ committee that presented a gold medal to Mrs. Lincoln, just as he had done for the widow of John Brown.

In 1871, Frederic Bartholdi at the urging of DeLaboulaye undertook a voyage to America to sale his idea of a colossal statue clearly symbolizing the end of chattel slavery in the United States. He was armed with a large terracotta statue and numerous drawings to clearly illustrate his proposed Statue of Liberty. The original African face of the Statue of Liberty was published in The New York Post dated June 17, 1986 as part of the centennial celebration. Bartholdi found little American support for his African slave model. In 1878, as the African head of Miss Liberty first went on display at the Universal Exposition in Paris, France, rampant reaction raged throughout the American South. Bartholdi finally had to abandon his original ideas and changed the Statue of Liberty to the features the United States is now familiar with. The African face was re-sculptured into the face of his mother Madame Bartholdi. A tablet of law tucked into her folded arm that bears the date July 4, 1776, replaced the broken chains in the slave’s left hand. Ironically, the chains were left at the feet but the meaning changed from broken American slavery to broken English tyranny.

On May 18, 1986 during the centennial celebration, The New York Times joined The New York Post in describing the original Statue of Liberty and the intention of DeLaboulaye and Bartholdi in presenting this statue to America. Dr. Jack Felder sums it up clearly: "Once in place, Miss Liberty received a new meaning. She was hailed as the ‘Mother of White Exiles,’ greeting European immigrants seeking freedom in America. Nothing in the original conceptions of Bartholdi or DeLaboulaye envisioned this role for their statue." [38] *Excerpt from Black People & Their Place In World History By: Dr. Leroy Vaughn, MD, MBA*

Other research suggests that Bartholdi's creation was inspired by his trip to Egypt with four artist friends, and there he developed the idea of creating a gigantic statue to embellish the entrance to the Suez Canal (the construction of which began around 1859). Upon his return, he created a model and presented it to a friend, who described it as follows: "It was a beautiful woman clothed in the ancient style, with a headdress in the style of the Egyptian sphinx…The right arm carried the lamp of a lighthouse, the left arm fell along the side of the body. In the mind of the young artist, this statue was to serve as a lighthouse at Suez, at the precise point where the canal opens into the Red Sea." Controversy to the historical roots and intentions of the Statue of Liberty lies in whether it was intended as popularly professed, or was it inspired by the then newfound freedom of slaves. Lack of documentation as to who served as the model for the statue (if, indeed, Bartholdi even used a model) has prompted speculation about her identity. Conjecture about the identity includes Bartholdi’s mother, his wife, his mistress, a glove shop owner in Nancy, and the manager of a brothel in Paris. Apocrypha circulating on the Internet claim that the model was a black woman. There have been some claims that the research into this matter is not legitimate, and that the whole controversy began as an urban legend circulated through the internet and that while freed slaves may have played a role in the French inspiration for the Statue, the primary issue was the representation of the freedoms of the United States in general and that many statements in the past regarding this matter have been misinterpreted. Whoever the original model was or whatever the true origins of the statue may be, the statue stands today as a symbol of liberty.

U.S. Presidents with African Ancestry?

Joel A. Rogers and Dr. Auset Bakhufu have both written books documenting that at least five former presidents of the United States had Black people among their ancestors. If one considers the fact that European men far outnumbered European women during the founding of the U.S., and that the rape and impregnation of an African female slave was not considered a crime, as was documented throughout United States history. The presidents they name include Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Warren Harding, and Calvin Coolidge.

One of the best cases for black ancestry was against Warren G. Harding, the 29th President of the United States from 1921 to 1923, who never denied his ancestry. When Republican leaders called on Harding to deny the "Negro" history, he said, "How should I know whether or not one of my ancestors might have jumped the fence." William Chancellor, a White professor of economics and politics at Wooster College in Ohio, wrote a book on the Harding family genealogy and identified Black ancestors among both parents of President Harding. Justice Department agents allegedly bought and destroyed all copies of this book. Chancellor also said that Harding's only academic credentials included education at Iberia College, which was founded in order to educate fugitive slaves.

Andrew Jackson was the 7th president of the United States from 1829 to 1837. The Virginia Magazine of History, Volume 29, says that Jackson was the son of a White woman from Ireland who had intermarried with a Negro. The magazine also said that his eldest brother had been sold as a slave in Carolina. Joel Rogers says that Andrew Jackson Sr. died long before President Andrew Jackson Jr. was born. He says the president's mother then went to live on the Crawford farm where there were Negro slaves and that one of these men was Andrew Jr's father. Another account of the "brother sold into slavery" story can be found in David Coyle's book entitled "Ordeal of the Presidency" (1960).

