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African American history started with the arrival of Africans to North America in the 16th and 17th centuries. Former Spanish slaves who had been freed by Francis Drake arrived aboard the Golden Hind at New Albion in California in 1579. The European colonization of the Americas, and the resulting Atlantic slave trade, led to a large scale transportation of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic; of the roughly 10–12 million Africans who were sold by the Barbary slave trade, either to European slavery or to servitude in the Americas, approximately 388,000 landed in North America. After arriving in various European colonies in North America, the enslaved Africans were sold to white colonists, primarily to work on cash crop plantations. A group of enslaved Africans arrived in the English Virginia Colony in 1619, marking the beginning of slavery in the colonial history of the United States; by 1776, roughly 20% of the British North American population was of African descent, both free and enslaved. The American Revolutionary War, which saw the Thirteen Colonies become independent and transform into the United States, led to great social upheavals for African Americans; Black soldiers fought on both the British and the American sides, and after the conflict ended the Northern United States gradually abolished slavery. However, the American South, which had an economy dependent on plantations operation by slave labor, entrenched the slave system and expanded it during the westward expansion of the United States. During this period, numerous enslaved African Americans escaped into free states and Canada via the Underground Railroad. Disputes over slavery between the Northern and Southern states led to the American Civil War, in which 178,000 African Americans served on the Union side. During the war, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery in the U. S., except as punishment for a crime. After the war ended with a Confederate defeat, the Reconstruction era began, in which African Americans living in the South were granted equal rights with their white neighbors. White opposition to these advancements led to most African Americans living in the South to be disfranchised, and a system of racial segregation known as the Jim Crow laws was passed in the Southern states. Beginning in the early 20th century, in response to poor economic conditions, segregation and lynchings, over 6 million primarily rural African Americans migrated out of the South to other regions of the United States in search of opportunity. The nadir of American race relations led to civil rights efforts to overturn discrimination and racism against African Americans. In 1954, these efforts coalesced into a broad unified movement led by civil rights activists such as Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. This succeeded in persuading the federal government to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed racial discrimination. The 2020 United States census reported that 46,936,733 respondents identified as African Americans, forming roughly 14.2% of the American population. Of those, over 2.1 million immigrated to the United States as citizens of modern African states. African Americans have made major contributions to the culture of the United States, including literature, cinema and music.

African Americans are the descendants of Africans who were forced into slavery after they were captured during African wars or raids. They were captured and brought to America as part of the Atlantic slave trade. African Americans are descended from various ethnic groups, mostly from ethnic groups that lived in West and Central Africa, including the Sahel. A smaller number of African Americans are descended from ethnic groups that lived in Eastern and Southeastern Africa. The major ethnic groups that the enslaved Africans belonged to included the Bakongo, Igbo, Mandinka, Wolof, Akan, Fon, Yoruba, and Makua, among many others. Although these different groups varied in customs, religious theology and language, what they had in common was a way of life which was different from that of the Europeans. Originally, a majority of the future slaves came from these villages and societies, however, once they were sent to the Americas and enslaved, these different peoples had European standards and beliefs forced upon them, causing them to do away with tribal differences and forge a new history and culture that was a creolization of their common past, present, and European culture Slaves who belonged to specific African ethnic groups were more sought after and became more dominant in numbers than slaves who belonged to other African ethnic groups in certain regions of what later became the United States.

Before the Atlantic slave trade there were already people of African descent in America. A few countries in Africa would buy, sell, and trade other enslaved Africans, who were often prisoners of war, with the Europeans. The people of Mali and Benin are known for partaking in the event of selling their prisoners of war and other unwanted people off as slaves. Once aboard the ships the captives were then segregated by gender. They were forced to adjust to a new way of life.

