African American history

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

Contents

1 Early history
2 The Black Yankees

2.1 Origins of today's African American ethnicity
2.2 African American ethnic traits
2.3 The integration versus separatism pendulum
2.4 The color line in the north

3 The Civil War, Reconstruction and its aftermath: 1860–1890

3.1 Cultural integration of former slaves
3.2 Cultural integration of former bi-racial slaveowners
3.3 The collapse of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow

4 The Great Migration and the Harlem Renaissance
5 Two World Wars
6 The Civil Rights Movement
7 Political and economic empowerment
8 Historians
9 Notes
10 See also
11 Further reading
12 External links

Early history

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

They came from eight distinct slave-trading regions in Africa. The regions were Senegambia (Present day Senegal, Gambia, Guinea and Guinea Bissau), Sierra Leone (also includes the area of present day Liberia), Windward Coast (present day Ivory Coast), Gold Coast (present day Ghana and surrounding areas), Bight of Benin (Present day Togo, Benin and western Nigeria), Bight of Biafra (Nigeria south of the Benue River, Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea), Central Africa (Gabon, Angola, Democratic Republic of the Congo) and Southeast Africa (Mozambique and Madagascar). The majority of slaves that were taken to what would become the United States came from the Senegambian, Sierra Leone, Windward Coast, Bight of Benin, and Bight of Biafra. Certain slaves were more favored than others because of experience in agriculture or perceived docile natures.

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

Mali: Mandinka, Fulani, Bambara, Songhai, and Dogon
Senegal, Gambia, & Guinea: Wolof, Serer, Fula, Peuhl, Balante, and Papel
Sierra Leone & Liberia: Temne, Mende, Kissi, Goree, Kru, and Vai
Ivory Coast: Gullah, Bassa, and Grebo
Ghana: Ashanti, Fante, and Ga
Benin & Togo: Fon, Ewe, and Mina
Nigeria: Yoruba, Nupe, Edo-Bini, Igbo, Ibibio, Ijaw, Ibani, and Efik
Cameroon: Duala
Angola: BaKongo, Imbangala, Mbunda, and Lunda
Congo: Luba

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

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

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

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

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

A former slave displays the telltale criss-cross, keloid scars from being bullwhipped. It was common practice to use a bullwhip or a cat-o-nine-tails and then rub salt, or a combination of salt and hot pepper, into the open wounds, which had a dual purpose. The salt helped ward off infection, but both ingredients also acted as irritants, heightening and prolonging suffering.

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

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

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

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

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

The Black Yankees

Origins of today's African American ethnicity

Early in the nineteenth century, the American North saw the emergence of ethnic self-identities that became political power groups: Germans, Irish, Jews, Hispanics (from Louisiana and Florida), and African Americans. Section adapted from "Chapter 13. The Color Line Created African-American Ethnicity in the North" of Legal History of the Color Line: The Rise and Triumph of the One-Drop Rule by Frank W. Sweet, ISBN 0939479230, which contains the detailed citations and sources. A summary of this chapter, with endnotes, is also available online at [The Color Line Created African-American Ethnicity in the North]. Each ethnic community was synthetic in the sense that, while adopting symbols (traditions, language, rituals) associated with some land of origin, it absorbed diversity under a single label. Residents of what would become western Germany (Bavaria or Hesse-Kassel), for example, did not think of themselves as kin to Prussians until after they became a U.S. " as a single word (rather like "damnYankee" in the U.S. South).The process is visible today in the Anglo-American-invented label "Hispanic," which covers both Puerto Ricans and Chicanos, despite their having little in common. A useful introduction to ethnicity formation is Werner Sollors, The Invention of Ethnicity (New York, 1989), especially the introduction and the chapter by Kathleen Conzen.

Despite such initial divisions, immigrants learned that power in America comes to those who command bloc votes. Each ethnic label became an umbrella designation covering all who joined. Voting was not the only manifestation of group power. Parades, public rituals, even riots and gang wars pitted group against group. Ultimately however, the aggressive, in-your-face umbrella ethnicities of the period arose as a consequence of democracy and surged with the widening Jacksonian franchise. Ethnic groups were voting blocs.David A. Gerber, The Making of an American Pluralism: Buffalo, New York, 1825-1860 (Urbana, 1989), 164; Elliott J. Gorn, "'Good-Bye Boys, I Die a True American': Homicide, Nativism, and Working-Class Culture in Antebellum New York City," The Journal of American History, 74 (no. 2, September 1987), 388-410; Kerby A. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (New York, 1985); Richard Briggs Stott, Workers in the Metropolis: Class, Ethnicity, and Youth in Antebellum New York City (Ithaca, N.Y., 1990); David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London, 1991); Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York, 1995); Susan G. Davis, Parades and Power: Street Theatre in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 1986).