Thomas Jefferson was the 3rd president of the United States from 1801 to 1809. The chief attack on Jefferson was in a book written by Thomas Hazard in 1867 called "The Johnny Cake Papers." Hazard interviewed Paris Gardiner, who said he was present during the 1796 presidential campaign, when one speaker states that Thomas Jefferson was "a mean-spirited son of a half-breed Indian squaw and a Virginia mulatto father." In his book entitled "The Slave Children of Thomas Jefferson", Samuel Sloan wrote that Jefferson destroyed all of the papers, portraits, and personal effects of his mother, Jane Randolph Jefferson, when she died on March 31, 1776. He even wrote letters to every person who had ever received a letter from his mother, asking them to return that letter. Sloan says, "There is something strange and even psychopathic about the lengths to which Thomas Jefferson went to destroy all remembrances of his mother, while saving over 18,000 copies of his own letters and other documents for posterity."

Abraham Lincoln was the 16th president of the United States from 1861 to 1865. J. A. Rogers quotes Lincoln's mother, Nancy Hanks, as saying that Abraham Lincoln was the illegitimate son of an African man. William Herndon, Lincoln's law partner, said that Lincoln had very dark skin and coarse hair and that his mother was from an Ethiopian tribe. In Herndon's book entitled "The Hidden Lincoln" he says that Thomas Lincoln could not have been Abraham Lincoln's father because he was sterile from childhood mumps and was later castrated. Lincoln's presidential opponents made cartoon drawings depicting him as a Negro and nicknamed him "Abraham Africanus the First," though this likely had more to do with his political stance towards slavery and not his speculated heritage.

Calvin Coolidge was the 30th president of the United States, and he succeeded Warren Harding. He proudly admitted that his mother was dark because of mixed Indian ancestry. However, Dr. Bakhufu says that by 1800 the New England Indian was hardly any longer pure Indian, because they had mixed so often with Blacks. Calvin Coolidge's mother's maiden name was "Moor". In Europe the name "Moor" was given to all Black people just as the name Negro was used in America.

All of the presidents mentioned were able to pass for White and never acknowledged their Black ancestry. Millions of other children who were descendants of former slaves have also been able to pass for White. As in many cases, this genealogical research is excluded from general American history texts and considered controversial by many modern and historical standards.

The term "African American"

Political overtones

File:Barack Obama portrait 2005.jpg

Barack Obama is the only African American in the U.S. Senate.

The term African American carries important political overtones. Previous terms used to identify Americans of African ancestry were conferred upon the group by whites and were included in the wording of various laws and legal decisions which became tools of white supremacy and oppression. There developed among blacks in America a growing desire for a term of their own choosing.

With the political consciousness that emerged from the political and social ferment of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Negro fell into disfavor among many African Americans. It had taken on a moderate, accommodationist, even Uncle Tomish, connotation. In this period, a growing number of blacks in the U.S., particularly African American youth, celebrated their blackness and their historical and cultural ties with the African continent. The Black Power movement defiantly embraced black as a group identifier—a term they themselves had repudiated only two decades earlier—a term often associated in English with things negative and undesirable, proclaiming, "Black is beautiful".

In this same period, others favored the term Afro-American; this particular term never gained much traction, but by the 1990s, the term African American had emerged as the leading choice of self-referential term. Just as other ethnic groups in American society historically had adopted names descriptive of their families' geographical points of origin (such as Italian-American, Irish-American, Polish-American), many blacks in America expressed a preference for a similar term. Because of the historical circumstances surrounding the capture, enslavement and systematic attempts to de-Africanize blacks in the U.S. under chattel slavery, most African Americans are unable to trace their ancestry to a specific African nation; hence, the entire continent serves as a geographic marker.

For many, African American is more than a name expressive of cultural and historical roots. The term expresses African pride and a sense of kinship and solidarity with others of the African diaspora—an embracing of the notion of pan-Africanism earlier enunciated by prominent African thinkers such as Marcus Garvey, W.E.B. Dubois and, later, George Padmore.

A discussion of the term African American and related terms can be found in the journal article "The Politicization of Changing Terms of Self Reference Among American Slave Descendants" in American Speech v 66 is 2 Summer 1991 p. 133-46.

Who is African American?

To be considered African American in the United States of America, not even half of one's ancestry need be Black. The nation's answer to the question "Who is black?" long has been that a black person is any American with any known Black ancestry. This definition reflects the long experience with racism, white supremacy, slavery, and, later, with Jim Crow laws.

