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Article

African Americans and the West  

John William Templeton

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
06 April 2006
Published online:
01 December 2006

The black businessmen William Alexander Leidesdorff and Andres Pico were both born in 1810 with something the abolitionist Frederick Douglass and millions of other Africans in the Western Hemisphere could not claim: their fathers' names. Leidesdorff took that birthright from the Virgin Islands to the far ends of what was to be the United States: Hawaii and California. Pico was able to rise to the highest political and military offices in Alta California because members of his family had already served as military commanders and established their own ranches along the Pacific coast.

West was the direction of freedom for thousands of African Americans who labored long and hard in the abolition movement with Douglass or who simply sought to avoid the segregation prevalent within the boundaries of the United States They found vast areas where blacks were not only welcomed but also were in command of physical political military ...

Article

Agriculture and Agricultural Labor  

Carmen V. Harris

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
09 February 2009
Published online:
01 December 2009

The history of African Americans in the United States is intimately intertwined with the history of American agriculture. From the colonial era to the early nineteenth century, the labor of African Americans—enslaved ones, specifically—powered American agribusiness, producing crops such as cotton, tobacco, rice, and sugar. Although emancipation ended African Americans’ legal bondage as agricultural laborers, African Americans remained a significant portion of the Americans who made their living by agricultural labor. U.S. census statistics from 1900 through 1954 show that during that time African Americans constituted an average of 28.7 percent of the nation's farm operators. Between 1954 and 1959, the percentage of African American farmers dropped by nearly 9 points. Since 1959 the number of African American farmers—then 265,261—has continued to dwindle until in the early twenty-first century there were only about 15,000 African American farmers remaining, which is less than 0.2 percent of all American farmers.

Article

The Antebellum Slave Economy  

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
02 December 2004
Published online:
01 December 2006

Article

Arts and Crafts  

Rebekah Presson Mosby

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
06 April 2006
Published online:
01 December 2006

The colonial period in America was not noted for its fine arts there was little in the way of sculpture and most of the paintings that were made were stiff portraits in the manner of European mostly British art The puritanical spirit that dominated America at the time was not one that nurtured the arts in general Very little if any experimentation went on in any of the arts as most art was regarded as frivolous and a distraction from what was held to be the serious and important business of religion and work Within this context there is evidence that fine art in the form of portraits was made by Africans in colonial America However most of the known artifacts from both slave and free blacks are the work of artisans Some of this work is of exceptionally high quality and it includes just about every imaginable practical and ...

Article

Aviation  

Caroline M. Fannin

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
19 May 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

Despite gender and race discrimination, and despite the small numbers of black women active in aviation, black women have contributed notably to the encouragement of black Americans’ participation in aviation and to the furtherance of aerospace research.

Article

The Barrow Plantation  

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
02 December 2004
Published online:
01 December 2006

Article

Beauty Culture  

Tiffany M. Gill

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
19 May 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

Black is beautiful This familiar cry of the Black Power movement was revolutionary in its celebration of the culture style politics and physical attributes of peoples of African descent Symbols of the black is beautiful aesthetic most notably the Afro not only conjured up ideas about black beauty but also highlighted its contentious relationship with black politics and identity This tension between beauty standards and black politics and identity however did not first emerge in the late twentieth century with the Afro or the Black Power movement In fact blacks particularly black women have been struggling to navigate the paradoxical political nature of black identity and beauty since their enslavement in the Americas Despite this strained relationship black women have actively sought to define beauty in their lives and in the process created and sustained one of the most resilient and successful black controlled enterprises in America the black beauty ...

Article

Beckwourth, Jim  

Lisa E. Rivo

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

mountain man, fur trapper and trader, scout, translator, and explorer, was born James Pierson Beckwith in Frederick County, Virginia, the son of Sir Jennings Beckwith, a white Revolutionary War veteran and the descendant of minor Irish aristocrats who became prominent Virginians. Little is known about Jim's mother, a mixed-race slave working in the Beckwith household. Although he was born into slavery, Jim was manumitted by his father in the 1820s. In the early 1800s, Beckwith moved his family, which reputedly included fourteen children, to Missouri, eventually settling in St. Louis. Some commentators suggest that Beckwith, an adventurous outdoorsman, was seeking an environment less hostile to his racially mixed family.

As a young teenager, after four years of schooling, Jim Beckwourth as his name came to be spelled was apprenticed to a blacksmith Unhappy as a tradesman he fled to the newly discovered lead mines in Illinois s Fever ...

