African-American history started with the forced transportation of Black Africans to North America in the 16th and 17th centuries. The European colonization of the Americas, and the resulting Atlantic slave trade, encompassed a large-scale transportation of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic. Of the roughly 10–12 million Black Africans who were sold in the Atlantic slave trade, either to Europe or the Americas, approximately 388,000 were sent to North America. After arriving in various European colonies in North America, the enslaved Africans were sold to European colonists, primarily to work on cash crop plantations. A group of enslaved Africans arrived in the English Virginia Colony in 1619, marking the beginning of slavery in the colonial history of the United States; by 1776, roughly 20% of the British North American population was of Black African descent, both free and enslaved.
During the American Revolutionary War, in which the Thirteen Colonies gained independence and began to form the United States, Black soldiers fought on both the British and the American sides. After the conflict ended, the Northern United States gradually abolished slavery. However, the population of the American South, which had an economy dependent on plantations operation by slave labor, increased their usage of slaves to pick cotton, which became the basis of the industrial revolution underway in England and New England. Slavery moved westward from the Southern states during the westward expansion of the United States.Leonard L. Richards, Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780–1860 (2000) p. 3) During this period, numerous enslaved African Americans escaped into free states and Canada via the Underground Railroad. Disputes over slavery between the Northern and Southern states led to the American Civil War, in which 178,000 African Americans served on the Union side. During the war, Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation which ended slavery as soon as the Union armies arrived. After the war ended, the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery in the U.S., except as punishment for a crime.
In 1863 the Reconstruction era began, in which African Americans living in the South were granted limited rights compared to their white counterparts. After 1876 white opposition to these advancements led to most African Americans living in the South to be disfranchised, and a system of racial segregation known as the Jim Crow laws was passed in the Southern states. Beginning in the early 20th century, in response to poor economic conditions, segregation and lynchings, over 6 million African Americans, primarily rural, migrated out of the South to other regions of the United States in search of opportunity. The nadir of American race relations led to civil rights efforts to overturn discrimination and racism against African Americans.Finkelman, Paul. ed. 2009. Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present (5 vol.). Oxford University Press. . In 1954, these efforts coalesced into a broad unified movement led by civil rights activists such as Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. This succeeded in persuading the federal government to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed racial discrimination.Ellis, Sylvia. Freedom's Pragmatist: Lyndon Johnson and Civil Rights (U Press of Florida, 2013).
The 2020 United States census reported that 46,936,733 respondents identified as African Americans, forming roughly 14.2% of the American population. Of those, over 2.1 million immigrated to the United States as citizens of modern African states. African Americans have made major contributions to the culture of the United States, including literature, cinema and music. White supremacy has impacted African American history, resulting in a legacy characterized by systemic oppression, violence, and ongoing disadvantage that the African American community continues to this day.
The legacy of European colonization left African Americans to experience health disparities, economic disadvantages, racial discrimination and racial segregation to this day. African Americans were brought to the United States because of the Native American genocide in the United States. During the 17th century, European colonists in North America increasingly relied on enslaved Africans for labor, as they were a more affordable and abundant workforce compared to Indigenous Native Americans and indentured servants, who were primarily impoverished and poor white Europeans.
Enslavement and colonial era
Native Americans were first enslaved before African Americans; however, their populations declined sharply due to diseases introduced by European colonizers. The Spanish, in particular, devastated Native American communities. Illnesses such as smallpox spread rapidly among Native Americans, destroying entire villages. Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, multiple major epidemics struck Native American populations, hindering their ability to resist European colonial expansion. As a result, European settlers eventually began enslaving Africans instead. Slavery in the Americas began with Italian explorer and navigator Christopher Columbus. Columbus is said to have brought the first African slaves to the Americas in the late 1490s during his voyages to the Caribbean Island of Hispaniola, which is now present day Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The European trade of enslaving Africans began in the 1400s when the Portuguese captured African slaves in Ras Nouadhibou (Cabo Branco) in present-day Mauritania and then took them to Portugal as slaves. In the area that would later become the United States, there were no African slaves before the Spanish took control of Florida in the early 1500s.