One would think that African Americans would have been initially more diverse than European Americans because Africa is larger and more populous than Europe. The geographic triangle bounded by Cape Town, Casablanca, and Cairo is a vast kaleidoscope of thousands of cultures, religions, and languages. Nevertheless, African Americans were not exempt from the need to define themselves as an ethnic group. Like other ethnicities, Black Yankees in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Cincinnati also conducted parades, processions, and festivals to, "strengthen and solidify the boundaries of class and ethnicity that buttressed and circumscribed American politics of self-interest." According to Elizabeth Rauh Bethel:

Amid much pomp and parade, with carriaged processions of Revolutionary War veterans, members of benevolent and literary societies, and the committee on arrangements, entire communities made a public show of their "industry, integrity, [and] temperance." Women and children joined the parades, waving flags from the windows of omnibuses. Along waterways like the Hudson and Susquehanna rivers, chartered steamboats brought 'large delegations from different localities' to common points of celebration like Geneva, New York, and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. In a resonant declaration of Pan-African unity, African-American communities made clear [their solidarity].Elizabeth Rauh Bethel, The Roots of African-American Identity (New York, 1997), 3, 6.

In Cincinnati, a three-way fight for jobs, among Black Yankees, Irish, and Germans, led to an attempt to exile Black Yankees from the state.Elizabeth Rauh Bethel (1997), 119-24. The struggle among Irish, German, and African American laborers for lucrative work on Cincinnati's docks led to demonstrations, then parades, then riots. Previously, Cincinnati's African American community had provided the bulk of construction laborers, porters, vendors, shoeblacks, messengers, and domestic workers—steady work in an expanding economy. The growing political power of Irish and German immigrants struggling to distinguish themselves as White men too, manifested itself in the enforcement of the repressive Ohio Black Codes, laws that had long been on the books but ignored.Enacted in 1804 and 1807, the Ohio Black Codes were meant to stop Blacks from moving to Ohio. The most onerous of these was a law that required Blacks to pay a $500 bond signed by two White men within 20 days of arrival in order to remain in the state. See Leon F. Litwack, North of Slavery: the Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860 (Chicago, 1961), 72. The city expelled Black Yankee children from public schools and forbade the construction of Black private schools.

By the summer of 1829, Cincinnati's African Americans were avoiding going out in public. They stopped going to hotels, restaurants, theaters, or riding public transportation. They found that they were no longer welcome to attend European American church services.Elizabeth Rauh Bethel (1997), 119-24. Former Virginian John Malvin organized a petition drive calling for a repeal of the Black codes. In angry reaction, the city council gave each Black Cincinnatian thirty days to leave the state or post $500 surety bond (roughly $25,000 apiece, in today's money). Desperate, Malvin negotiated a sixty-day extension from the city in order for the refugees to find new homes in exile. The city's White zealots—led by not-yet-fully-White immigrant German and Irish laborers—responded to the extension on August 19, 1829 with a riot that burned down all of Cincinnati's Black residential areas.Carter G. Woodson, "The Negroes of Cincinnati Prior to the Civil War," The Journal of Negro History, 1 (no. 1, January 1916), 1-22.

The expulsion order and subsequent arson riot shocked Americans everywhere. It was even reported overseas. Compassion for the victims sparked collection drives for money, food, and clothing even among Southern slave-owners, and brought about the first meeting of the National Convention movement. Zephaniah Kingsley, one of Florida's wealthiest slaveowners, a man who, seven years earlier had been appointed by President Monroe to Florida's Legislative Council wrote that, "[racial tolerance] may be considered as a standard measure by which the comparative state of civilization... may be fairly estimated." He opined that Ohio had stepped outside the limits of civilized society, "in its acts of oppression against its free colored inhabitants, by which their existence seems so far to have been threatened...."Zephaniah Kingsley, Balancing Evils Judiciously: The Proslavery Writings of Zephaniah Kingsley, ed. Daniel W. Stowell (Gainesville, 2000), 77-78. Of course, slave-owning planter Kingsley was not impartial regarding either race relations or slavery. His slave-trading wife (she had her own plantations) was from Senegal, and so his children (who were also slave-owning planters) were of 40-50 percent sub-Saharan genetic admixture. By the turn of the twentieth century, most of their descendants had assimilated into upper-crust White Florida society.

Looked at rationally, immigrant Irish and German resentment of Cincinnati's African-American workers made little sense. From the viewpoint of strict self-interest, the most severe competition that each unskilled Irish worker faced in selling his labor was not from already-employed Black workers, but from the dozens of identically unskilled Irish laborers who had just stepped off the same boat.David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London, 1991). Membership in an ethnicity in many ways resembled membership in a gang.Herbert Asbury, The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld, 1st Paragon House ed. (New York, 1990).

