Black Americans Essay -- American History

Black Americans Black Americans are those persons in the United States who trace their ancestry to members of the Negroid race in Africa. They have at various times in United States history been referred to as African, coloured, Negro, Afro-American, and African-American, as well as black. The black population of the United States has grown from three-quarters of a million in 1790 to nearly 30 million in 1990. As a percentage of the total population, blacks declined from 19.3 in 1790 to 9.7 in 1930. A modest percentage increase has occurred since that time. Over the past 300 and more years in the United States, considerable racial mixture has taken place between persons of African descent and those with other racial backgrounds, mainly of white European or American Indian ancestry. Shades of skin colour range from dark brown to ivory. In body type black Americans range from short and stocky to tall and lean. Nose shapes vary from aquiline to extremely broad and flat; hair colour from medium brown to brown black; and hair texture from tightly curled to limp and straight. Historically, the predominant attitude toward racial group membership in the United States has been that persons having any black African ancestry are considered to be black. In some parts of the United States, especially in the antebellum South, laws were written to define racial group membership in this way, generally to the detriment of those who were not Caucasian. It is important to note, however, that ancestry and physical characteristics are only part of what has set black Americans apart as a distinct group. The concept of race, as it applies to the black minority in the United States, is as much a social and political concept as a biological one. Blacks Under Slavery: 1600-1865 The first Africans in the New World arrived with Spanish and Portuguese explorers and settlers. By 1600 an estimated 275,000 Africans, both free and slave, were in Central and South America and the Caribbean area. Africans first arrived in the area that became the United States in 1619, when a handful of captives were sold by the captain of a Dutch man-of-war to settlers at JAMESTOWN. Others were brought in increasing numbers to fill the desire for labour in a country where land was plentiful and labour scarce. By the end of the 17th century, approximately 1,300,000 Africans had landed in the New World... ...r education for blacks, and for the first time black students began to appear in colleges that had previously been all white. In the 1970s the percentage of blacks attending college increased markedly, but in the 1980s blacks lost ground. Although desegregation of the public schools in the South proceeded slowly for the first decade after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, by 1969 school districts in every state were at least in token compliance with the 1954 ruling. By that time all forms of de jure segregation had been struck down by the courts. De facto school segregation continued, however, in large part because the communities the schools served were segregated in their residential patterns. This was particularly true in large urban areas and more prevalent in the North than in the South. One method adopted to overcome such segregation was to bus children across school district lines in order to achieve racial balance in the schools. This caused major controversy and led to instances of violent opposition . The overwhelming majority of black children now attend formally integrated schools, although they may have little contact with white pupils even within the schools.