White people imposed slavery on Africans because they deemed black people as inferior and suitable for slavery. Africans were also transported to the colonies because they possessed agricultural knowledge relevant to the cultivation of new crops such as rice in the Americas, making them useful to white planters. From 1750 to 1775, the majority of over 50,000 enslaved black Africans were forcibly taken from the aptly named Rice Coast, a traditional rice-growing area situated between Guinea and Guinea-Bissau, as well as the western Ivory Coast, with its core located in present-day Sierra Leone and Liberia. Since rice was not native to the Americas and European plantation owners lacked the knowledge required for its cultivation, enslaved Africans were brought in to support its farming, supplying the eastern seaboard of the United States, Britain, and provisioning various regions of the British Caribbean. In the antebellum South, cotton was regarded as the king of commodities but then rice was undoubtedly the queen. Rice brought unparalleled economic strength, transforming the cities of Charleston, South Carolina and Savannah, Georgia into bustling cosmopolitan ports. White people also used the Curse of Ham biblical belief to justify slavery. African men, women, and children were abducted and kidnapped from various African regions that include present-day Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. They were seized during raids conducted by slave traders or sold by African leaders amid local conflicts. Evidence of this can be found in writings by individuals who experienced enslavement. Olaudah Equiano in his autobiography recounted his violent capture from his village, alongside his sister, in the Kingdom of Benin. Another author, Ottobah Cugoano, narrated his experience of being assaulted and threatened by armed men. Enslaved African individuals were shackled together in groups and transported by boat along the waterways of West Africa to the coast. At this location, traders awaited to sell these enslaved individuals to European merchants. Following the 1707 Act of Union, England and Scotland merged to form the Kingdom of Great Britain. British participation in the slave trade escalated during the 1700s after the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) granted them the authority to sell enslaved individuals within the Spanish Empire. The British empire later enslaved Africans in the United States after the Spanish. By the year 1770, British vessels were engaged in the transportation of approximately 42,000 Africans annually each year. The earliest records of the Atlantic slave trade comes from a Portuguese seamen named Gomes Eannes de Azurara, who witnessed a Portuguese raid on a village in Africa.
The Doctrine of Discovery, which was proclaimed by the Spanish former head of the Catholic Church Pope Alexander VI in the year 1493, asserted the entitlement of any Christian nation to seize the territories of non-Christians under the pretext of saving their souls. In the same year, the pope also announced that the non-Christian residents of these territories could be subjected to enslavement for this very reason. Slavery had been a longstanding practice in Africa before the white Europeans arrived, and thus the mechanisms for capturing and transporting human cargo were already established.
Before arriving in the Americas, On European slave ships sub-saharan Africans transported to the New World suffered the anguish and trauma of enslavement caused by white men, regardless of their gender, age, or nationality. Captured deep within the African continent, they endured a prolonged and perilous journey to the coast. Often traveling for months, they were transferred from one group to another, as numerous African nations were involved in the slave trade. However, regardless of who led the captives to their unwelcome fate, the conditions of their journey were exceedingly grueling. In certain regions, approximately forty percent of the Africans perished between their initial capture in the interior and their arrival at the coast. The captives then confronted the horrific transatlantic voyage. The extent of human suffering and the staggering death toll of men and women crammed into the foul-smelling holds of the ships remains hard to comprehend. Stripped of their clothing and all possessions, they boarded the vessel and encountered—often for the first time—white men. Wielding heated irons to brand their captives in an intensely personal manner, these 'white men with dreadful appearances, flushed faces, and long hair' inflicted more than just physical scars. Many enslaved Africans believed that these white men were allied with Satan, if not the devils themselves. For other Africans, the trauma of having their skin burned confirmed their fate as being destined for the slaughterhouse, to be consumed by cannibals, who had marked them in a manner similar to how animals were branded. Africans were usually purchased by white people at slave auctions.