The history of African Americans is a story of resilience, perseverance, and the ongoing pursuit of equality and justice. From the horrors of slavery to the triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement and beyond, African Americans have shaped the cultural, political, and social landscape of the United States.
Percentage of African Americans in the USA, 2020
Early Presence in the Americas
People of African descent were part of the population that settled Texas in the 17th and 18th centuries. This population included free and enslaved black and mixed-race people, as interracial marriage was legal and very common. Estevanico, also called Esteban, is the earliest known person of African descent to arrive in present-day Texas. He was born in Morocco in the early sixteenth century and at some point, came to Spain and was enslaved by Andres Dorantes de Carranza, with whom he later traveled as a member of the Panfilo de Narvaez expedition, which landed in the Americas in 1528.
Africans also came via Santo Domingo in the Caribbean to the San Miguel de Gualdape colony (most likely located in the Winyah Bay area of present-day South Carolina), founded by Spanish explorer Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón in 1526. The ill-fated colony was almost immediately disrupted by a fight over leadership, during which the slaves revolted and fled the colony to seek refuge among local Native Americans. De Ayllón and many of the colonists died shortly afterward, due to an epidemic and the colony was abandoned.
The marriage between Luisa de Abrego, a free Black domestic servant from Seville, and Miguel Rodríguez, a White Segovian conquistador in 1565 in St. Augustine (Spanish Florida), is the first known Christian marriage celebrated and registered anywhere in the continental United States.
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The Era of Slavery
The uninterrupted history of Black people in the United States began in 1619, when 20 Africans were landed in the English colony of Virginia. These individuals were not enslaved people but indentured servants-persons bound to an employer for a limited number of years-as were many of the settlers of European descent (whites). By the 1660s large numbers of Africans were being brought to the English colonies.
Attempts to hold Black servants beyond the normal term of indenture culminated in the legal establishment of Black chattel slavery in Virginia in 1661 and in all the English colonies by 1750. Black people were easily distinguished by their skin color (the result of evolutionary pressures favoring the presence in the skin of a dark pigment called melanin in populations in equatorial climates) from the rest of the populace, making them highly visible targets for enslavement.
Enslaved Africans were put to work clearing and cultivating the farmlands of the New World. Of an estimated 10,000,000 Africans brought to the Americas by the trade of enslaved peoples, about 430,000 came to the territory of what is now the United States. The overwhelming majority were taken from the area of western Africa stretching from present-day Senegal to Angola, where political and social organization as well as art, music, and dance were highly advanced.
Mexico gained its independence from Spain in 1821 following an 11-year revolutionary war. Under Mexican rule, slavery was officially outlawed in Texas by 1829. Following Mexican Independence in 1821, the Mexican government adopted policies to gradually outlaw enslavement in the newly established country, but Anglo settlers actively worked to ensure slavery was preserved in Tejas. A number of enslaved African Americans arrived with Stephen F. Austin and his Anglo settlers in 1824. By the end of 1825, there were around 443 slaves in the colony -almost a quarter of its population.
Most enslaved people in Texas were brought by white families from the southern United States. Some enslaved people came through the domestic slave trade, which was centered in New Orleans. Most enslaved African Americans in Texas were forced into unskilled labor as field hands in the production of cotton, corn, and sugar, though some lived and worked on large plantations or in urban areas where they engaged in more skilled forms of labor as cooks, blacksmiths, and carpenters.
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While there were no large-scale slave insurrections in Texas, enslaved people resisted in a variety of ways, the most common being running away.
The Texas Constitution of 1836 gave more protection to slaveholders while further controlling the lives of enslaved people through new slave codes. Texas's enslaved population grew rapidly: while there were 30,000 enslaved people in Texas in 1845, the census lists 58,161 enslaved African Americans in 1850.
Slaves Waiting for Sale: Richmond, Virginia, 1853
The Civil War and Emancipation
On February 23, 1861, Texans voted to secede from the Union and joined the Confederate States of America. Because Texas remained relatively unscathed by fighting during the war, life for enslaved African Americans continued in much the same way as it had before the fighting.
While Felix Haywood’s life was undisturbed by the war, other enslaved people experienced upheaval. Some enslaved people were moved from the eastern areas of Texas or from other southern states to keep them away from Union troops, and many were made to labor for the Confederate Army, building fortifications and other methods of defense.
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On June 19, 1865, at the end of the Civil War and over two years after President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, General Gordon Granger landed in Galveston and declared that enslavement was ended. However, many black people in Texas remained enslaved for months, and in rare cases years, when their owners refused to release them. Many newly emancipated people celebrated their independence at the holiday subsequently known as Juneteenth, though some found their celebrations thwarted by disgruntled former slave-owners.