Africans assisted the Spanish and the Portuguese during their early exploration of the Americas. In the 16th century some Black explorers settled in the Mississippi valley and in the areas that became South Carolina and New Mexico. The most celebrated Black explorer of the Americas was Estéban, who traveled through the Southwest in the 1530s. In 1619, the first captive Africans were brought via Dutch slave ship to Point Comfort (today Fort Monroe in Hampton, Virginia), thirty miles downstream from Jamestown, Virginia. They had been kidnapped by Portuguese slave traders. Virginia settlers treated these captives as indentured servants and released them after a number of years. This practice was gradually replaced by the system of chattel slavery used in the Caribbean. When servants were freed, they became competition for resources. Additionally, released servants had to be replaced. This—combined with the ambiguous nature of the social status of Black people and the difficulty in using any other group of people as forced servants—led to the subjugation of Black people into slavery. Massachusetts was the first colony to legalize slavery in 1641. Other colonies followed suit by passing laws that made slave status heritable and non Christian imported servants slaves for life. At the same time, many were born to Africans and their descendants, and thus were native born on the North American mainland. Their legal status was now clear: enslaved for life, with Black children inheriting the same status. As European colonists engaged in aggressive expansionism, claiming and clearing more land for large scale farming and the construction of plantations, the flow of enslaved Africans brought to the continent rapidly increased, beginning in the 1660s. The slave trade from the West Indies proved insufficient to meet demand in the now fast growing North American slave market. Additionally, most North American buyers of enslaved people no longer wanted to purchase enslaved people who were coming in from the West Indies—by now they were either harder to obtain, too expensive, undesirable, or more often, they had been exhausted in many ways by the brutality of the islands' sugar plantations. From the 1680s onward, the majority of enslaved Africans imported into North America were shipped directly from Africa, and most of them disembarked in ports located in what is now the Southern U. S, particularly in the present day states of Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, and Louisiana. By the turn of the 18th century, enslaved Africans had come to fully supplant indentured servants in proving the labor source for the rapidly expanding plantation system of the Southern Colonies. The population of enslaved African Americans in North American grew rapidly during the 18th and early 19th centuries due to a variety of factors, including a lower prevalence of tropic diseases. Colonial society was divided over the religious and moral implications of slavery, though it remained legal in each of the Thirteen Colonies until the American Revolution. Slavery led to a gradual shift between the American South and North, both before and after independence, as the comparatively more urbanized and industrialized North required fewer slaves than the South. By the 1750s, the native born enslaved population of African descent outnumbered that of the African born enslaved. By the time of the American Revolution, several Northern states were considering the abolition of slavery. Some Southern colonies, such as Virginia, had produced such large and self sustaining native born enslaved Black populations that they stopped taking indirect imports of enslaved Africans altogether. However, other colonies such as Georgia and South Carolina still relied on a steady influx of enslaved people to keep up with the ever growing demand for agricultural labor among the burgeoning plantation economies. These colonies continued to import enslaved Africans until the trade was outlawed in 1808, save for a temporary lull during the Revolutionary War. South Carolina's Black population remained very high for most of the eighteenth century due to the continued import of enslaved Africans, with Blacks outnumbering whites three to one. In contrast, Virginia maintained a white majority despite its significant Black enslaved population. It was said that in the eighteenth century, the colony South Carolina resembled an "extension of West Africa". Legal importation of enslaved Africans halted in 1808 when the newly formed United States outlawed the slave trade on the earliest date allowed by the Constitution. Despite the ban, small to moderate cargoes of enslaved Africans continued to be illegally brought into the U. S., only ending for good in 1859. Gradually, a free Black population emerged, concentrated in port cities along the Atlantic coast from Charleston to Boston. Enslaved people who lived in the cities and towns had more privileges than enslaved people who did not, but the great majority of enslaved people lived on southern tobacco or rice plantations, usually in groups of 20 or more. Wealthy plantation owners eventually became so reliant on slavery that they devastated their own lower class. In the years to come, the institution of slavery would be so heavily involved in the South's economy that it would divide America. The most serious slave rebellion was the 1739 Stono Uprising in South Carolina. The colony had about 56,000 enslaved Blacks, outnumbering whites two to one. About 150 enslaved people rose up, seizing guns, ammunition, and killing twenty whites before fleeing to Spanish Florida. The local militia soon intercepted and killed most of the slaves involved in the uprising. At this time, slavery existed in all American colonies. In the North, 2% of people owned enslaved people, most of whom were personal servants. In the south, 25% of the population relied on the labour of enslaved people. Southern slavery usually took the form of field hands who lived and worked on plantations. These statistics show the early imbalance that would eventually tip the scale and rid the United States of slavery.

