According to the 2018 United States Census estimates, the United States population is approximately 14.6% Black or African American, which equals 47.8 million people. The Black-only population is 13.4%. The term African American throughout this article refers to people who reported their detailed response as African American.
In the 2020 Census, 46,936,733 respondents identified as Black or African American alone or in combination, the third largest race group. Throughout this article, we will refer to the Black or African American population as the Black population. African American was the most reported detailed response by those who identified their race as Black or African American in the 2020 Census, according to recently released data.
This profile offers an overview of the social, economic, and environmental factors that shape the health of the Black/African American population in the United States. Considering the unique environments, cultures, histories, and circumstances of Black/African American populations is fundamental to improving their health outcomes and reducing disparities. Black/African Americans are the second largest racial and ethnic minority population in the United States, following the Hispanic/Latino population.
The Census Bureau defines “Black or African American” as anyone “having origins in any of the Black racial groups of Africa, including people who indicate their race as "Black or African American," or report responses such as African American, Jamaican, Haitian, Nigerian, Ethiopian, or Somali.
African-American history began in the 16th century, when African slave traders sold African artisans, farmers, and warriors to European slave traders, who transported them across the Atlantic to the Western Hemisphere. They were sold as slaves to European colonists and put to work on plantations, particularly in the southern colonies.
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A few were able to achieve freedom through manumission or escape, and founded independent communities before and during the American Revolution. During Reconstruction, African Americans gained citizenship and adult-males the right to vote; however, due to widespread White supremacy, they were treated as second-class citizens and soon disenfranchised in the South. These circumstances changed due to participation in the military conflicts of the United States, substantial migration out of the South, the elimination of legal racial segregation, and the civil rights movement which sought political and social freedom.
In the 20th and 21st centuries, immigration has played an increasingly significant role in the African-American community. African-American culture has had a significant influence on worldwide culture, making numerous contributions to visual arts, literature, the English language, philosophy, politics, cuisine, sports, and music.
Historical Context
Between 1500 and 1820, 12.5 million African men, women, and children were taken from Africa and sold to various slave trades around the world. About 410,000 were brought to the United States, mostly landing in ports in Charleston, Baltimore, and other parts of Maryland, Virginia, and New Orleans. The vast majority of those who were enslaved and transported in the transatlantic slave trade were people from several Central and West African ethnic groups.
The first African slaves in what is now the United States arrived in the early 16th century. 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. An indentured servant (who could be White or Black) would work for several years (usually four to seven) without wages. The status of indentured servants in early Virginia and Maryland was similar to slavery. Servants could be bought, sold, or leased, and they could be physically beaten for disobedience or attempting to running away. Unlike slaves, they were freed after their term of service expired or if their freedom was purchased.
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By the 1640s and 1650s, several African families owned farms around Jamestown, and some became wealthy by colonial standards and purchased indentured servants of their own. In Spanish Florida, some Spanish married or had unions with Pensacola, Creek or African women, both enslaved and free, and their descendants created a mixed-race population of mestizos and mulattos. The Spanish encouraged slaves from the colony of Georgia to come to Florida as a refuge, promising freedom in exchange for conversion to Catholicism. King Charles II issued a royal proclamation freeing all slaves who fled to Spanish Florida and accepted conversion and baptism. Most went to the area around St. Augustine, but escaped slaves also reached Pensacola.
The popular conception of a race-based slave system did not fully develop until the 18th century. The Dutch West India Company introduced slavery in 1625 with the importation of eleven Black slaves into New Amsterdam (present-day New York City). Massachusetts was the first English colony to legally recognize slavery in 1641. In 1662, Virginia passed a law that children of enslaved women would take the status of the mother, rather than that of the father, as was the case under common law.
In Spanish Louisiana, although there was no movement toward abolition of the African slave trade, Spanish rule introduced a new law called coartación, which allowed slaves to buy their freedom, and that of others. Although some did not have the money to do so, government measures on slavery enabled the existence of many free Blacks. This caused problems to the Spaniards with the French creoles (French who had settled in New France) who had also populated Spanish Louisiana.