Samuel McCullough was a free black man who served as a soldier in the Texas Revolution. McCullough is believed to have suffered the first significant injury of the revolution when he was severely wounded at Goliad in October 1835. After the war, he was forced to petition to remain in Texas, as free black people were ordered to leave the state in 1840. He was allowed to remain in Texas and was awarded a land grant for his service, which he settled in 1847.
Jacob Fontaine, born in Arkansas in 1808, was brought to Austin in 1839, where he spent the remaining years of his enslavement as a preacher and local leader. After emancipation, he founded the First Colored Baptist Church in Austin, and published the Austin Gold Dollar, one of the earliest known black newspapers in the region.
Reconstruction and Its Aftermath
Reconstruction, a period when people across the United States attempted to reckon with the political, economic, and physical destruction of the Civil War, was a difficult time in Texas, and throughout the country. This era was marked by intense violence and extreme social turmoil, and had lasting implications at the local, state, and federal levels.
Black Codes instated by an all-white state Constitutional Congress in 1866 severely limited black people’s rights. These Black Codes included labor, vagrancy, and apprenticeship laws that were meant to mimic the conditions of enslavement. White Texans, reacting to the end of the Civil War, increased violence and attacks against African Americans. The Ku Klux Klan was present in Texas by 1868 and its members intimidated and assaulted freedpeople, usually to reduce black political participation. The Freedman's Bureau, which began in Texas in September 1865, attempted to curb this violence. Its success diminished over time.
Newly freed African Americans, most of whom had few resources with which to start their new lives, found themselves increasingly limited by the legacies of enslavement. Many were forced to sign sharecropping contracts with their former owners, while others were incarcerated at rapid rates. Though black Texans rejoiced at the news of their emancipation, many struggled to earn a living and care for their families after the Civil War. In addition, many could not read or write and were coerced into becoming sharecroppers, or farm tenants. This meant that they rented land from landowners, and paid for the land and their expenses with crops, which kept many African Americans at the time in a cycle of debt and poverty.
Black sharecroppers in the early twentieth century.
With the implementation of national Reconstruction, African Americans became more involved in state political processes, and some black men, including G.T. Ruby and Matthew Gaines, were elected to the Texas Legislature.
George T. Ruby, a former Freedmen’s Bureau agent originally from New York, was a particularly prominent black voice in Texas politics, serving in the Texas Legislature from 1870 until 1874. Matthew Gaines, formerly enslaved in Fredericksburg, Texas, was a Baptist minister who served as the Senator from the Sixteenth District in the Texas Legislature during Reconstruction.
George T. Ruby (left) introduced resolutions to protect black voters, while Matthew Gaines (right) supported bills for public education and prison reform. Both men, along with other black members of the Texas Legislature, helped pass bills creating a State Police, of which black men were a large part, before the end of Texas Reconstruction in 1874.
Reconstruction in Texas officially ended with the inauguration of Democratic Governor Richard Coke in January 1874, and the brief political engagement of Texas African Americans was severely curtailed until the mid-twentieth century. White Texans utilized violence, intimidation, and legal means to limit black suffrage, and passed a poll tax in 1902 to restrict the political participation of poor people of all races.
The Jim Crow Era and the Fight for Civil Rights
The most effective means of reducing black political participation, however, was the white primary, which restricted voting in Democratic primary elections to white Texans. Many African Americans challenged the legality of this system, including Lawrence A. Nixon in 1924 and Richard R. Grovey in 1935.
Laws requiring segregation of railroad cars, waiting rooms, restrooms, restaurants, entertainment establishments, and residential neighborhoods also restricted African American mobility and advancement during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The Ku Klux Klan, which experienced a national resurgence in the 1920s, enacted violence and terror on Texas African Americans, and lynching became an increasingly prevalent form of racial intimidation.
Students of Brackenridge Elementary School in Austin, Texas, in the early 1900s.
Schools were among the many segregated institutions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Black teachers earned significantly less than white teachers; black schools suffered from lack of funding for supplies and facilities; and black students had fewer options for higher education.
Black people built neighborhoods, participated in churches and organizing efforts, and owned businesses and newspapers, all while living under the shadow of racist violence and oppression. While schools continued to be segregated until later in the 20th century, black Texas educators including Melvin B. Tolson at Wiley College in Marshall and W. Rutherford Banks at Prairie View worked to improve historically black colleges and universities.
