History of African Americans began when 20 Africans were dropped in the English
colony of Virginia in 1619. They worked as indentured servants who were bound to an
employer for a limited number of years. The blacks were documented into slavery in
Virginia in 1661 and in all the English colonies by 1750. During that time, they were
considered an inferior race with heathen culture. They were forced to work in the
farmlands of the New World. They were sold as merchandise by European traders on
slave ships across the Atlantic Ocean to the West Indies. At least one-sixth of them
died during the journey due to shock, disease and suicide. During the period of the
17th and 18th centuries, Africans and African Americans were forced to work as
slaves on tobacco, rice, and indigo plantations of the southern coast. Legislation was
passed by President Thomas Jefferson in 1807 to end the slave trade in America.
However, it did nothing but boosted the domestic slave trade in the country.
Meanwhile, there were still free black people making up one tenth of the entire
African American population. But while in the South, they were subject to
restrictions imposed on slaves, in the North, they were not allowed to vote, own any
property and travel freely. Abolitionists in Britain and the United States in the 1840-
1860 period developed large, complex propaganda campaigns against slavery. Among
the free blacks in the North were emerging African American leaders in many states
such as Philadelphia, Boston, and New York City. They initially held national and state
conventions in early 1830. However, these people share different opinions on how to
deal with slavery and discrimination. Thus, African Americans founded Liberia in
West Africa, which foreshadowed the development of Pan-African nationalism.
According to the Missouri Compromise of 1820, there must be an equal number of
slave and free states. But this was abrogated, leading to slavery in all American
territory. In 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected president of America on the
antislavery platform of the new Republican party. At the beginning of 1861, a
movement, known as the Civil War, was launched in an attempt to liberate all the
country's slaves. In September 1862 he issued the Emancipation Proclamation,
stating that all slaves were to be free. After the Civil War, nearly four million slaves
were freed, gained their citizenship and the right to vote by the Thirteenth,
Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments respectively. However, all of these new
provisions were ignored, especially in the South. During reconstruction, with
leadership from educated African Americans from the North and abroad, they
gradually wield political power in the South. However, it didn’t last long due to
economic pressure and violent antiblack activities such as ones from Ku Klux Klan. The
white supremacy once again dominated, leading to racial separation all over the
Southern states. In the post-Reconstruction years, both African Americans in the
South and the North struggled to find a job, so many of them decided to migrate
westward. In 1900, nearly 8 million African Americans still lived in the South,
however, due to economic depression, more African Americans moved Northwards and
were then embroiled in WWI. During the war thousands of black officers were
commissioned and many served abroad in labour battalions and service regiments. Due
to the Great Depression of the 1930s, a large number of African Americans lost their
jobs amidst inherent discrimination. African Americans were aided with low cost
public housing, education and more jobs. The Civil Rights Movement was the
persistent and deliberate step of African Americans in the 1940s and 1950s. The
culmination of the Civil Rights Movement was in 1963 when King addressed the crowd
of about 250,000 demonstrators gathered on the Mall from Lincoln Memorial. The
march aided in securing the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned
discrimination in voting, public accommodations, and employment. The dramatic
political breakthrough came in the 2008 election, with the election of Barack Obama,
the son of a black Kenyan father and a white American mother. The post-civil rights
era is notable for the New Great Migration, in which millions of African Americans
have returned to the South, often to pursue increased economic opportunities in now-
desegregated southern cities.