First established in South Carolina in 1704, groups of armed White men-slave patrols-were formed to monitor enslaved Black people. Their function was to police slaves, especially fugitives. Slave owners feared that slaves might organize revolts or slave rebellions, so state militias were formed to provide a military command structure and discipline within the slave patrols. The earliest African American congregations and churches were organized before 1800 in both northern and southern cities following the Great Awakening.
During the 1770s, Africans, both enslaved and free, helped rebellious American colonists secure their independence by defeating the British in the American Revolutionary War. Blacks played a role in both sides in the American Revolution. Crispus Attucks, the first "martyr" of the American Revolution.
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In the Spanish Louisiana, Governor Bernardo de Gálvez organized Spanish free Black men into two militia companies to defend New Orleans during the American Revolution. They fought in the 1779 battle in which Spain captured Baton Rouge from the British. Gálvez also commanded them in campaigns against the British outposts in Mobile, Alabama, and Pensacola, Florida. He recruited slaves for the militia by pledging to free anyone who was seriously wounded and promised to secure a low price for coartación (buy their freedom and that of others) for those who received lesser wounds. During the 1790s, Governor Francisco Luis Héctor, baron of Carondelet reinforced local fortifications and recruit even more free Black men for the militia. Carondelet doubled the number of free Black men who served, creating two more militia companies-one made up of Black members and the other of pardo (mixed race). Serving in the militia brought free Black men one step closer to equality with Whites, allowing them, for example, the right to carry arms and boosting their earning power.
Slavery had been tacitly enshrined in the US Constitution through provisions such as Article I, Section 2, Clause 3, commonly known as the 3/5 compromise. In the United States Constitution, the Three-fifths Compromise is part of Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3. The compromise was an agreement reached during the 1787 United States Constitutional Convention over the counting of slaves in determining a state's total population. House of Representatives and, should direct taxation be imposed by Congress (which was never done under Article I, section 2, clause 3 of the Constitution), how much each state would pay in taxes. House of Representatives. representatives and more presidential electoral votes than if slaves had not been counted.
Due to the restrictions of Section 9, Clause 1, Congress was unable to pass an Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves until 1807. Fugitive slave laws (derived from the Fugitive Slave Clause of the Constitution-Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3) were passed by Congress in both 1793 and 1850, guaranteeing the right of a slaveholder to recover an escaped slave anywhere within the US. Slave owners, who viewed enslaved people as property, ensured that it became a federal crime to aid or assist those who had fled slavery or to interfere with their capture.
By that time, slavery, which almost exclusively targeted Black people, had become the most critical and contentious political issue in the Antebellum United States, repeatedly sparking crises and conflicts. Prior to the Civil War, eight serving presidents had owned slaves, a practice that was legally protected under the US Constitution. By 1860, the number of enslaved Black people in the US had grown to between 3.5 and 4.4 million, largely as a result of the Atlantic slave trade. Slaves not only represented a significant financial investment for their owners, but they also played a crucial role in producing the country's most valuable product and export: cotton.
By 1815, the domestic slave trade had become a significant and major economic activity in the United States, continuing to flourish until the 1860s. Historians estimate that nearly one million individuals were subjected to this forced migration, which was often referred to as a new "Middle Passage". The historian Ira Berlin described this internal forced migration of enslaved people as the "central event" in the life of a slave during the period between the American Revolution and the Civil War.
Emigration of free Blacks to their continent of origin had been proposed since the Revolutionary war. After Haiti became independent, it tried to recruit African Americans to migrate there after it re-established trade relations with the United States. The Haitian Union was a group formed to promote relations between the countries. After riots against Blacks in Cincinnati, its Black community sponsored founding of the Wilberforce Colony, an initially successful settlement of African American immigrants to Canada. The colony was one of the first such independent political entities.
In 1863, during the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. In 1865, all enslaved blacks (African Americans) in the United States were emancipated as a result of the Thirteenth Amendment. states had previously emancipated some or all of their black population.
