African Americans

African Americans in the United States

At 12.3% of the population, African Americans are the second largest minority group in the United States, behind Hispanics who make up 12.5% of the U.S. population. Also commonly referred to as Black Americans, African Americans are still the single largest racial minority group in the country. Many Black biracial individuals and foreign-born Blacks also self-identify as African American. However, both of these groups are quite small, constituting less than 1% and 5% of the Black population, respectively. Black immigrants to the United States are from three primary regions: the Caribbean, Latin America, and sub-Saharan Africa.

In the early 1600s, some of the first Africans were brought to the United States as indentured servants. However, by the mid-1600s, the status of Africans in the United States had been changed to slaves. By the end of the legal slave trade in 1808, more than 500,000 Africans had been brought into the United States, primarily to work on the plantations in the southern states. Until the Great African American Migration (1910–1920), 90% of the African American population lived in the South, and less than 25% lived in urban areas. This early 20th-century migration of African Americans eventually yielded settlement patterns that are reflected in the United States today, with substantial concentrations of African Americans in the urban centers of the northeastern and midwestern United States.

The South still has the largest concentration of African Americans in the country, with more than 50% of the Black population. Nonetheless, African Americans constitute less than 20% of the South's population. African Americans make up about 11% of the populations in the Northeast and Midwest and about 5% of the population in the West. The top 10 residential areas for African Americans include the following metropolitan areas, in descending order: New York City, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Detroit, Philadelphia, Los Angeles/Long Beach, Houston, Baltimore, and Dallas. Although there have been declines in segregation over the past three decades, African Americans still live in highly segregated neighborhoods, and the metropolitan areas with the largest concentrations of African Americans also have the highest levels of residential segregation. Affluent African Americans also live in areas with high levels of residential segregation, and children experience the highest segregation levels at home and in school.

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