African American ethnic traits

The newly formed Black Yankee ethnicity of the early 1800s differed from today's African-American ethnicity. Modern African-American ethnic traits come from a post-bellum blending of three cultural streams: the Black Yankee ethnicity of 1830, the slave traditions of the antebellum South, and the free Creole or Mulatto elite traditions of the lower South. Each of the three sources provided elements of the religious, linguistic, and folkloric traditions found in today's African-American ethnicity.See Joel Williamson, New People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the United States (New York, 1980) for a summary of this threefold blending. For a more detailed account, see Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race: Black/White Relations in the American South Since Emancipation (New York, 1984).

Although less wealthy than the Louisiana Creoles, the Black Yankees had developed a strong supportive culture that could withstand the buffeting of social upheaval. They were usually ostracized from mainstream society due to the endogamous color line. According to contemporary accounts, they responded with grace and dignity, making a virtue of their separation. It was not uncommon to see lines of quiet, well-behaved children following their parents to Sunday service with the gravitas and pietas of Roman elders.The chief Roman virtues. Elizabeth Rauh Bethel, The Roots of African-American Identity (New York, 1997). Their preachers taught that they were put on earth to be tested. Their lot was to serve as example to White folks of how civilized Christians behave.

Most Black Yankees distinguished themselves from slaves—indeed many families had no history of slavery but descended from indentured servants. Nevertheless, many were active contributors to and activists in the abolition movement. This is in strong contrast to the biracial elite of the Gulf coast and Latin America, who owned slaves and defended slavery as a noble institution.Zephaniah Kingsley, Balancing Evils Judiciously: The Proslavery Writings of Zephaniah Kingsley, ed. Daniel W. Stowell (Gainesville, 2000). The contrast was due to the lack of an independent African-American ethnic self-identity among Hispanic planters of part-African ancestry, and this lack was due, in turn, to the absence of an endogamous color line.

In some ways, Black Yankee culture (religion, language, music, dance, food, costume) was indistinguishable from that of White Yankees. For example, the boisterous interactive style of many African-American church services today would have been alien to them, since it originated in the slaveholding South. Daniel A. Payne was a Black Yankee, a career AME minister in Philadelphia. He was a sympathizer of the Underground Railroad, so its organizers asked him to preach to a group of newly escaped slaves. His diary reports:

After the sermon, they formed a ring, and with coats off sung, clapped their hands and stamped their feet in a most ridiculous and heathenish way. I requested that the pastor go and stop their dancing. At his request they stopped their dancing and clapping of hands, but remained singing and rocking their bodies to and fro. Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans: A History, 2nd ed. (New York, 1983), 130.

Although the endogamous color line was stricter in the antebellum North than in the antebellum South, it was less strict in 1850 and 1860 than in 1970 and 1980. The children of interracial marriages in the Northeast were usually census-reported as "Negroes" rather than as "Mulattoes." This resembles today's customs and contrasts with the more permeable color lines of the lower South. According to Joel Williamson, "In 1850 in the five states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin, mulattoes actually outnumbered blacks by 24,000 to 22,000, while in the older-settled New England and Middle Atlantic states blacks outnumbered mulattoes by about three to one."Joel Williamson, New People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the United States (New York, 1980).

The Black Yankees set many of the patterns of modern African-American life. They developed the supportive church-centered social structure found in African-American communities today. Long before the South was segregated, they faced isolation and cyclical rejection by mainstream society. They were also the first to articulate the dilemma that continues to occupy African American thinkers to this day: integration versus separatism.

The integration versus separatism pendulum

The ethnicity invented by Black Yankees oscillated between two poles, just as African-American ethnicity does today. It was "a cleavage within the community, similar... to one familiar today between aspects of Negro life started by and based on European American institutions and those that are indigenous or nativistic."The quotation, as well as an analysis of the two poles of ongoing Black Yankee self-image (as Africans who happen to be in America versus as Americans who happen to come from Africa) can be found in Adelaide M. Cromwell, The Other Brahmins: Boston's Black Upper Class, 1750-1950 (Fayetteville, 1994), 33. At one extreme, they coined the term African American, invented a fantasy image of Africa as a civilized, Eden-like homeland, strove to emigrate to lands where Africans still ruled, and demanded segregated churches for worship by their adults and segregated schools for the education of their children in order to preserve their cultural integrity. At the other extreme, they considered themselves true Americans, their families having lived in the United States since long before the first Irish and Germans arrived, demanded integrated schools where their children could learn American mainstream values, demanded full membership in the body politic, and rejected colonization overseas as unjust exile. Although at any given instant in time, at least some Black Yankees populated the entire ideological spectrum between these two extremes of separatism on the one hand and integration on the other, fashions changed over the years.For an account of the formation of the Black Yankee component of African-American ethnicity, see Scott Hancock, "The Elusive Boundaries of Blackness: Identity Formation in Antebellum Boston," Journal of Negro History, 84 (no. 2, Spring 1999), 115-29.