African Americans quickly set up congregations for themselves, as well as schools and community/civic associations, to have space away from White control or oversight. While the post-war Reconstruction era was initially a time of progress for African Americans, that period ended in 1876. By the late 1890s, Southern states enacted Jim Crow laws to enforce racial segregation and disenfranchisement.
Segregation was now imposed with Jim Crow laws, using signs used to show Blacks where they could legally walk, talk, drink, rest, or eat. For those places that were racially mixed, non-Whites had to wait until all White customers were dealt with. Most African Americans obeyed the Jim Crow laws, to avoid racially motivated violence. In the last decade of the 19th century, racially discriminatory laws and racial violence aimed at African Americans began to mushroom in the United States, a period often referred to as the "nadir of American race relations". These discriminatory acts included racial segregation-upheld by the United States Supreme Court decision in Plessy v.
The desperate conditions of African Americans in the South sparked the Great Migration during the first half of the 20th century which led to a growing African American community in Northern and Western United States. The rapid influx of Blacks disturbed the racial balance within Northern and Western cities, exacerbating hostility between both Blacks and Whites in the two regions.
The Red Summer of 1919 was marked by hundreds of deaths and higher casualties across the US as a result of race riots that occurred in more than three dozen cities, such as the Chicago race riot of 1919 and the Omaha race riot of 1919. Overall, Blacks in Northern and Western cities experienced systemic discrimination in a plethora of aspects of life. Within employment, economic opportunities for Blacks were routed to the lowest-status and restrictive in potential mobility. Despite discrimination, drawing cards for leaving the hopelessness in the South were the growth of African American institutions and communities in Northern cities. Institutions included Black oriented organizations (e.g., Urban League, NAACP), churches, businesses, and newspapers, as well as successes in the development in African American intellectual culture, music, and popular culture (e.g., Harlem Renaissance, Chicago Black Renaissance).
By the 1950s, the civil rights movement was gaining momentum. A 1955 lynching that sparked public outrage about injustice was that of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old boy from Chicago. Spending the summer with relatives in Money, Mississippi, Till was killed for allegedly having wolf-whistled at a White woman. Till had been badly beaten, one of his eyes was gouged out, and he was shot in the head.
The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and the conditions which brought it into being are credited with putting pressure on presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. During the post-war period, many African Americans continued to be economically disadvantaged relative to other Americans.
Average Black income stood at 54 percent of that of White workers in 1947, and 55 percent in 1962. In 1959, median family income for Whites was $5,600 (equivalent to $60,405 in 2024), compared with $2,900 (equivalent to $31,281 in 2024) for non-White families. In 1965, 43 percent of all Black families fell into the poverty bracket, earning under $3,000 (equivalent to $29,933 in 2024) a year. From 1965 to 1969, Black family income rose from 54 to 60 percent of White family income. In 1968, 23 percent of Black families earned under $3,000 (equivalent to $27,126 in 2024) a year, compared with 41 percent in 1960. In 1965, 19 percent of Black Americans had incomes equal to the national median, a proportion that rose to 27 percent by 1967.
Politically and economically, African Americans have made substantial strides during the post-civil rights era. In 1967, Thurgood Marshall became the first African American Supreme Court Justice. In 1968, Shirley Chisholm became the first Black woman elected to the US Congress. In 1989, Douglas Wilder became the first African American elected governor in US history. Clarence Thomas succeeded Marshall to become the second African American Supreme Court Justice in 1991. In 1992, Carol Moseley-Braun of Illinois became the first African American woman elected to the US Senate. There were 8,936 Black officeholders in the United States in 2000, showing a net increase of 7,467 since 1970.
In 2005, the number of Africans immigrating to the United States, in a single year, surpassed the peak number who were involuntarily brought to the United States during the Atlantic slave trade. 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.
In 1790, when the first US census was taken, Africans (including slaves and free people) numbered about 760,000-about 19.3% of the population. In 1860, at the start of the Civil War, the African American population had increased to 4.4 million, but the percentage rate dropped to 14% of the overall population.
