African Americans in the U.S. Essay

African Americans (American mordants or Black Americans), racial assemblage in the join States whose dominant ancestry is from sub-Saharan West Africa. legion(predicate) African Americans likewise claim atomic number 63an, Native American, or Asian ancestors. A variety of names have been accustomd for African Americans at various(a) points in annals. African Americans have been referred to as Negroes, colored, blacks, and Afro-Americans, as well as lesser-known terms, such as the 19th-century designation Anglo-African. The terms Negro and colored be now rarg lone about(prenominal) used.African American, black, and to a lesser extent Afro-American, atomic number 18 used interchangeably today. Recent black immigrants from Africa and the islands of the Caribbean are abouttimes categorize as African Americans. However, these groups, especially first- and second-generation immigrants, oft have cultural practices, histories, and languages that are distinct from those of Africa n Americans born in the United States. For example, Caribbean natives may deliver French, British English, or Spanish as their first language.Emigrants from Africa may say a European language separate than English or whatsoever of a number of African languages as their first language. Caribbean and African immigrants often have little knowledge or experience of the distinctive history of race relations in the United States. Thus, Caribbean and African immigrants may or may not choose to identify with the African American community. fit to 2000 U. S. census, some 34. 7 gazillion African Americans live in the United States, making up 12. 3 share of the total nation. 2000 census shows that 54.8 part African Americans lived in the South. In that year, 17. 6 percent of African Americans lived in the Northeast and 18. 7 percent in the Midwest, while only 8. 9 percent lived in the Western states. Almost 88 percent of African Americans lived in metropolitan areas in 2000. With all over 2 million African American residents, New York City had the largest black urban population in the United States in 2000. Washington, D. C. , had the highest proportion of black residents of any U. S. metropolis in 2000, with African Americans making up almost 60 percent of the population.Microsoft Encarta 2009. 1993-2008 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Atlantic Slave Trade, Atlantic Slave Trade, the forced shipping of at least 10 million en slaved Africans from their homelands in Africa to destinations in Europe and the Americas during the 15th through 19th centuries. European and North American slave traders transported most of these slaves to areas in tropical and subtropical America, where the vast absolute majority worked as laborers on large agricultural plantations.See Slavery. Between 1440 and 1880 Europeans and North Americans change merchandise for slaves along 5600 km (3500 miles) of Africas western and west rudimentary Atlantic coasts. These slaves were then transported to other locations around the Atlantic Ocean. The vast majority went to Brazil, the Caribbean, and Spanish-speaking regions of South America and Central America. Smaller numbers were interpreted to Atlantic islands, continental Europe, and English-speaking areas of the North American mainland.Approximately 12 million slaves left Africa via the Atlantic trade, and more than 10 million arrived. The Atlantic slave trade involved the largest intercontinental migration of people in existence history prior to the 20th century. This transfer of so many people, over such a long time, had enormous consequences for every continent bordering the Atlantic. It deeply changed the racial, kind, economic, and cultural makeup in many of the American nations that imported slaves.It also left a legacy of racism that many of those nations are all the same struggling to overcome. Microsoft Encarta 2009. 1993-2008 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Civil Rights Move ment in the United States, political, legal, and social struggle by black Americans to gain full citizenship rights and to achieve racial equality. The cultured rights movement was first and foremost a challenge to segregation, the system of laws and customs separating blacks and whites that whites used to control blacks after slavery was abolished in the 1860s.During the civil rights movement, individuals and civil rights organizations challenged segregation and discrimination with a variety of activities, including protest marches, boycotts, and refusal to resist by segregation laws. Many believe that the movement began with the Montgomery pile boycott in 1955 and ended with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, though in that respect is debate about when it began and whether it has ended yet. The civil rights movement has also been called the Black Freedom Movement, the Negro Revolution, and the Second Reconstruction. Microsoft Encarta 2009. 1993-2008 Microsoft Corporation.All r ights reserved. AAVE Distinctive patterns of language use among African Americans arose as creative responses to the hardships imposed on the African American community. Slave-owners often intentionally mixed people who spoke many antithetical African languages to discourage communication in any language other than English on their plantations. Moreover, many whites were unwilling to allow blacks to learn square-toed English. One response to these conditions was the development of pidgins, simplified mixtures of two or more languages that speakers of different languages could use to communicate with each other.Some of these pidgins eventually became full developed Creole languages spoken by certain groups as a native language. Significant numbers of people still speak some of these Creole languages, notably Gullah on the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia. African American Vernacular English (AAVE), also called black English or Ebonics, is a dialect of English spoken by man y African Americans that shares some features with Creole languages. Microsoft Encarta 2009. 1993-2008 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.