The latter half of the 18th century was a time of significant political upheaval on the North American continent. In the midst of cries for independence from British rule, many pointed out the hypocrisy inherent in colonial slaveholders' demands for freedom. The Declaration of Independence, a document which would become a manifesto for human rights and personal freedom around the world, was written by Thomas Jefferson, a man who owned over 200 enslaved people. Other Southern statesmen were also major slaveholders. The Second Continental Congress considered freeing enslaved people to assist with the war effort, but they also removed language from the Declaration of Independence that included the promotion of slavery amongst the offenses of King George III. A number of free Black people, most notably Prince Hall—founder of Prince Hall Freemasonry—submitted petitions which called for abolition, but these were largely ignored. This did not deter Black people, free and enslaved, from participating in the Revolution. Crispus Attucks, a free Black tradesman, was the first casualty of the Boston Massacre and of the ensuing American Revolutionary War. 5,000 Black people, including Prince Hall, fought in the Continental Army. Many fought side by side with White soldiers at the battles of Lexington and Concord and at Bunker Hill. However, upon George Washington's ascension to commander of the Continental Army in 1775, the additional recruitment of Black people was forbidden. Approximately 5000 free African American men helped the American Colonists in their struggle for freedom. One of these men, Agrippa Hull, fought in the American Revolution for over six years. He and the other African American soldiers fought in order to improve their white neighbor's views of them and advance their own fight of freedom. By contrast, the British and Loyalists offered emancipation to any enslaved person owned by a Patriot who was willing to join the Loyalist forces. Lord Dunmore, the Governor of Virginia, recruited 300 African American men into his Ethiopian regiment within a month of making this proclamation. In South Carolina 25,000 enslaved people, more than one quarter of the total, escaped to join and fight with the British, or fled for freedom in the uproar of war. Thousands of slaves also escaped in Georgia and Virginia, as well as New England and New York. Well known African Americans who fought for the British include Colonel Tye and Boston King. Thomas Peters was one of the large numbers of African Americans who fought for the British. Peters was born in present day Nigeria and belonged to the Yoruba tribe, and ended up being captured and sold into slavery in French Louisiana. Sold again, he was enslaved in North Carolina and escaped his master's farm in order to receive Lord Dunmore's promise of freedom. Peters had fought for the British throughout the war. When the war finally ended, he and other African Americans who fought on the losing side were taken to Nova Scotia. Here, they encountered difficulty farming the small plots of lands they were granted. They also did not receive the same privileges and opportunities as the white Loyalists had. Peters sailed to London in order to complain to the government. "He arrived at a momentous time when English abolitionists were pushing a bill through Parliament to charter the Sierra Leone Company and to grant it trading and settlement rights on the West African coast." Peters and the other African Americans on Nova Scotia left for Sierra Leone in 1792. Peters died soon after they arrived, but the other members of his party lived on in their new home where they formed the Sierra Leone Creole ethnic identity.

The colonists eventually won the war and the United States was recognized as a sovereign nation. In the provisional treaty, they demanded the return of property, including enslaved people. Nonetheless, the British helped up to 3,000 documented African Americans to leave the country for Nova Scotia, Jamaica and Britain rather than be returned to slavery. The Constitutional Convention of 1787 sought to define the foundation for the government of the newly formed United States of America. The constitution set forth the ideals of freedom and equality while providing for the continuation of the institution of slavery through the fugitive slave clause and the three fifths compromise. Additionally, free Black people's rights were also restricted in many places. Most were denied the right to vote and were excluded from public schools. Some Black people sought to fight these contradictions in court. In 1780, Elizabeth Freeman and Quock Walker used language from the new Massachusetts constitution that declared all men were born free and equal in freedom suits to gain release from slavery. A free Black businessman in Boston named Paul Cuffe sought to be excused from paying taxes since he had no voting rights. In the Northern states, the revolutionary spirit did help African Americans. Beginning in the 1750s, there was widespread sentiment during the American Revolution that slavery was a social evil (for the country as a whole and for the whites) that should eventually be abolished. All the Northern states passed emancipation acts between 1780 and 1804; most of these arranged for gradual emancipation and a special status for freedmen, so there were still a dozen "permanent apprentices" into the 19th century. In 1787 Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance and barred slavery from the large Northwest Territory. In 1790, there were more than 59,000 free Black people in the United States. By 1810, that number had risen to 186,446. Most of these were in the North, but Revolutionary sentiments also motivated Southern slaveholders. For 20 years after the Revolution, more Southerners also freed enslaved people, sometimes by manumission or in wills to be accomplished after the slaveholder's death. In the Upper South, the percentage of free Black people rose from about 1% before the Revolution to more than 10% by 1810. Quakers and Moravians worked to persuade slaveholders to free families. In Virginia, the number of free Black people increased from 10,000 in 1790 to nearly 30,000 in 1810, but 95% of Black people were still enslaved. In Delaware, three quarters of all Black people were free by 1810. By 1860, just over 91% of Delaware's Black people were free, and 49.1% of those in Maryland. Among the successful free men was Benjamin Banneker, a Maryland astronomer, mathematician, almanac author, surveyor, and farmer, who in 1791 assisted in the initial survey of the boundaries of the future District of Columbia. Despite the challenges of living in the new country, most free Black people fared far better than the nearly 800,000 enslaved Blacks. Even so, many considered emigrating to Africa. The Second Great Awakening (1800–1830s) has been called the "central and defining event in the development of Afro Christianity."

