African forced migration

Throughout most of Americas history, Americans of African descent were its largest minority
group. In July 2001, they were overtaken by Hispanics (see Hispanic and related terms)
but still made up 12.7 percent of the U.S. population (36.1 million/284.8 million). Most
African Americans are descended from slaves forcibly brought by Europeans to the United
States and the Caribbean during the 18th and early 19th centuries.
The continent of Africa was the native home to darkskinned peoples who came to be called
Negroes (blacks) by Europeans. Between the 16th and 19th centuries, about 11 million
Africans were forced into slavery and brought to the Americas. Some 600,000 of these were
brought to lands now comprising the United States and Canada. Their most frequent
destinations included Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas, where by the 1770s, blacks
constituted more than 40 percent of the population.
Most black Africans lived south of the vast Sahara desert, which minimized contact between
them and Europeans until the 15th century, when Italian and Portuguese merchants began
to cross the Sahara, and Portuguese mariners, to sail down the western coast. In 1497,
Bartolomeu Dias reached the Cape of Good Hope at the southernmost tip of Africa, and in
the following year Vasco da Gama reached the east coast port of Malindi on his voyage to
India. The Portuguese expanded their coastal holdings, particularly in the areas of modern
Angola and Mozambique, where they established plantations and began to force native
peoples into slavery. When the Portuguese arrived in Africa, there were few large political
states. Constant warring among hundreds of native ethnic groups provided a steady supply
of war captives for purchase. With the decimation of Native American populations in Spanish
territories and the advent of British, French, and Dutch colonialism, demand for slaves
increased dramatically during the 17th and 18th centuries. Sometimes they were captured
by European slavers, but most often African middlemen secured captives to be sold on the
coast to wealthy European slave merchants.
Although the earliest slaves were taken from the coastal regions of Senegambia, Sierra
Leone, the Gold Coast, the Bight of Benin, the Bight of Biafra, Angola, and Mozambique, by
the 17th century most were being brought from interior regions, further diversifying the
ethnic background of Africans brought to the Americas. Once at the coast, captives usually
would be held in European forts or slaving depots until their sale could be arranged with
merchants bringing a variety of manufactured items from Europe or America, including
textiles, metalware, alcohol, firearms and gunpowder, and tobacco. Africa thus became part
of the infamous triangular trade: New England merchants would exchange simple
manufactured goods on the western coast of Africa for slaves, who would in turn be shipped
to the West Indies where they were traded for rum and molasses.
Once a merchant had secured a full cargo, Africans were inhumanely packed into European
ships for the Middle Passage, a voyage of anywhere from five to 12 weeks from West Africa
to the Americas. Some slavers were loose packers, which reduced disease, while others were
tight packers who expected a certain percentage of deaths and tried to maximize profits by
shipping as many slaves as space would allow. It is estimated that 15 to 20 percent died en
route during the 16th and 17th centuries, and 5 to 10 percent during the 18th and 19th
centuries. African men, who were most highly valued, were usually separated from women
and children during the passage. The holds of the ships rarely allowed Africans to stand, and
they were often unable to clean themselves throughout the voyage. Upon arrival in the
Americas, slavers would advertise the auction of their cargo, often describing particular skills
and allowing Africans to be inspected before sale. It was common for slaves to be sold more
than once, and many came to North America after initial sales in the West Indies.
The first Africans were brought to British North America in 1619 to Jamestown, VIRGINIA,
probably as servants. Their numbers remained small throughout the 17th century,
and slavery was not officially sanctioned until the 1660s, when slave codes began to be
enacted. This enabled a small number of African Americans to maintain their freedom and
even to become landholders, though this practice was not common. By that time, passage of
the navigation acts, lower tobacco prices, and the difficulty in obtaining indentured
servants had led to a dramatic rise in the demand for slaves. Although only 600,000 slaves
were brought into the region, as a result of the natural increase that prevailed after 1700,
the number of African Americans in the United States rose to 4 million by 1860.
The first Africans to arrive in New France were brought in 1628. Although the lack of an
extensive plantation economy kept their numbers small, they were readily available from
Caribbean plantations and French Louisiana. Slaves were never widely used in northern
colonies in either British or French territories, where most were employed as domestic