From the Revolution to about 1826, Black Yankee ethnic self-image leaned towards separatism. They spoke longingly of returning to Africa. Yet, few emigrated although many had the opportunity. Instead, Africa became a fantasized Eden, spoken of in hushed tones the way European Jews would say "next year in Jerusalem." They made up rituals and customs, which they attributed to the Dark Continent. They founded the traditional African-American churches. The African Society, founded in 1796, was the first known use of the term African to denote upper-class Black Yankees. Using his own money, Black Yankee ship's captain Paul Cuffee of Boston personally conveyed 38 emigrants who wanted to return to Africa to Sierra Leone in 1815. Elizabeth Rauh Bethel, The Roots of African-American Identity (New York, 1997), 66-67. Bostonian Prince Hall, who was born on September 12, 1748 in Barbados, organized the first chapter of African-American Masonry on March 6, 1775 and led the 1787 petition drive to open segregated schools in Boston, so that African-American children could be taught by members of their own culture.A brief biography of Prince Hall can be found in Adelaide M. Cromwell, The Other Brahmins: Boston's Black Upper Class, 1750-1950 (Fayetteville, 1994), 31. After the Revolution, Peter J. Williams, Jr. and Samuel Cornish founded segregated schools for African-American children in New York city.Elizabeth Rauh Bethel, The Roots of African-American Identity (New York, 1997), 66-67. And shortly before the great Philadelphia yellow fever epidemic of 1793, Richard Allen and Absalom Jones both founded Black churches, the former the AME Church, the latter an African branch of the Episcopal Church. Allen and Jones both vowed that their churches, "would admit none to be enrolled members but descendants of the African race."Bethel (1997), 70.

The Black Yankee ideological pendulum swung the other way around 1826. Black Yankees demanded full citizenship. Many Black Yankee families tried to enroll their children in mainstream schools.Helen Tunnicliff Catterall and James J. Hayden, Judicial Cases Concerning American Slavery and The Negro (New York, 1968), 5:4. And Africa was no longer seen as a desirable homeland. According to one editor:

Our claims are on America, it is the land that gave us birth; it is the land of our nativity, we know no other country, it is a land in which our fathers have suffered and toiled; they have watered it with their tears, and fanned it with their sighs. Our relation with Africa is the same as the white man's is with Europe. ... We have passed through several generations in this country, and consequently we have become naturalized, our habits, our manners, our passions, our dispositions have become the same.... I might as well tell the white man about England... and call him a European, as for him to call us Africans.Freedom's Journal, April 4, 1828.

Ship's captain Paul Cuffee had died in 1817, but his dream had been carried forward by the American Colonization Society. In part, AME founder Richard Allen and the other delegates were unhappy that the European American-run ACS had taken over governing what would eventually become the Liberia colony, rather than let African Americans control it. But, also in part, migrating back to an imagined African homeland was no longer fashionable. African-American emigrants were starting to move to Canada and Haiti instead.

In September of 1830, Baltimore ice dealer Hezekiah Grice suggested to Philadelphia AME Church founder Richard Allen that he convene a national meeting of Black Yankee leaders. The first goal was to debate colonization. They decided against it. The second was to collect money for the 1200-2000 Black refugees who had been exiled from Cincinnati to Canada on short notice. The convention met annually for six years, debating all aspects of the integration versus separatism pendulum. The sixth and final National Black Convention was held in 1835, its activist civil-rights agenda taken over by self-help (temperance) advocates.Bethel (1997), 83-84, 116, 124, 127-38. Hezekiah Grice, the Baltimore ice dealer who had started it all, moved to Haiti in 1832 and was named director of Public Works for Port-au-Prince in 1834.Bethel (1997), 165.

Thirteen years later, Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) founded his newspaper, The North Star. Douglass handled the editorial end while Martin R. Delany (1812-1885) traveled throughout Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Kentucky lecturing, reporting, and obtaining subscriptions for the newspaper.Victor Ullman, Martin R. Delany: The Beginnings of Black Nationalism (Boston, 1971). Although both men were uncompromising and eloquent in their support of the African American community, they came to represent both ends of the integration-versus-separatism spectrum. Delany, who epitomized Black nationalism, advocated emigration and cultural integrity. Douglass continued to advocate integration, assimilation, and American patriotism.Letter from Delany to Douglass published in the North Star of July 10, 1852. For Douglass's July 23, 1852, reply, see Ullman (1971), 145.