Article

Black Nationalism  

Gayle T. Tate

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
19 May 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

When most people, regardless of age, sex, or race, are asked to identify black nationalists, they may mention Marcus Garvey, El Hajj Malik El Shabazz (Malcolm X), or, more recently, Minister Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam. To others, who are aware of the back-to-Africa movements of the late nineteenth century, Bishop Henry McNeal Turner frequently comes to mind. Rarely however, have black women nationalists such as Maria W. Stewart, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Henrietta Vinton Davis, Audley “Queen Mother” Moore, or Amy Jacques Garvey been recognized for their contributions to the history of the black nationalist movement and ideology Other black women through mass movements political organizations church groups female societies and the early women s club movement fueled the movement s growth at different times in African American history Although African American men were in the foreground of the ...

Article

Black Towns  

Barbara C. Behan

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
09 February 2009
Published online:
01 December 2009

For three centuries, Americans of African descent have at times sought to establish communities where they could live in partial or complete isolation from the dominant culture. Settlements of formerly enslaved African Americans existed on the East Coast after the Revolutionary War. All-black settlements also developed among the Seminole Nation in Florida as early as the eighteenth century. As the nation industrialized, segregated company towns also were built in various locations.

The phrase “all-black towns” usually refers to the period of self-segregation and town-building that began after Reconstruction and continued into the early twentieth century. Historians estimate that at least seventy-five to one hundred all-black towns were founded during this time, mainly in the South and the West.

Article

Brown, Jim  

Julian C. Madison

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
09 February 2009
Published online:
01 December 2009

athlete, actor, civic activist. Jim Brown is generally recognized as the greatest football player and the greatest lacrosse player of all time. At 6 feet 2 inches tall, weighing 228 pounds, and with a 32-inch waist, Brown combined great speed with a powerful running style and fearsome stiff-arm to terrorize National Football League (NFL) defenders for nine years. The only person in history voted into three halls of fame (college football, college lacrosse, and the NFL), Brown is arguably the greatest athlete of the twentieth century.

James Nathaniel Brown was born on Saint Simons Island, Georgia, to Swinton “Sweet Sue” and Theresa Brown Swinton Brown left his family barely two weeks after his son was born and they rarely heard from him afterward When Jim was two his mother left him in the care of his great grandmother and moved to Great Neck Long Island where ...

Article

Charleston Market Women  

Robert Olwell

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
19 May 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

The 1740 South Carolina slave code allowed slaves to attend the Charleston marketplace only if they carried tickets from their masters detailing precisely what they were to buy or sell and at what price However many of the enslaved parlayed this small de jure permit into a much larger de facto liberty by which they purchased goods coming to market and resold them for a profit In effect they acted as independent marketeers while still enslaved Customarily after paying their master an agreed upon wage such enslaved marketeers could keep any surplus they earned for themselves Such extra legal arrangements allowed individual slave owners to collect a steady income from their slaves labor and from the market even when they had no work for the slaves to do or produce of their own to sell But as enslaved marketeers came to dominate the marketplace slaveholders collectively expressed their resentment ...

Article

Class  

Graham Russell Hodges

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
09 February 2009
Published online:
01 December 2009

Class as a factor in the lives of African Americans in the twentieth century created mixed reactions. In a society that in some ways generally regards itself as classless, many Americans regard economic inequality as a social problem that needs fixing—through government programs or, preferably, individual initiative. For African Americans, the massive impact of race and racism seemed to render all blacks victims of white prejudice. W. E. B. Du Bois's dictum that the color line would be the major problem of the twentieth century had the effect of underscoring that African Americans were behind a racial veil apart from white Americans: material conditions made this analysis convincing. Until the late twentieth century, few African Americans could be described as wealthy, and fewer owned the means of production.

By the early twenty first century for the first time there were significant numbers of blacks with money and power In addition ...

Article

Craft, William, and Ellen Craft  

Barbara McCaskill

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

escaped slaves, abolitionists, teachers, entrepreneurs, and autobiographers, were born into slavery in antebellum central Georgia. William recalled little of his father and mother, who, along with a brother and a sister, were sold away “at separate times, to different persons” by his first master, a merchant named Craft (Craft, 8). Ellen was the daughter of Maria, a mixed-race slave, and James Smith, a white planter from Clinton, Georgia. Like her mother, Ellen was raised as a house servant until she was given, at age eleven, as a wedding present to her white half-sister Eliza, the wife of Robert Collins, a wealthy businessman and railroad builder in Macon, Georgia. While Ellen was serving as a lady's maid and seamstress in the Collins mansion, William was brought to Macon by a bank officer named Ira Taylor.

