The pirates expected to steal precious metals like gold and silver, but they found that the ship held 350 black Africans from the Kingdom of Ndongo on the Kwanza River in north central Angola.

[19][full citation needed] The British regular army had some fears that, if armed, Black men would start slave rebellions.

Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia, was determined to maintain British rule in the southern colonies and promised to free those enslaved men of rebel owners who fought for him.

On November 7, 1775, he issued a proclamation: "I do hereby further declare all indented servants, Negroes, or others, (appertaining to Rebels,) free, that are able and willing to bear arms, they joining His Majesty's Troops."

In October 1779, about 200 Black Loyalist soldiers assisted the British in successfully defending Savannah against a joint French and rebel American attack.

[22] As a response to expressions of fear posed by armed Black men, in December 1775, George Washington wrote a letter to Colonel Henry Lee III, stating that success in the war would come to whatever side could arm Black men the fastest; therefore, he suggested a policy to execute any of the slaves who would attempt to gain freedom by joining the British effort.

[23] Washington issued orders to the recruiters to reenlist the free Black men who had already served in the army; he worried that some of these soldiers might cross over to the British side.

The Black Patriots who served the Continental Army found that the postwar military held few rewards for them, as it was much reduced in size, and the Southern states had banned all enslaved men from their militias.

In 1792, the United States Congress formally excluded African Americans from military service, allowing only "free able-bodied white male citizens" to serve.

[24][full citation needed] At the time of the ratification of the Constitution in 1789, free Black men could vote in five of the thirteen states, including North Carolina.

[25] Although southern state legislatures maintained the institution of slavery, numerous slaveholders, especially those in the Upper South, were inspired by revolutionary ideals to free the people they had enslaved.

[32] The invention of the cotton gin led to an increased demand for slaves in the South, reversing the economic decline that had occurred in the region during the late 18th century.

In the Confederacy, both free and enslaved Blacks were used for manual labor, but the issue of whether to arm them, and under what terms, became a major source of debate within the Confederate Congress, the President's Cabinet, and C.S.

[38] For roughly 100 years after the end of the Civil War, Black Americans, especially in the South, suffered from racial oppression in the form of segregation and lynchings.

Fully in place from 1910 onwards, Jim Crow laws reinstated white supremacy and contributed to the loss of the citizenship and voting rights that Blacks had worked so hard to gain.

During both migrations, five million Blacks left their homes in the South for Northern and Western states to find work in private and public sectors of the economy.

Upon arriving in the North and West, however, Black migrants unsurprisingly faced widespread racial discrimination there as well, being perceived as competitors for jobs and housing and blamed for lowering the property values of white residents.

Despite this, conditions in the North and Western U.S. were still ahead of the South at that time; blacks in those areas had the right to vote, could send their children to better schools, and were paid more for skilled and unskilled labor.

[41][full citation needed] In reference to why so many Blacks stayed in the South for so long, Jimmie Lewis Franklin points out that while Pan-Africanist values and prolonged discrimination may have inspired the continuous migration of Blacks from the South in search of a better life, many choose to stay not due to a submission to racism, but out of the basic human desire to remain in an established home.

Leaders of the nonviolent protest movement like Martin Luther King Jr. and James Bevel were backed by religious morals and the ideals of Gandhi.

However, a race riot ensued when Meredith arrived on campus, and President John F. Kennedy was forced to send the National Guard to Oxford, Mississippi, where two people were killed and 200 were injured.

The Montgomery Improvement Association was formed in 1955 with Martin Luther King Jr. as its president after Rosa Parks was arrested for sitting in the white section of a public city bus.

The Montgomery bus boycott was a major event in the civil rights movement, and it brought King to national attention as the leader of this protest.

A third migration appears to be underway, this time with African Americans from the North and West moving back to the South in record numbers.

According to a 2003 report by researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, Virginia Beach, Charlotte, Houston, Nashville-Davidson, and Jacksonville were the five most integrated of the nation's fifty largest cities, with Memphis at number six.

[citation needed] This rise in net gain points to Atlanta, Charlotte, Dallas, and Houston being a growing hot spots for the migrants of The New Great Migration.

The percentage of Black Americans who live in the South has been increasing since 1990, and the biggest gains have been in the region's large urban areas, according to census data.

Other southern states, including Mississippi, Louisiana, South Carolina, Alabama and Arkansas, have seen little net growth in the African American population from return migration.

[citation needed] Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was one of the most prominent African-American ministers in the South, leading a Baptist church in Atlanta.

[61] In the 1980s, for example, the population of Prince George's County, Maryland, where suburban housing was developed near Washington, DC, became majority African American.