A particularly instructive episode in the ideological struggle between separatism and assimilation within the Black Yankee ethnic community appeared in the court case Roberts v. City of Boston (1849).Court case 59 Mass. 198. Sixty-two years after Prince Hall had persuaded Boston's city fathers to open segregated schools for African-American children so that they could be taught their cultural heritage, the parents of Sarah C. Roberts sued the city for not allowing Sarah to attend a European American school. The African-American community was split on the topic. Heated intra-group debates erupted over the desirability of segregated schools for Boston's African-American children.Douglas J. Ficker, "From Roberts to Plessy: Educational Segregation and the 'Separate but Equal' Doctrine," Journal of Negro History, 84 (no. 4, Autumn 1999), 301-14; Adelaide M. Cromwell, The Other Brahmins: Boston's Black Upper Class, 1750-1950 (Fayetteville, 1994), 36; Leonard W. Levy and Harlan B. Philips, "The Roberts Case: Source of the "Separate but Equal" Doctrine," American Historical Review, 56 (no. 3, April 1951), 510-18.

The color line in the north

The endogamous color line was enforced more strictly in the North than in the antebellum lower South (South Carolina, Alabama, Louisiana, Florida). In 1800, Boston deported 240 violators of anti-intermarriage laws. The record says they were deported for intermarriage and for not having been born in Massachusetts. It is not clear if all 240 committed both crimes, or if some were convicted of one thing and some the other. Obviously, the latter charge could not be applied to Black Yankees. So, although it appears that at least some Black Yankees may have been prosecuted for intermarriage at this time, it is likely that the law was enforced only against Black immigrants.Leon F. Litwack, North of Slavery: the Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860 (Chicago, 1961), 16.

Massachusetts repealed its anti-intermarriage law in 1843 and marriages across the color line became more common, although they never approached the intermarriage rates of the lower South. The rate of Black/White intermarriage exceeded that of Irish/White intermarriage for a time. According to Oscar Handlin, Boston's Irish out-marriage rate in the 1860s "was lower than that of any other group including the Negroes, 12 percent of whose marriages were with whites."Oscar Handlin, Boston's Immigrants, 1790-1880, Rev. and enl. ed. (Cambridge MA, 1959), 177. To put this in context, between 45 and 55 percent of Irish-Americans out-marry today. Yet as recently as 1920, Irish-American exogamy was at less than half that—20 percent.Patrick J. Blessing, "The Irish," in Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, ed. Stephan Thernstrom and Oscar Handlin (Cambridge MA, 1980), 524-45, 541. In other words, Irish-Americans in Boston quadrupled this index of acceptance over the very same period that social acceptance of the Black endogamous group in the same city fell to one-fourth of its prior value.

The puzzle is solved by noting that impoverished female Irish servants and housemaids comprised the bulk of the initial wave of Irish famine immigrants. Once employed in America, they sent money home so that their relatives could come over as well.Handlin (1959), 61-63. But their lack of acceptance in White society limited their choices of marriage partners. Boston's Black Yankee elite, in contrast to most Whites, preferentially hired Irish servant girls. According to one contemporary, "Negroes were avoided both as servants in the home or as instructors for the children, for it was felt that more gentility and culture would come from exposure to whites."Adelaide M. Cromwell, The Other Brahmins: Boston's Black Upper Class, 1750-1950 (Fayetteville, 1994), 57. Proximity led to affection, then to love, and many of the Irish servant girls wound up marrying the sons of established Black craftsmen and shopkeepers.Cromwell (1994), 183. According to Wirth and Goldhammer, Black male/White female marriages were thirty times more common in mid-nineteenth-century Boston than White male/Black female marriages.Cromwell (1994), 271n40.

Nevertheless, Massachusetts in the 1840-1860 period, with its demographic imbalance of marriageable but poor Irish females was an exception. Most of the North continued to abhor intermarriage. During De Tocqueville's visit to the North, he wrote:

Race prejudice seems stronger in those states that have abolished slavery than in those where it still exists, and nowhere is it more intolerant than in those states where slavery was never known.Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York, 1966), 343.