In the Southern United States, it became known as the one-drop rule, meaning that a single drop of "black blood" makes a person "black". Some courts have called it the traceable amount rule, and anthropologists call it the hypodescent rule, meaning that racially mixed persons are assigned the status of the subordinate group. Prior to the one-drop rule, different states had different laws regarding color; in Virginia, for example, a person was legally black if he or she had at least one-sixteenth black ancestry. The one-drop rule was implemented by states in the southern United States during the early to mid-1880's. This definition eventually emerged from the American South to become America's national definition, generally accepted by whites and blacks -- but for different reasons.

White supremacists, whose motivation was racist, considered anyone with African ancestry tainted, inherently inferior morally and intellectually and, thus, subordinate. During slavery, there was also a strong economic incentive to maximize the number of slaves. The designation of anyone possessing any trace of African ancestry as "black", and, therefore, of subordinate status to whites, guaranteed a source of free or cheap labor during slavery] and for decades afterward.

For African Americans, the one-drop system of pigmentocracy was a significant factor in ethnic solidarity. African Americans generally shared a common lot in society and, therefore, common cause -- regardless of their multiracial admixture or social and economic stratification.

White Americans, Indians, other Asians and Arabs are traditionally not considered African American in the United States, though they or their ancestors may have emigrated from the African continent after generations of residence. In relatively rare cases when South African whites, Caucasoid North Africans or Asian immigrants from Africa living in America have self-identified as African American in an attempt to benefit from Affirmative Action or other entitlement programs, their claims generally have not been upheld.

While the one-drop rule holds its legacy to a degree over the American populace in general and the African American populace specifically, the contemporary standard of who is considered or assumed to be black or African American in the United States is more a matter of generally perceived "black" physical traits (such as hair texture, skin pigmentation, lip formation, and/or nose shape etc.) in any visible degree with recent black heritage as opposed to the original one drop rule standard of any trace of known African ancestry for generations rendering a person black, many times despite physical appearance.

In the 1980s, parents of mixed-race children began to organize and lobby for the addition of a more inclusive term of racial designation that would reflect the heritage of their children. As a result, the terms biracial and mixed has become more widely used and accepted to classify people of mixed race, however, there is no demographic classification in U.S. Census for biracial individuals. It is very common in the United States for people of mixed ancestry possessing any recent African American or black heritage to self-identify demographically as black/African American while acknowledging both their African American and other cultural heritages socially.

Due in part to a centuries-old history within the United States of America, historical experiences pre- and post-slavery, and migrations throughout North America, the vast majority of contemporary African Americans possess varying degrees of admixture with European and Native American ancestry. In recent decades, as the multicultural climate of the United States has continued to expand, significant Asian and/or Latin American mixed race (mestizo/mulatto) admixture can also be found throughout various African American populations (especially those in large, ethnically diverse states such as New York and California), though to a much lesser degree and extent historically than European and Native American ancestry. Although the terms mixed, biracial and multiracial are increasingly used, it remains common for those who possess any visible traits of black heritage to identify solely within black/African American ethnic groups.

Terms no longer in common use

The term Negro, which was widely used until the 1960s, has become increasingly considered passé and inappropriate, or derogatory. It is still fairly commonly used by older individuals and in the Deep South. Once widely considered acceptable, Negro fell into disfavor for reasons already herein stated. The self-referential term of preference for Negro became black. the term survives in certain historical organizations such as the United Negro College Fund.

Negroid/black was a term used by European anthropologists first in the 18th century to describe indigenous Africans and their descendants throughout the African diaspora. As with most descriptors of race based on inconsistent, unscientific phenotypical standards, the term is controversial and imprecise. Because of its similarity to Negro, growing numbers of blacks have substituted the term Africoid which, unlike Negroid, encompasses the phenotypes of all indigenous peoples of Africa.

Other largely defunct, seldom used terms to refer to African Americans are mulatto and colored. Even so, the use of the word "colored" can still be found today in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or NAACP. ("People of color" is also used, and can be considered less or equally derogatory, depending on the context.) The American use of the term mulatto originally was used to mean the offspring of a "pure African black" and a "pure European white".

The Latin root of the word is mulo, as in "mule", implying incorrectly that, like mules, which are horse-donkey hybrids, mulattoes are sterile crosses of two different species. For example, in the early 20th century, African American leaders such as Booker T. Washington and Frederick Douglass, who had slaves as mothers and white fathers, were referred to as mulattoes. While not as common as mixed, biracial, or even multiracial, mulatto is rarely used to refer to people of mixed parentage. Because of its roots in slavery, time when racial admixture had a bearing on the worth of a slave, many consider it derogatory.

