African Americans

Size and Composition

African Americans constitute the second largest racial group in the United States of America. Africans came with the Spaniards in the 16th century to the area that became the United States. However, the first appearance of groups of Africans in the English colonies of America occurred in 1619, when 20 Africans were brought as indentured servants to Jamestown, Virginia. Subsequent importations of Africans over a period of 200 years from western Africa, stretching from Morocco on the north to Angola on the south, greatly increased the African population in the United States. By the time of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, the population of Africans in the United States had reached 4½ million.

African Americans are a composite people comprised of numerous African ethnic groups—Yoruba, Wolof, Mandingo, Hausa, Asante, Fante, Edo, Fulani, Serere, Luba, Angola, Congo, Ibo, Ibibio, Ijaw, and Sherbro—with a common origin in Africa and a common struggle in the United States against racial oppression. Many African Americans show evidence of racial mixture with Native Americans, particularly Muskogee, Choctaw, Cherokee, and Pawnee, as well as with Europeans from various ethnic backgrounds.

African Americans were predominantly a rural and Southern people until the great urban migration of the World War II era. Thousands of Africans moved to the major urban centers of the North to find better jobs and more equitable living conditions. Cities such as Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and Detroit became magnets for entire Southern communities of African Americans. The lure of economic prosperity, political enfranchisement, and social mobility attracted many young men and frequently women, and the elderly were left on the farms of the South. Men would send for their families and men and women would send for their aging parents once they were established in their new homes in the North.

Residential segregation became a pattern in the North, as it had been in the South. Some segregated communities in the North gained prominence and became centers for culture and commerce. Harlem in New York, North Philadelphia in Philadelphia, Woodlawn in Detroit, Southside in Chicago, and Hough in Cleveland were written into the African American's imagination as places of high style, fashion, culture, and business. The evolution of African American communities from Southern and rural to Northern and urban has occurred since 1945. According to the 2000 census, the largest African American populations are found in these cities: New York, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Houston, Baltimore, New Orleans, Memphis, and Washington, D.C. In terms of the percentage of the population of a city that African Americans represent, the following cities are the five leaders among cities with populations over 300,000: Washington, D.C. (70%), Atlanta (67%), Detroit (65%), New Orleans (55%), and Memphis (49%). East St. Louis, Illinois, is 96% African American, but its population is less than 100,000. The cities with the largest African American populations are New York, with 2.1 million African Americans, Chicago with 1.4 million, Detroit with over 800,000, Philadelphia with close to 700,000, and Los Angeles with more than 600,000.

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