servants. Around 1760, the slave population in Canada was about 1,200, and in New England
around 2,000.
The massive forced migration of Africans to North America created a unique AfricanAmerican culture based on a common African heritage, the experience of slavery, and the
teachings of Christianity. As a result of the patterns of the slave trade, it was impossible for
most slaves to identify the exact tribe or ethnic group from which they came. African music
and folktales continued to be told and were adapted to changing circumstances. Although
African religious practices were occasionally maintained, most often the slaves belief in
spirits was combined with Christian teaching and the slave experience to produce a faith
emphasizing the Old Testament themes of salvation from bondage and Gods protection of a
chosen people. The majority of slaves labored on plantations in a community of 20 or more
slaves, subject to beatings, rape, and even death, without the protection of the law and
usually denied any access to education. Despite the fact that slaves were not allowed to
marry, the family was the principal bulwark against lifes harshness, and marriage and family
bonds usually remained strong. Strong ties of kinship extended across several generations
and even to the plantation community at large.
The 500,000 free African Americans in 1860 were so generally discriminated against that
they have been referred to as slaves without masters, but their liberty and greater access
to learning enabled them to openly join the abolitionist movement, which expanded rapidly
after 1830, and to bring greater knowledge of world events and technological developments
to the African-American community after the Civil War. Some, like the former slave Frederick
Douglass, inspired reformers and other members of the white middle class to abandon racial
prejudice, though this was uncommon even among abolitionists.
The first large-scale migration of free African Americans included some 3,000 black Loyalists
who fled New York for Nova Scotia at the end of the American Revolution in 1783, most
settling in Birchtown and Shelburne (see American Revolution and immigration). Toward
the end of the war, slaves were promised freedom in return for claiming protection behind
British lines. Facing racism and difficult farming conditions, in 1792 nearly 1,200 returned to
Sierra Leone in Africa.

African-American farmworkers in the 1930s board a truck near Homestead, Florida.The

enslavement of millions of Africans between the 1660s and the 1860s led to the creation of a
highly segregated society in the United States, still persistent at the start of the 21st
century. (Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division)

In response to the Enlightenment ideals of natural rights and political liberty and the
evangelical concern for humanitarianism and Christian justice, between 1777 and 1804 the
northern states gradually abolished slavery. The slave trade was banned by Britain in 1807,
and slavery abolished throughout the empire in 1833. The slave trade was prohibited in the
United States in 1808, but the invention of the cotton gin in 1793 and the rise of the shortstaple cotton industry reinvigorated Southern reliance on slave labor at the same time that
the antislavery movement was growing in strength. It is estimated that after the abolition of
the slave trade, more than 500,000 slaves were sold from farms and plantations in Virginia,
Maryland, Kentucky, and other states to the cotton plantations of the Deep South, with little
regard for the preservation of slave families. As a result, when President Abraham Lincoln
freed slaves under Southern control in 1863 and slavery was abolished in 1865, many African
Americans not only came from a legacy of forced enslavement but had also been uprooted
themselves.

