So, Goree Island, located a few miles off the coast of Senegal in the Atlantic Ocean, was the place from which the Europeans and Americans trafficked West and Central Africans to the former British colonies of North America, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and even after of the official abolition of slavery in the nineteenth century,[3][4] displacing maybe 50,000 West and Central Africans from there (although according to the Slave House curator, 20 million West and Central Africans were exported from the Gorée island to the modern United States).
[10] Most of the Senegalese whom Europeans trafficked to South Carolina, Georgia and the Gulf Coast (highlighting his number in Louisiana[11]), followed mainly by Virginia and Maryland.
According the Encyclopedia of Chicago, the number of Senegalese immigrants who arrived to the United States had a higher growth after "the implementation of the structural adjustment programs of the 1980s and the devaluation of the CFA currency in Senegal in 1990".
However, the changing of migration occurred not only by the increase in numbers of Senegaleses arriving: Until the late 1990s, the majority of Senegalese who emigrated to the United States were young men, but since the end of the decade, women also began to immigrate, working as hairdressers, waitresses in restaurants and studying in universities.
In the United States, one of the largest concentrations of people of Senegalese origin is in the state of New York, where they form one of the four main Muslim groups from Africa, being the neighborhood Little Senegal, or Le Petit Senegal, one of its major enclaves, a neighborhood which varies linguistically.
They form the majority group in a particular area of Harlem (116th Street between St. Nicholas Avenue and Frederick Douglass Boulevard).
However, the majority of Senegalese living in this neighborhood grew up poor in small villages in Senegal, where they did not receive an education, so they do not usually go to schools in Harlem.
Due to the size of the Senegalese community in Little Senegal, there are also some Wolof interpreters who work as volunteers at the Harlem Hospital.
ASA used to have an FM radio station, a broadcast that discusses the way in which the Senegalese of the US should cooperate in this community, and the kind of life that they have in the US.
The murids usually meet every week to sing the litany of the wali (Arabic: the friend of God or holy leader) Cheikh Amadou Bamba Mbacké.
In 1997, the City of Chicago stated that on August 13, the Cheikh Amadou Bamba Day, The Da'ira allows the visit of a Murid marabout, a spiritual leader of Senegal, and a number of Islam.
[14] Launched in 2019, Tékkil is a nonprofit organization dedicated to connecting and advancing Senegalese-American professionals to be leaders in their careers and communities.