African Americans continued to confront racist legislation and legal segregation, organizing in their communities against their continued oppression. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Texas, target of racist ire since its formation in the state in 1915, chipped away at legal restrictions on black rights and won important cases in Smith v. Allwright, which declared white primaries unconstitutional in 1944, and Sweatt v.
African American women, including Lulu B. White and Juanita Craft, were instrumental in political activism. White became the president of the Houston chapter of the NAACP in 1939, and transformed her chapter into the largest in the South by 1943. Juanita Craft worked with Lulu B. White at the NAACP, and was the first black woman to vote in Dallas in 1944. During her long career in Texas politics, Craft was responsible for the 1955 Dallas Youth Council protest of Negro Achievement Day at the Texas State Fair, and was involved in desegregation efforts at the University of Texas and North Texas State University.
While African American women worked for progress on the state and local levels, federal policies also created opportunities for black Texans.
Members of the Southwest Region NAACP in Dallas, Texas, in March 1950. Lulu B. White is pictured in the front row wearing a black dress. To the right is Thurgood Marshall.
Black History Month highlights the innovation, intellect, creativity and perseverance within the Black community. Black history is beautifully moving because it is the story of triumph over adversity, determination in the face of uncertainty, and courage and conviction standing down hate and violence. It is to know struggle. It is to fight against structural inequities and indignity. It may be that this constant striving for equity makes Black people all the more committed to the ideals of justice, freedom and equity for everyone. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 made discrimination illegal not only based on race, but also based on color, religion, sex, national original and later sexual orientation and gender identity [2].
Black history is America's history. reveals more about who we are as a country-our difficult past, our painstaking movements forward towards justice, and our persistent racial wounds that we refuse to heal-than the sanitized history that children learn in our school systems. The omission of this narrative is not only harmful for Black people, it is harmful and dangerous for the entire country. government in an unsuccessful coup d'état and many remarked that “this is not who we are as a country.” Yet history documents that this is exactly who we have always been as a country. A country where White violence, racist rhetoric and revisionist history has oppressed the lives and well-being of Black people for centuries. history. is at another crossroads in our racial journey. The exponential rise in White terrorism and extremism is now the largest domestic threat to the U.S [4]. Yet voices throughout the country have been clear: “Black Lives Matter.” It is only through wide-eyed clarity of vision and purpose, and commitment to justice and equity that we will rise as a nation and begin to make peace with our racial past. That process begins with truth-telling and a commitment to doing so to our children.
Contributions and Achievements
In addition, African Americans participated in the war efforts of the First and Second World Wars. Black men were called up for enlistment at higher rates than their population percentages, while black women worked in the defense industry and supported troops from home. Doris Miller, born in Willow Grove, Texas, distinguished himself during the Pearl Harbor attack on December 7, 1941, while Leonard Harmon, originally from Cuero, became the first African American to have a warship named after him, for his heroism during the battle of Guadalcanal in 1942.
At the same time, the black rural population declined as more African Americans moved to urban areas in Texas. Black people increasingly participated in urban industry, and the number of black professionals rose from around 400 in 1940 to almost 4,000 by 1960.
Black musicians and athletes, including Blind Lemon Jefferson and Jack Johnson, achieved national recognition for their contributions to Texas and American culture, while John Biggers, J. Mason Brewer, and many others influenced state and national art and literature.
J. Mason Brewer was a renowned black folklorist and author. Born in Goliad, Texas in 1896, he attended Wiley College in Marshall and later taught at Huston-Tillotson College in Austin. He was the first black member of the Texas Folklore Society, as well as the first black member of the Texas Institute of Letters. Brewer is best known for his work as a folklorist and writer, and for the over two dozen books of folklore, poetry, and essays he wrote or edited.
Dust jacket of American Negro Folklore (1968).
African Americans Today
On November 4, 2008, Democratic Senator Barack Obama-the son of a White American mother and a Kenyan father-defeated Republican Senator John McCain to become the first African American to be elected president.
The Story of Texas cannot be told without recognition of 500 years of African American impact and contribution to the state’s legacy. African descended people in the state of Texas have encountered incredible difficulty, but have continued to build community and create identity throughout their presence in the state.
Timeline of Key Events
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 1528 | Estevanico arrives in present-day Texas. |
| 1619 | First captive Africans brought to North America as indentured servants. |
| 1829 | Slavery officially outlawed in Texas by Mexican rule. |
| 1865 | General Gordon Granger declares enslavement ended in Texas. |
| 1964 | The Civil Rights Act is passed, outlawing discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. |
| 2008 | Barack Obama is elected as the first African American president of the United States. |
