United States

African Americans

From colonial times, African Americans arrived in large numbers as slaves and lived primarily on plantations in the South. In 1790 slave and free blacks together comprised about one-fifth of the U.S. population. As the nation split between Southern slave and Northern free states prior to the American Civil War, the Underground Railroad spirited thousands of escaped slaves from the South to the North. In the century following abolition, this migration pattern became more pronounced as some six million blacks moved from rural areas of the South to northern and western cities between 1916 and 1970 during the so-called Great Migration. On the heels of this massive internal shift came new immigrants from Western Africa and the West Indies, principally Haiti, Jamaica, and the Dominican Republic.

The American civil rights movement in the 1950s and ’60s awakened the country’s conscience to the plight of African Americans, who had long been denied first-class citizenship. The movement used nonviolence and passive resistance to change discriminatory laws and practices, primarily in the South. As a result, increases in median income and college enrollment among the black population were dramatic in the late 20th century. Widening access to professional and business opportunities included noteworthy political victories. By the early 1980s black mayors in Chicago, Los Angeles, Cleveland, Baltimore, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C., had gained election with white support. In 1984 and 1988 Jesse Jackson ran for U.S. president; he was the first African American to contend seriously for a major party nomination. In 2008 Barack Obama became the first African American elected to the country’s highest office. However, despite an expanding black middle-class and equal-opportunity laws in education, housing, and employment, African Americans continue to face staunch social and political challenges, especially those living in the inner cities, where some of American society’s most difficult problems (such as crime and drug trafficking) are acute.