Abraham Lincoln represented his constituency in Springfield, Illinois, on June 26, 1857. He repeated the following speech in a dozen later venues, and referred back to it for the rest of his life:

Judge Douglas is especially horrified at the thought of the mixing of blood by the white and black races: agreed for once—a thousand times agreed. ... On this point we fully agree with the Judge; and when he shall show that his policy is better adapted to prevent amalgamation than ours we shall drop ours, and adopt his. Let us see. In 1850 there were in the United States, 405,751, mulattoes. Very few of these are the offspring of whites and free blacks; nearly all have sprung from black slaves and white masters.Although Lincoln apparently believed this, it is factually inaccurate. DNA admixture studies show that genetically speaking, African male with European female mixing has been nearly as common nationwide as the reverse. In general, Afro-European admixture is sexually asymmetrical towards African males in the Northeast but leans the other way (towards European males) in the South. (It is very asymmetrical towards European males in Latin America and in the British West Indies.) See Bernardo Bertoni and others, "Admixture in Hispanics: Distribution of Ancestral Population Contributions in the Continental United States," Human Biology, 75 (no. 1, 2003), 1-11; Maria Catira Bortolini and others, "African-Derived South American Populations: A History of Symmetrical and Asymmetrical Matings According to Sex Revealed by Bi- and Uni-parental Genetic Markers," American Journal of Human Biology, 11 (1999), 561-63; Ricardo M. Cerda-Flores and others, "Genetic Admixture in Three Mexican Mestizo Populations Based D1S80 and HLA-DQA1 Loci," American Journal of Human Biology, 14 (2002), 257-63; Manfred Kayser and others, "Y Chromosome STR Haplotypes and the Genetic Structure of U.S. Populations of African, European and Hispanic Ancestry," Genome Research, 13 (2003), 624-34; D. Andrew Merriwether and others, "Mitochondrial Versus Nuclear Admixture Estimates Demonstrate a Past History of Directional Mating," American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 102 (1997), 153-59; Clemencia Rodas, Nancy Gelvez, and Genoveva Keyeux, "Mitochondrial DNA Studies Show Asymmetrical Amerindian Admixture in Afro-Colombian and Mestizo Populations," Human Biology, 75 (no. 1, 2003), 13-30. Also, see Paul Heinegg, Free African Americans of Maryland and Delaware from the Colonial Period to 1810 (Baltimore, 2000) for exhaustive genealogical research showing the same finding. A separation of the races is the only perfect preventive of amalgamation but as an immediate separation is impossible the next best thing is to keep them apart where they are not already together. If white and black people never get together in Kansas, they will never mix blood in Kansas. ... I have said that the separation of the races is the only perfect preventive of amalgamation. I have no right to say all the members of the Republican party are in favor of this, nor to say that as a party they are in favor of it. There is nothing in their platform directly on the subject. But I can say a very large proportion of its members are for it, and that the chief plank in their platform—opposition to the spread of slavery—is most favorable to that separation.Illinois State Journal, June 29, 1857. Copies of this speech were advertised by the Journal for sale. It was copied and commented on widely throughout the state, at least two papers copying it in full (Decatur, Illinois State Chronicle, July 2; Clinton Central Transcript, July 9). Also see Leon F. Litwack, North of Slavery: the Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860 (Chicago, 1961), 276-77.

Like Lincoln, many Midwestern Abolitionists became peculiarly enraged at the possibility of intermarriage. In 1862 Ohio, abolitionist newspaperman Calvin Kingsley wrote:

Where is this social equality, the fruits of which appear in amalgamation, to be found but among the slaveholders of the South? In the North it is a strange and disgusting sight to see a white man with a colored wife. In the South it can be practically seen everywhere. As to political equality, it has nothing whatever to do with the question of emancipation.As quoted in V. Jacque Voegeli, Free But Not Equal: The Midwest and the Negro During the Civil War (Chicago, 1967), 59-60.

In 1863 Illinois, The Chicago Tribune said that Republican doctrine was to:

let the African race alone; neither marry or cohabit with them;... separate the whites from adulterous communication with them; and preserve the purity of Caucasian blood from African admixture.Voegeli (1967), 87.

In 1863 Chicago and Columbus, editors responding to Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation by saying that Republicans were "actively promoting miscegenation, the most dreaded form of equality." They said this would destroy "the identity of both [races] and substitute in their stead human mongrels."Voegeli (1967), 77. Even the Government-appointed American Freedman's Inquiry Commission reported in 1864 that amalgamation between the races led to degeneration. Voegeli (1967), 181. In 1864, Democrat John McClernand of Illinois said, "We wanted no intermixture of white blood with theirs..."Voegeli (1967), 127. and Republicans answered that it was the Democratic slaveowners... who had long been guilty of trying "to bleach out the black race."Voegeli (1967), 179. Congressman George W. Julian "recoiled in disgust" at the prospect of miscegenation, saying that in the North there were "no such intimate relations as there were in the South where slave mothers and slave masters are brought on to the level of social equality in its most loathsome forms."Voegeli (1967), 182. In short, Midwesterners in general, Democrats, Republicans, Free-Soilers, Know-Nothings, Popular Sovereignty advocates, and Abolitionists alike fully agreed on only one thing—the importance of the endogamous color line.

