African-American history

[11] Beginning in the early 20th century, in response to poor economic conditions, segregation and lynchings, over 6 million African Americans, primarily rural, were forced to migrate out of the South to other regions of the United States in search of opportunity.

[36] From the 1680s onward, the majority of enslaved Africans imported into North America were directly from Africa, and most of them were sent to ports located in what is now the Southern U.S., particularly in the present-day states of Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, and Louisiana.

The population of enslaved African Americans in North America grew rapidly during the 18th and early 19th centuries due to a variety of factors, including a lower prevalence of tropic diseases and rape of black women by white men.

The Second Continental Congress considered freeing enslaved people to assist with the war effort, but they also removed language from the Declaration of Independence that included the promotion of slavery amongst the offenses of King George III.

"He arrived at a momentous time when English abolitionists were pushing a bill through Parliament to charter the Sierra Leone Company and to grant it trading and settlement rights on the West African coast."

[54] Among the successful free men was Benjamin Banneker, a Maryland astronomer, mathematician, almanac author, surveyor, and farmer, who in 1791 assisted in the initial survey of the boundaries of the future District of Columbia.

I wish to see all done that can be done...to assist [Black men]in acquiring property, in becoming intelligent, enlightened citizens...but at the same time, I would not have anything done which would harm the white race,"[93] Blanche K. Bruce was the other African American who became a U.S. senator during this period.

[99] In the face of years 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.

Unlike the Klan, paramilitary members operated openly, often solicited newspaper coverage, and had distinct political goals: to turn Republicans out of office and suppress or dissuade Black voting in order to regain power in 1876.

After the notorious Springfield, Illinois race riot of 1908, a group of concerned Whites joined the leadership of the Niagara Movement and formed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) a year later, in 1909.

In 1908 after the 1906 Atlanta Race Riot got him involved, Ray Stannard Baker published the book Following the Color Line: An Account of Negro Citizenship in the American Democracy, becoming the first prominent journalist to examine America's racial divide; it was extremely successful.

Writers Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, Claude McKay and Richard Wright; and artists Lois Mailou Jones, William H. Johnson, Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence and Archibald Motley gained prominence.

[135][136] Historian Joe Trotter explains the decision process: After the war ended and the soldiers returned home, tensions were very high, with serious labor union strikes and inter-racial riots in major cities.

[142] In January 1934, the journalist Lorena Hickok reported from rural Georgia that she had seen "half-starved Whites and Blacks struggle in competition for less to eat than my dog gets at home, for the privilege of living in huts that are infinitely less comfortable than his kennel".

[158] When a Black minister, Marshall L. Shepard, delivered the opening prayer at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia in 1936, Senator Ellison D. Smith stormed out, screaming: "This mongrel meeting ain't no place for a white man!

[170] On 18 June 1941, Randolph met with Roosevelt with the mayor of New York, Fiorello H. La Guardia serving as a mediator, where in a compromise it was agreed that the march would be cancelled in exchange for Executive Order 8802, which banned discrimination in factories making weapons for the military.

[171] In 1941, the Roosevelt administration, through officially neutral, was leaning in very Allied direction with the United States providing weapons to Great Britain and China (to be joined by the Soviet Union after 22 June 1941), and the president needed the co-operation of Congress as much possible, where isolationist voices were frequently heard.

[174] The newspaper argued that a victory of the Axis powers, especially Nazi Germany, would be a disaster for African-Americans while at the same time the war presented the opportunity "to persuade, embarrass, compel and shame our government and our nation...into a more enlightened attitude towards a tenth of its people".

[179] Owing to the high failure rate caused by the almost non-existent education system for African-Americans in the South, the Army was forced to offer remedial instruction for Afro-Americans who fell into the lower categories of the AGCT.

[186] At the subsequent court martial for the "Port Chicago 50" on the charges of mutiny, their defense lawyer, Thurgood Marshall stated: "Negroes in the Navy don't mind loading ammunition.

They want to know why they are segregated; why they don't get promoted, and why the Navy disregarded official warnings by the San Francisco waterfront unions...that an explosion was inevitable if they persisted in using untrained seamen in the loading of ammunition".

[190][191] In his book A Rising Wind, Walter Francis White of the NAACP wrote: "World War II has immeasurably magnified the Negro's awareness of the American profession and practice of democracy...[Black veterans] will return home convinced that whatever betterment of their lot is achieved must come largely from their own efforts.

[192] Due to massive shortages as a result of the American entry into World War II, defense employers from Northern and Western cities went to the South to convince blacks and whites there to leave the region in promise of higher wages and better opportunities.

As a result, African Americans left the South in large numbers to munitions centers in the North and West to take advantage of the shortages caused by the war, sparking the Second Great Migration.

[183] In Detroit, which expanded massively during the war years with 50, 000 Black people from the South and 200, 000 "hillbilly" whites from Appalachia moving to the city to work in the factories, competition for sparse rental housing had pushed tensions to the brink.

[citation needed] In Virginia, state legislators, school board members and other public officials mounted a campaign of obstructionism and outright defiance to integration called Massive Resistance.

The organizers of the march were called the "Big Six" of the Civil Rights Movement: Bayard Rustin the strategist who has been called the "invisible man" of the Civil Rights Movement; labor organizer and initiator of the march, A. Philip 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 Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

[citation needed] This march, the 1963 Birmingham Children's Crusade, and other events were 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.

The post-civil rights era is also notable for the New Great Migration, in which millions of African Americans have returned to the South including Texas, Georgia, Florida and North Carolina, often to pursue increased economic opportunities in now-desegregated southern cities.

While they were not alone in advocating a new examination of slavery and racism in the United States, the study of African-American history has frequently been a political and scholarly struggle which has been waged by historians who wish to refute incorrect assumptions.