William was much in demand for his carpentry skills as his first master ...

Article

Cuffe, Paul  

Robert Fay

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

At his death on September 9, 1817 Paul Cuffe had a rich life upon which to reflect He and his wife Alice had seven children His several family run businesses had earned assets worth an estimated $20 000 making him the wealthiest man in Westport Massachusetts and the wealthiest black man in the United States News of his death reached the other side of the Atlantic illustrating how far his fame and influence had spread Yet his life of accomplishment had not eliminated the racial discrimination that was built into American society ironically following his funeral at the South Friends Meeting House which his financial support had helped to build Cuffe was buried in a remote cemetery corner far away from the white Quakers Despite the material successes of his life he had not attained the goal that came to dominate his life the mass emigration of American blacks ...

Article

Depression, The  

Lois Rita Helmbold

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
19 May 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

The worldwide economic depression of the 1930s greatly increased the burden on many black women across the United States. Their triple responsibilities of holding down a job, caring for families and friends, and organizing to build communities and to fight for rights as citizens were more difficult than ever to fulfill. While hard times were hardly new to most black women, what was new was the severity of the Depression and the fact that people at the bottom of the economy found that their old ways of coping with hard times were obsolete. As one unemployed woman noted, “You can’t get no more job like you used to. I used to have a new job before I was let out from the old.”

While the Depression devastated the economy of the United States its local effects largely depended on the particular circumstances of individual communities At the time of the ...

Article

Detroit, Michigan  

Eric Bennett

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

Detroit was founded by French slaveholders, but when Michigan joined the United States in 1837, the state legislature abolished slavery. The city soon earned a reputation as a major stop on the Underground Railroad, and by the Civil War (1861–1865), fugitive slaves constituted the largest group of African Americans in Detroit. The black community founded a reading room, a Young Men's Debating Club, and even an African-American Philharmonic Association, and many abolitionists made Detroit their center of activity.

After the Civil War, the black population in Detroit increased sevenfold as freedpeople arrived in search of work, largely from Virginia and Kentucky. Empowered by growing numbers as well as the Fifteenth Amendment, which gave freedmen the vote, African Americans began to seek and win local political offices.

By the turn of the twentieth century Detroit s liberal reputation combined with worsening conditions in the South to encourage ...

Article

Dickson, Amanda America  

Lynette D. Myles

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

slave and later a wealthy black woman, was born in Hancock County, Georgia, the daughter of Julia Frances Lewis Dickson, a slave, and David Dickson, a wealthy, white Georgian planter, businessman, and slave owner. Amanda America Dickson's birth resulted from the rape of thirteen-year-old Julia Dickson by David Dickson, the forty-year-old son of the slave owner Elizabeth Sholars Dickson. After she was weaned, Amanda was taken from her mother and placed in the home of her white owner and grandmother, Elizabeth Sholars Dickson. Julia, on the other hand, remained in living quarters outside the Dickson house. Until her white grandmother's death in 1864, Amanda lived with her in the same bedroom where she spent most of her time “studying her books and doing whatever she was told to do” (Leslie, Woman of Color 42 According to the Dickson family s African ...

Article

Domestic Workers  

Jane E. Dabel

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
19 May 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

From the period of slavery onward, African American women have labored outside of the home in many roles, and most prominently as domestic servants. Because employment has been the key to their survival, and though racism and sexism have limited their employment opportunities, black women have always attempted to make the best of their employment situation. Throughout their wage-earning experiences, black women have always sought to control and shape their lives as laborers.

Article

Du Sable, Jean Baptiste Pointe  

Richard C. Lindberg

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

explorer and merchant, was born in San Marc, Haiti, the son of a slave woman (name unknown) and Dandonneau (first name unknown), scion of a prominent French Canadian family active in the North American fur trade. Surviving historical journals record the name of Jean Baptiste Pointe du Sable (Pointe au Sable by some accounts), a Haitian of mixed-race ancestry, as the first permanent settler of Chicago. In her 1856 memoir of frontier life in the emerging Northwest Territory, Juliette Kinzie, the wife of the fur trader John Kinzie makes note of the fact that the first white man who settled here was a Negro Several of the voyageurs and commercial men who regularly traversed the shores of southern Lake Michigan in the last decade of the eighteenth century kept accurate records of their encounters in journals and ledger books One such entry describes du Sable as a ...