It is interesting that much of the above was not mere political rhetoric aimed at discrediting the opposition. Some see the accusation that many slaveowners in the South openly intermarried as hyperbole. In fact, the accusers were correct. More Southern slaveowners married interracially than Northern abolitionists ever did. This was especially true of the thousands of French Creole, Hispanic, and West Indian slaveowners in the lower South who were themselves of partial African ancestry.

The Civil War, Reconstruction and its aftermath: 1860–1890

In 1863, during the American Civil War (1861–1865), President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing slaves in the southern states at war with the North. The 13th amendment of the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1865, outlawed slavery in the United States. In 1868, the 14th amendment granted full U.S. citizenship to African-Americans. The 15th amendment, ratified in 1870, extended the right to vote to black males.

The Emancipation Proclamation

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

Cultural integration of former slaves

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

The channels though which mulatto leadership moved from the North to the lower South are clearly visible. Many of the migrants, women as well as men, came as teachers sponsored by a dozen or so benevolent societies, arriving in the still turbulent wake of Union armies. Others came to organize relief for the refugees.... Still others... came south as religious missionaries... Some came south as business or professional people seeking opportunity on this... special black frontier. Finally, thousands came as soldiers [Black Yankees in regiments that served in the South], and when the war was over, many of [their] young men remained there or returned after a stay of some months in the North to complete their education.

At first, culture clash with former slaves made bumpy times for the volunteers. Slave religious services were characterized by the ring-shout ceremony. In a ring-shout, as Daniel Payne had noticed, the outdoor congregation shuffles, dances, claps, and sings as they circle the preacher, loudly responding to his or her every utterance. Although the ring-shout is ostensibly Christian, the old Yoruba orixas Exu, Ogun, Xango, Oxossi often make an appearance by taking possession of a dancer, especially in the Sea Islands and in Louisiana bayous. Black Yankees, in contrast, were staid Methodist Episcopalians. Slave music had exceedingly simple melodies and harmony was unknown, but the music gloried in dazzling rhythmic syncopation. Black Yankee music was characterized by the subtle and changing harmonies of Anglican hymns and a steady British beat.This section and the next were adapted from chapters 13 and 19 of Legal History of the Color Line: The Rise and Triumph of the One-Drop Rule by Frank W. Sweet, ISBN 0939479230, which contains the detailed citations and sources.

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

Cultural integration of former bi-racial slaveowners

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The collapse of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow

In the face of mounting violence and intimidation directed at blacks as well as whites sympathetic to their cause, the U.S. government retreated from its pledge to guarantee constitutional protections to freedmen and women. When President Hayes withdrew Union troops from the South in 1877, white southerners acted quickly to reverse the groundbreaking advances of Reconstruction, and European American mob violence against African-Americans intensified.

Sign for "Colored waiting room", Georgia, 1943

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

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

The Jim Crow era saw the cruelest wave of "racial" hatred that America has yet experienced. Between 1890 and 1940, millions of African Americans were disenfranchised, killed, brutalized, even discouraged from learning the Three Rs. According to newspaper records kept at the Tuskegee Institute, about 5,000 men, women, and children were murdered outright by the system, tortured to death in documented extrajudicial public rituals—human sacrifices called "lynchings." Public murders not reported by the newspapers plus similar executions under the veneer of due process were estimated by Ida B. Wells to have added up to about 20,000 killings. Of the tens of thousands of lynchers and onlookers during this period, it is reported that less than 50 whites were ever indicted for their crimes, and only four sentenced. Meanwhile, the lynchings were a weapon of terror with tens of million of Afro-Americans living in a constant state of anxiety and fear of the white mob. For the story of the lynchings, see Philip Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America (New York: Random House, 2002). For the systematic oppression and terror inflicted, see Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York, 1998).

The Great Migration and the Harlem Renaissance

In response to these and other setbacks, in the summer of 1905, W.E.B. DuBois and 28 other prominent, African-American men met secretly at Niagara Falls, Ontario. There, they produced a manifesto calling for an end to racial discrimination, full civil liberties for African-Americans and recognition of human brotherhood. The organization they established came to be called the Niagara Movement. After the notorious Springfield, Illinois race riot of 1908, a group of concerned European Americans joined with the leadership of the Niagara Movement and formed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) a year later, in 1909. Under the leadership of DuBois, the NAACP mounted legal challenges to segregation and lobbied legislatures on behalf of black Americans. During this period, African Americans continued to create independent community and institutional lives for themselves. They established schools, churches, social welfare institutions, banks, newspapers and small businesses to serve the needs of their communities.