Native Americans
Though we do not usually think of Native Americans and "The New World" as part of
medieval times, it must be remembered people have been living in the Americas for 15000
years.
Native Americans (American Indians, Amerindians, Amerins, Indyans, Injuns, or Red Indians)
are indigenous peoples, who lived in the Americas prior to the European colonization; some
of these ethnic groups still exist. The name "Indians" was bestowed by Christopher
Columbus, who mistakenly believed that the places he found them were among the islands
to the southeast of Asia known to Europeans as the Indies. (See further discussion below).
Canadians now generally use the term First Nations to refer to Native Americans. In Alaska,
because of legal use in the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANSCA) and because of the
presence of the Inuit, Yupik, and Aleut peoples, the term Alaskan Native predominates. (See
further discussion below.)
Native Americans officially make up the majority of the population in Bolivia, Peru and
Guatemala and are significant in most other former Spanish colonies, with the exception of
Costa Rica, Cuba, Argentina, Dominican Republic and Uruguay.
History
The Native Americans are widely believed to have come to the Americas via the prehistoric
Bering Land Bridge. However, this is not the only theory. Some archaeologists believe that
the migration consisted of seafaring tribes that moved along the coast, avoiding
mountainous inland terrain and highly variable terrestrial ecosystems. Other researchers
have postulated an original settlement by skilled navigators from Oceania, though these
American Aborigine people are believed to be nearly extinct. Yet another theory claims an
early crossing of the Atlantic Ocean by people originating in Europe. Many native peoples do
not believe the migration theory at all. The creation stories of many tribes place the people
in North America from the beginning of time. Mormon tradition holds that the Native
Americans represent one of the lost tribes of Israel.
Based on anthropological evidence, at least three distinct migrations from Siberia occurred.
The first wave of migration came into a land populated by the large mammals of the late
Pleistocene epoch, including mammoths, horses, giant sloths, and wooly rhinoceroses. The
Clovis culture provides one example of such immigrants. Later the Folsom culture developed,
based on the hunting of bison.
The second immigration wave comprised the Athabascan people, including the ancestors of
the Apaches and Navajos; the third wave consisted of the Inuits, the Yupiks, and the Aleuts,
who may have come by sea over the Bering Strait. The Athabascan peoples generally lived
in Alaska and western Canada but some Athabascans migrated south as far as California and
the American Southwest, and became the ancestors of tribes now there.

The descendants of the third wave are so ethnically distinct from the remainder of the
indigenous inhabitants of the Americas that they are not usually included in the terms
"American Indian" or "First Nations".
In recent years, anthropological evidence of migration has been supplemented by studies
based on molecular genetics. The provisional results from this field suggest that four distinct
migrations from Asia occurred; and, most surprisingly, provide evidence of smaller-scale,
contemporaneous human migration from Europe. This suggests that the migrant population,
living in Europe at the time of the most recent ice age, adopted a life-style resembling that
lived by Inuits and Yupiks in recent centuries.
In the Mississippi valley of the United States, in Mexico and Central America, and in the
Andes of South America Native American civilizations arose with farming cultures and citystates.
The Arrival of Europeans
The European colonization of the Americas forever changed the lives and cultures of the
Native Americans. In the 15th to 19th centuries, their populations were decimated, by the
privations of displacement, by disease, and in many cases by warfare with European groups
and enslavement by them. The first Native American group encountered by Columbus, the
250,000 Arawaks of Haiti, were violently enslaved. Only 500 survived by the year 1550, and
the group was totally extinct before 1650. Over the next 400 years, the experiences of other
Native Americans with Europeans would not always amount to genocide, but they would
typically be disastrous for the Native Americans.
In the 15th century Spaniards and other Europeans brought horses to the Americas. Some of
these animals escaped their owners and began to breed and increase their numbers in the
wild. Ironically, the horse had originally evolved in the Americas, but the last American
horses died out at the end of the last ice age. The re-introduction of the horse, however, had
a profound impact on Native American cultures in the Great Plains of North America. This
new mode of travel made it possible for some tribes to greatly expand their territories,
exchange goods with neighboring tribes and to more easily capture game.
Europeans also brought diseases against which the Native Americans had no immunity.
Sometimes they did this intentionally, but often it was unintentional. Ailments such as
chicken pox and measles, though common and rarely fatal among Europeans, often proved
fatal to Native Americans. More deadly diseases such as smallpox were especially deadly to
Native American populations. It is difficult to estimate the percentage of the total Native
American population killed by these diseases, since waves of disease oftentimes preceded
White scouts and often destroyed entire villages. Some historians have argued that more
than 80% of some Indian populations may have died due to European-derived diseases.
The first reported case of white men scalping Native Americans took place in New Hampshire
colony on February 20, 1725, though it is thought that Indians learned scalping from
Americans who, at times, collected them for bounties.
Four Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy sided with the British and the Tories of the
American Revolutionary War. The colonists were especially outraged at the Wyoming
Massacre and the Cherry Valley Massacre, which occurred in 1788. In 1799 Congress sent
Major General John Sullivan on what has become known as the Sullivan Expedition to
neutralize the Iroquois threat to the American side. The two allied nations were rewarded, at
least temporarily by keeping title to their lands after the Revolution. The title was later
purchased very cheaply by Massachusetts and sold off in the Phelps and Gorham Purchase
and the Holland Purchase, after which by treaty, it became a part of New York State. The
tribes were moved to reservations or sent westward. Part of the Cayuga Nation was granted
a reservation in British Canada See also History of New York.
In the 19th century the United States forced Native Americans onto marginal lands in areas
farther and farther west as white settlement of the young nation expanded in that direction.
Numerous Indian Wars broke out between US forces and many different tribes. Authorities
drafted countless treaties during this period and then later nullified them for various reasons.
Well-known battles include the untypical Native American victory at the Battle of Little
Bighorn in 1876, and the massacre of Native Americans at Wounded Knee in 1890. On

