African Americans

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**African Americans** (also referred to as **Black Americans** or **Afro-Americans**) are an ethnic group of Americans with partial or total ancestry from any of the Black racial groups of Africa. The term *African American* generally denotes descendants of enslaved Africans who are from the United States, while some Black immigrants or their children may also come to identify as African-American.

African Americans constitute the second largest racial group in the US, after White Americans and the third largest ethnic group after Hispanic and Latino Americans. Most African Americans are descendants of enslaved people within the boundaries of the present United States. On average, African Americans are of West/Central African and European descent, and some also have Native American ancestry. According to U.S. Census Bureau data, African immigrants generally do not self-identify as African American. The overwhelming majority of African immigrants identify instead with their own respective ethnicities (≈95%). Immigrants from some Caribbean, Central American, and South American nations and their descendants may or may not also self-identify with the term.

African-American history began in the 16th century, with Africans from West Africa being sold to European slave traders and transported across the Atlantic to the Thirteen Colonies. After arriving in the Americas, they were sold as slaves to European colonists and put to work on plantations, particularly in the southern colonies. A few were able to achieve freedom through manumission or escape and founded independent communities before and during the American Revolution. After the United States was founded in 1783, most Black people continued to be enslaved, being most concentrated in the American South, with four million enslaved only liberated during and at the end of the Civil War in 1865. During Reconstruction, they gained citizenship and the right to vote, but due to White supremacy, they were largely treated as second-class citizens and found themselves soon disenfranchised in the South. These circumstances changed due to further development of the Black community, participation in the military conflicts of the United States, substantial migration out of the South, the elimination of legal racial segregation, and the civil rights movement which sought political and social freedom. In 2008, Barack Obama became the first African American to be elected President of the United States.

## References

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 https://census.gov/library/visualizations/interactive/race-and-ethnicity-in-the-united-state-2010-and-2020-census.html. 2020 U.S. Census
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3. ↑ "The Black Population: 2010" (PDF), Census.gov, September 2011. "Black or African Americans" refers to a person having origins in any of the Black racial groups of Africa. The Black racial category includes people who marked the "Black, African Am., or Negro" checkbox. It also includes respondents who reported entries such as African American; Sub-Saharan African entries, such as Kenyan and Nigerian; and Afro-Caribbean entries, such as Haitian and Jamaican."
4. ↑ African Americans Law & Legal Definition: "African Americans are citizens or residents of the United States who have origins in any of the black populations of Africa. In the United States, the terms are generally used for Americans with at least partial Sub-Saharan African ancestry."
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10. ↑ Gomez, Michael A: *Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South*, p. 29. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina, 1998.
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## Further reading

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* Finkelman, Paul, ed. *Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass* (3 vol Oxford University Press, 2006).
* Finkelman, Paul, ed. *Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-first Century* (5 vol. Oxford University Press, USA, 2009).
* John Hope Franklin, Alfred Moss, *From Slavery to Freedom. A History of African Americans*, McGraw-Hill Education 2001, standard work, first edition in 1947.
* Gates, Henry L. and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham (eds), *African American Lives*, Oxford University Press, 2004 – more than 600 biographies.
* Darlene Clark Hine, Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, Elsa Barkley Brown (eds), *Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia*, Paperback Edition, Indiana University Press 2005.
* Kranz, Rachel. *African-American Business Leaders and Entrepreneurs* (Infobase Publishing, 2004).
* Salzman, Jack, ed. *Encyclopedia of Afro-American culture and history*, New York City : Macmillan Library Reference USA, 1996.
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## External links

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* Richard Thompson Ford Name Games, *Slate*, September 16, 2004. Article discussing the problems of defining *African American*
* "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
* "The Definition of Political Absurdity", *San Francisco Chronicle*, March 2, 2007
* African American archaeology in Sacramento, California pdf
* African American archaeology in Oakland, California – see Part III, Chap 10
* Black History related original documents and photos
* President Obama's Speech to the NAACP on July 16, 2009 – full video by MSNBC
* Frank Newport, "Black or African American?", Gallup, September 28, 2007
* "The Long Journey of Black Americans" – slideshow by *The First Post*

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