The term quadroon referred to a person of one-fourth African descent, for example, someone born to a Caucasian father and a mulatto mother. Someone of one-eighth African descent technically was an octoroon, although the term often was used to refer to any white person with even a hint of black ancestry.

Mulatto and terms with the -roon suffix persisted in a social context for a number of decades, but by the mid twentieth century, they no longer were in common use. With the end of slavery, there was no longer a strong commercial incentive to classify blacks by their African-European ancestral admixture. The occasional use of these terms, however, does still persist in electronic media, literature and in some social settings.

Criticisms of the term

There is some criticism of the term African American. To be African American, some argue that an individual would have to be born in Africa, then immigrate to the U.S., and then obtain citizenship. By this definition, an overwhelming majority of black Americans would not be African American, but of African American descent. The term can also be interpreted to include non-black immigrants from Africa to the United States, such as white South Africans or Arab Africans, although these groups generally do not refer to themselves as African American nor generally thought of as such in the United States.

The term African American has also been misused by some in lieu of black, regardless of an individual's nationality, ethnicity or geography. For example, during the 2005 civil unrest in France, CNN anchorwoman Carol Lin referred[39] to the rioters as "African Americans". While the majority of rioters were of North African background, none was known to be a U.S. citizen.

Defenders of the term argue that the term was never meant to encompass all Africans, or even all black people, but only those individuals formerly referred to as American Negroes, primarily people whose ancestors survived the Middle Passage and slavery. Further, in the U.S., which is often described as a nation of immigrants, hyphenated American terms historically have been used to indicate one's national origin, or that of one's ancestors.

By virtue of this, any person born in Africa would take on the name of his or her country of origin. For example, an individual from Nigeria would be called a Nigerian-American, as the term is descriptive of national origin, as opposed to African American. Many prefer the term African American because, although the historical national origin of the majority of black Americans is untraceable, the continent of Africa serves as an indicator of geographic origin and a descriptive term.

Quotations

"I am America. I am the part you won't recognize. But get used to me. Black, confident, cocky; my name, not yours; my religion, not yours; my goals, my own; get used to me". -- Muhammad Ali (born 1942), The Greatest' (1975)

"The common goal of 22 million Afro-Americans is respect as human beings, the God-given right to be a human being. Our common goal is to obtain the human rights that America has been denying us. We can never get civil rights in America until our human rights are first restored. We will never be recognized as citizens there until we are first recognized as humans." -- Malcolm X "Racism: the Cancer that is Destroying America", in Egyptian Gazette (August 25 1964).

"If we accept and acquiesce in the face of discrimination, we accept the responsibility ourselves and allow those responsible to salve their conscience by believing that they have our acceptance and concurrence. We should, therefore, protest openly everything . . . that smacks of discrimination or slander." -- Mary McLeod Bethune (1875-1955) "Certain Unalienable Rights", What the Negro Wants, edited by Rayford W. Logan (1944)

"My father was a slave and my people died to build this country, and I'm going to stay right here and have a part of it, just like you. And no fascist-minded people like you will drive me from it. Is that clear?" Paul Robeson (1898-1976) testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee, June 12, 1956

"The workings of the human heart are the profoundest mystery of the universe. One moment they make us despair of our kind, and the next we see in them the reflection of the divine image." - Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932) The Marrow of Tradition (1901)

"Tears will get you sympathy. Sweat will get you change."-- Jesse Jackson, minister and activist

"We, the people." It is a very eloquent beginning. But when that document [the Preamble to the US Constitution] was completed on the seventeenth of September in 1787 I was not included in that "We, the people." I felt somehow for many years that George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, just left me out by mistake. But through the process of amendment, interpretation and court decision I have finally been included in "We, the people." - Barbara Jordan (1936-1996) statement made before the House Committee on the Judiciary, July 25, 1974

"It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others. . . . One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warrings ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder." --W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) The Souls of Black Folk (1903)

"We have come over a way that with tears has been watered, We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered." -- James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) "Lift Every Voice and Sing", stanza 2 (1900)

"We should emphasize not Negro History, but the Negro in history. What we need is not a history of selected races or nations, but the history of the world void of national bias, race hate, and religious prejudice. -- Carter Woodson (1875-1950) on founding Negro History Week, 1926

"Freedom is never given; it is won." -- A. Philip Randolph (1889-1979) keynote speech given at the Second National Negro Congress in 1937

"If you will protest courageously, and yet with dignity and Christian love, when the history books are written in future generations, the historians will have to pause and say, "There lived a great people—a black people—who injected new meaning and dignity into the veins of civilization." -- Martin Luther King Jr.