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

Two World Wars

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

The Civil Rights Movement

Demonstrator at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom

In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a landmark decision in the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. This decision led to the dismantling of legal segregation in all areas of southern life, from schools to restaurants to public restrooms. The ruling also brought new momentum to the Civil Rights Movement. Boycotts against segregated public transportation systems sprang up in the South, the most notable of which was the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Civil rights groups organized other boycotts, voter registration campaigns, Freedom Rides and other nonviolent direct action, such as marches, pickets and sit-ins to mobilize around issues of equal access and voting rights. Southern segregationists fought back to block reform. The conflict grew to involve steadily escalating physical violence, bombings and intimidation; and southern law enforcement responded with batons, electric cattle prods, fire hoses, attack dogs and mass arrests.

In Virginia, a campaign of obstructionism and outright defiance, called Massive Resistance, entailed a series of actions by state legislators, school board members and other public officials to deny state funding to integrated schools and fund privately run "segregation academies" for white students. Farmville, Virginia, in Prince Edward County, was one of the plaintiff African-American communities involved in the 1954 Brown v. Board Supreme Court decision. As a last-ditch effort to avoid court-ordered desegregation, officials in the county shut down the county's entire public school system in 1959.[link] White students were able to attend private schools established for the sole purpose of circumventing integration. The largely black, rural population of the county had little recourse. Some families were split up as parents sent their children to live with relatives in other locales to attend public school; but the majority of Prince Edward's more than 2,000 black children, as well as many poor whites, simply remained unschooled until court action forced the schools to reopen five years later.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivers his famous "I Have a Dream" speech during the March on Washington

Perhaps, the high point of the Civil Rights Movement was the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which brought more than 200,000 marchers to the grounds of the Lincoln Memorial and the National Mall in Washington, D.C., to speak out for an end to southern racial violence and police brutality, equal opportunity in employment, equal access in education and public accommodations. The organizers of the march were the "Big Six" of the Civil Rights Movement: labor organizer and initiator of the march, A. Phillip Randolph; Roy Wilkins of the NAACP; Whitney Young, Jr., of the National Urban League; Martin Luther King, Jr., of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC); James Farmer of the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE); and John Lewis of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Also active behind the scenes and sharing the podium with Dr. King was Dorothy Height, head of the National Council of Negro Women. It was at this event, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial that King delivered his historic "I Have a Dream" speech. This march and the conditions which brought it into being are credited with putting pressure on President John F. Kennedy and then Lyndon B. Johnson that culminated in the passage the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that banned discrimination in public accommodations, employment, and labor unions.

President Johnson signs the historic
Civil Rights Act of 1964 bill.

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

By this time, African Americans who questioned the effectiveness of nonviolent protest had gained a greater voice. More militant black leaders, such as Malcolm X of the Nation of Islam and Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panther Party, called for blacks to defend themselves, using violence, if necessary. From the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, the Black Power movement urged African Americans to look to Africa for inspiration and emphasized black solidarity, rather than integration.

Political and economic empowerment

Oprah Winfrey during her car giveaway to the entire audience.

Politically but less so economically, blacks have made substantial strides in the post-civil rights era. Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson, who ran for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 1984 and 1988, brought unprecedented support and leverage to blacks in politics. In 1989, Virginia became the first state in U.S. history to elect a black Governor, Douglas Wilder. In 1992 Carol Moseley-Braun of Illinois became the first black woman elected to the U.S. Senate. There were 8,936 black officeholders in the United States in 2000, showing a net increase of 7,467 since 1970. In 2001 there were 484 mayors and 38 members of Congress. The Congressional Black Caucus serves as a political bloc in Congress for issues relating to African Americans. The appointment of blacks to high federal offices—including General Colin Powell, Chairman of the U.S. Armed Forces Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1989-1993, United States Secretary of State, 2001 - 2005; Condoleezza Rice, Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, 2001-2004, confirmed Secretary of State in January, 2005; Ron Brown, United States Secretary of Commerce, 1993-1996; and Supreme Court justices Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas—also demonstrates the increasing visibility of blacks in the political arena.

Economic progress for blacks has been less rapid. According to Forbes rich lists, Oprah Winfrey was the richest African American of the 20th century and has been the world's only black billionaire since 2004.[[http://www.aframnews.com/html/2006-05-10/publisher.htm]] Not only is Winfrey the world's only black billionaire but she's been the only black on the Forbes 400 nearly every year since 1995 (BET founder Bob Johnson briefly joined her on the list from 2001-2003 before his ex-wife acquired part of his fortune). With only one black wealthy enough to rank among America's 400 richest people, blacks are currently only 0.25% of America's economic elite, despite being 12% of the U.S. population.

Historians

Notes

External links

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