January 31, 1876 the United States government ordered all Native Americans to move into
reservations or reserves. This spelled the end of the Prairie Culture that developed around
the use of the horse for hunting, travel and trading.
American policy toward Native Americans has been an evolving process. In the late
nineteenth century reformers in efforts to civilize Indians adapted the practice of educating
native children in boarding schools. The experience in the boarding schools which existed
from 1875 to 1928 was difficult for Indian children who were forbidden to speak their native
languages and in numerous other ways forced to adopt white cultural practices.
Military defeat, cultural pressure, confinement on reservations, forced cultural assimilation,
the outlawing of native languages and culture, forced sterilizations, termination policies of
the 50's and 60's, and (especially) slavery have had deleterious effects on Native Americans'
mental and ultimately physical health. Contemporary problems include poverty, alcoholism,
heart disease, and diabetes.
What name best identifies this group of people?
The term "Native American" originated with anthropologists who preferred it to the former
appellations of "Indian" or "American Indian", which they considered inaccurate, as these
terms bear no relationship to the actual origins of Aboriginal Americans (or American
Aborigines), and were born of the misapprehension on the part of Christopher Columbus,
arriving at islands off the east coast of the North American continent, that he had reached
the East Indies. The words "Indian" and "American Indian" continue in widespread use in
North America, even amongst Native Americans themselves, many of whom do not feel
offended by the terms.[1] But the appropriateness of this usage has become controversial
since the late 20th century; many feel the "Indian" term undesirable as symbolic of the
domination of these peoples by the European colonists. Others, in turn, resent criticism of
their traditional way of speaking. "Red Indian" is a common British term, useful in
differentiating this group from a distinct group of people referred to as East Indians.
One minority view has advocated the name "Asiatic Americans" as a more accurate term
because of the popular theory that such peoples migrated to the Americas from Asia across
an ice bridge covering the Bering Straits some 20,000 years ago. Competent fossil evidence
supports the case for such a migration. However, this term is considered offensive by many
American Indians because most native religions state that American Indians have been in
the Western Hemisphere since the dawn of time. Furthermore, the strong tradition among
archaeologists and anthropologists, is to indicate the geographic origins of a people as
relating to the region where researchers first encountered them or their remains.
One difficulty with the term "Native American" as a substitute for "American Indian" lies in
the fact that there exist several groups of people indisputably indigenous to the Americas,
but who fall outside the classification of "American Indians", for example the Innu people of
the Labrador/Quebec peninsula and the Inuit, Yupik, and Aleut peoples of the far north of the
continent. Another argument is that any person born in America is native to it.
Another difficulty is that many Native American groups migrated (or were displaced) to their
current locations after the start of European colonization, and therefore it can be argued that
they have no more "native" ties to their current locations than do the Europeans. However,
as they were moving within America, they remained native to the America.
The term "Native American" is woefully inadequate from a scientific viewpoint, as Homo
sapiens is an invasive species in the Americas. From a legal standpoint, however, any person
born in the Americas is a native American (though not Native American).