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Population Distribution and Key Demographics
Roughly 55% of the Black population lives in the south and southeast regions of the United States. A majority of the top ten states are located in this region. Texas has the highest Black population in the United States of 3,936,669, about 14% of Texas’s total population. Twelve states have a Black population comprising less than 5% of their total population. Wyoming and Idaho’s Black population comprise only 1% of their respective populations; Wyoming, Vermont, Maine, New Hampshire, and Utah’s are only 2%; South Dakota, New Mexico, and Oregon’s are 3%; and North Dakota and Hawaii’s are 4%.
Nearly two-thirds of the Black population provided a detailed response to the race question. The largest Sub-Saharan African groups in 2020 were Nigerian, Ethiopian, Somali and Ghanaian. The top four groups made up about half of the Sub-Saharan African alone (50.5%) and Sub-Saharan African alone or in any combination (46.9%) populations.
Four Caribbean groups (Jamaican, Haitian, Trinidadian and Tobagonian and West Indian) made up the majority of the Caribbean alone (90.1%) and Caribbean alone or in any combination (91.5%) populations. Together, Jamaican and Haitian comprised 80.5% of the nation’s Caribbean alone population. Jamaican and Haitian each made up 2.2% of the Black alone or in combination population.
The three states (Texas, Georgia and Florida) with the nation’s largest African American populations had nearly equal shares of that population (Table 2). Nearly 20% of the Sub-Saharan African population lived in Texas and New York. Texas was home to the largest Sub-Saharan African alone population (11.4%) and over 20% of the Nigerian alone population resided there in 2020. Maryland had the next-largest Nigerian alone population (10.7%).
Caribbean groups were geographically concentrated: over half of the Caribbean alone (60%) and the Caribbean alone or in any combination (56.1%) populations lived in Florida and New York.
In 87% of counties, the largest detailed Black alone or in any combination group was African American, and these counties were spread throughout the country (Figure 3). Nigerian was the largest Sub-Saharan African alone or in any combination detailed group in almost 700 counties (Figure 4). South African was the largest detailed Sub-Saharan African group in 70 counties, including 10 in Florida and nine in North Carolina. Somali was the largest group in 66 counties, including 21 in Minnesota. The Congolese population was the largest group in 46 counties, mostly in the Midwest. Ghanaian was the largest group in 20 counties.
In 64 counties, Sub-Saharan African groups other than Nigerian, South African, Somali, Ethiopian, Congolese, Ghanaian or Kenyan were the largest. Sudanese was the largest in 15 counties. Cameroonian and Liberian were the largest group in 14 counties each. Eritrean was the largest group in six counties. South Sudanese was the largest group in three counties. In five counties, there were two groups that tied as the largest Sub-Saharan African group. In all five counties, Nigerian was one of the two largest.
Haitian was the largest detailed Caribbean group in 179 counties, concentrated in the eastern half of the nation. Trinidadian and Tobagonian was the largest group in seven counties, including two in Texas: Chambers County (just east of Houston) and San Patricio County. Virgin Islander group was the largest in six counties, including four (Barron, Burnett, Polk and Sawyer) in northern Wisconsin.
Percent Black or African American Alone by County, 2020
Regions with significant populations
- Southern United States
- American urban centers
States with Largest African American Populations:
- Texas: 3,552,997
- Georgia: 3,320,513
- Florida: 3,246,381
- New York: 2,986,172
- California: 2,237,044
Social and Economic Factors
More non-Hispanic Black/African American women than men had earned at least a bachelor's degree (29.9% compared with 23.5%). families, were experiencing poverty. Black/African Americans have the second lowest life expectancy at birth of all racial and ethnic groups in the United States, after American Indians and Alaska Natives.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in 2023, the average life expectancy at birth for Black/African Americans was 74.0 years (77.6 years for females and 70.3 years for males) compared to 78.4 years for all races, 85.2 for Asian Americans, 81.3 for Hispanic/Latinos, 78.4 for whites, and 70.1 for American Indians and Alaska Natives.