African American population

The following gives the African American population in the U.S. over time, based on U.S. Census figures. (Numbers from years 1920 to 2000 are based on U.S. Census figures as given by the Time Almanac of 2005, p 377)

Year	Number	Percentage of total population
1790	757,208	19.3% (highest historic percentage)
1800	1,002,037	18.9%
1810	1,377,808	19.0%
1820	1,771,656	18.4%
1830	2,328,642	18.1%
1840	2,873,648	16.8%
1850	3,638,808	15.7%
1860	4,441,830	14.1%
1870	4,880,009	12.7%
1880	6,580,793	13.1%
1890	7,488,788	11.9%
1900	8,833,994	11.6%
1910	9,827,763	10.7%
1920	10.5 million	9.9%
1930	11.9 million	9.7% (lowest historic percentage)
1940	12.9 million	9.8%
1950	15.0 million	10.0%
1960	18.9 million	10.5%
1970	22.6 million	11.1%
1980	26.5 million	11.7%
1990	30.0 million	12.1%
2000	36.6 million	12.3%

note: The CIA World Factbook gives the current 2005 figure as 13.5% [40]

See also

• Political Correctness
• Black (people)
• Category:African Americans
• African American National Biography Project
• List of African Americans
• List of African-American-related topics
• List of U.S. metropolitan areas with large African-American populations
• List of U.S. cities with large African-American populations
• Race, Hyphenated American
• African American Art
• Terminology: Blacks, Colored, Creole, Negro
• African American history
  • Racial segregation
  • Black nationalism
• African American literature
• African American Vernacular English
• Affirmative action
• Black Indians
• Atlanticism

Other groups

• Americo-Liberian
• Afro-Argentinian
• Afro-Brazilian
• Afro-Cuban
• Afro-Ecuadorian
• Afro-Filipino
• Afro-Italian
• Afro-Latin American
• Afro-Mexican
• Afro-Peruvian
• Afro-Trinidadian
• African American culture
• African American music
• Black British

Further reading

• Jack Salzman, ed., Encyclopedia of Afro-American culture and history, New York, NY  : Macmillan Library Reference USA, 1996
• African American Lives, edited by Henry L. Gates, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Oxford University Press, 2004 - more than 600 biographies
• From Slavery to Freedom. A History of African Americans, by John Hope Franklin, Alfred Moss, McGraw-Hill Education 2001, standard work, first edition in 1947
• Black Women in America - An Historical Encyclopedia, Darlene Clark Hine (Editor), Rosalyn Terborg-Penn (Editor), Elsa Barkley Brown (Editor), Paperback Edition, Indiana University Press 2005
• van Sertima, Ivan "They Came Before Columbus"

References

• Brandon S. Centerwall, "Race, Socioeconomic Status and Domestic Homicide, Atlanta, 1971-72", 74 AM. J. PUB. HLTH. 813, 815 (1984)
• Darnell F. Hawkins, "Inequality, Culture, and Interpersonal Violence", 12 HEALTH AFFAIRS 80 (1993)
• Jerome A. Neapolitan, "Cross-National Variation in Homicide; Is Race A Factor?" 36 CRIMINOLOGY 139 (1998)
• Bohlen, C. "Does She Say the Same Things in her Native Tongue?" New York Times, May 18, 1986
• Felder, J. (1992) From the Statue of Liberty to the Statue of Bigotry. New York: Jack Felder.
• Felder, J. "Black Origins and Lady Liberty". Daily Challenge. July 16, 1990
• Sinclair, T. Was Original Statue a Tribute to Blacks? New York Voice, July 5, 1986
• The New York Post, "Statue of Liberty" June 17, 1986.
• Altman, Susan "The Encyclopedia of African-American Heritage"
• The Music of Black Americans: A History. Eileen Southern. W. W. Norton & Company; 3rd edition, (1997). ISBN 0-393-97141-4
• Stewart, Earl L. (1998). African American Music: An Introduction. ISBN 0-02-860294-3.

External links

• Definition of African American from MedicineNet
• Article detailing the problems of defining African American
• An Essay About African-American NFL quarterbacks and the discrimination they face during intelligence testing
• "Of Arms & the Law: Don Kates on Afro-American Homicide Rates"
• Scientific American Magazine (June 2006) Trace Elements Reconnecting African-Americans to an ancestral past.
• USF Africana Project A guide to researching African American genealogy

• African American names An extensive list of common African American baby names and their meaning.
• NeoBlack.Com: African-American Poetry A place to read & share poems, engage in creative soul writings, meet black talents, store photos, etc.