As the United States grew, the institution of slavery became more entrenched in the southern states, while northern states began to abolish it. Pennsylvania was the first, in 1780 passing an act for gradual abolition. A number of events continued to shape views on slavery. One of these events was the Haitian Revolution, which was the only slave revolt that led to an independent country. Many slave owners fled to the United States with tales of horror and massacre that alarmed Southern whites. The invention of the cotton gin in the 1790s allowed the cultivation of short staple cotton, which could be grown in much of the Deep South, where warm weather and proper soil conditions prevailed. The industrial revolution in Europe and New England generated a heavy demand for cotton for cheap clothing, which caused an enormous demand for slave labor to develop new cotton plantations. There was a 70% increase in the number of slaves in the United States in only 20 years. They were overwhelmingly concentrated on plantations in the Deep South, and moved west as old cotton fields lost their productivity and new lands were purchased. Unlike the Northern States who put more focus into manufacturing and commerce, the South was heavily dependent on agriculture. Southern political economists at this time supported the institution by concluding that nothing was inherently contradictory about owning slaves and that a future of slavery existed even if the South were to industrialize. Racial, economic, and political turmoil reached an all time high regarding slavery up to the events of the Civil War. In 1807, at the urging of President Thomas Jefferson, Congress abolished the importation of enslaved workers. While American Black people celebrated this as a victory in the fight against slavery, the ban increased the internal trade in enslaved people. Changing agricultural practices in the Upper South from tobacco to mixed farming decreased labor requirements, and enslaved people were sold to traders for the developing Deep South. In addition, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 allowed any Black person to be claimed as a runaway unless a White person testified on their behalf. A number of free Black people, especially indentured children, were kidnapped and sold into slavery with little or no hope of rescue. By 1819 there were exactly 11 free and 11 slave states, which increased sectionalism. Fears of an imbalance in Congress led to the 1820 Missouri Compromise that required states to be admitted to the union in pairs, one slave and one free. In 1850, after winning the Mexican–American War, a problem gripped the nation: what to do about the territories won from Mexico. Henry Clay, the man behind the compromise of 1820, once more rose to the challenge, to craft the compromise of 1850. In this compromise the territories of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Nevada would be organized but the issue of slavery would be decided later. Washington D. C. would abolish the slave trade but not slavery itself. California would be admitted as a free state but the South would receive a new fugitive slave act which required Northerners to return enslaved people who escaped to the North to their owners. The compromise of 1850 would maintain a shaky peace until the election of Lincoln in 1860. In 1851 the battle between enslaved people and slave owners was met in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. The Christiana Riot demonstrated the growing conflict between states' rights and Congress on the issue of slavery.

Abolitionists in Britain and the United States in the 1840–1860 period developed large, complex campaigns against slavery. According to Patrick C. Kennicott, the largest and most effective abolitionist speakers were Black people who spoke before the countless local meetings of the National Negro Conventions. They used the traditional arguments against slavery, protesting it on moral, economic, and political grounds. Their role in the antislavery movement not only aided the abolitionist cause but also was a source of pride to the Black community. In 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe published a novel that changed how many would view slavery. Uncle Tom's Cabin tells the story of the life of an enslaved person and the brutality that is faced by that life day after day. It would sell over 100,000 copies in its first year. The popularity of Uncle Tom's Cabin would solidify the North in its opposition to slavery, and press forward the abolitionist movement. President Lincoln would later invite Stowe to the White House in honor of this book that changed America. In 1856 Charles Sumner, a Massachusetts congressmen and antislavery leader, was assaulted and nearly killed on the House floor by Preston Brooks of South Carolina. Sumner had been delivering an abolitionist speech to Congress when Brooks attacked him. Brooks received praise in the South for his actions while Sumner became a political icon in the North. Sumner later returned to the Senate, where he was a leader of the Radical Republicans in ending slavery and legislating equal rights for freed slaves. Over 1 million enslaved people were moved from the older seaboard slave states, with their declining economies, to the rich cotton states of the southwest; many others were sold and moved locally. Ira Berlin (2000) argues that this Second Middle Passage shredded the planters' paternalist pretenses in the eyes of Black people and prodded enslaved people and free Black people to create a host of oppositional ideologies and institutions that better accounted for the realities of endless deportations, expulsions, and flights that continually remade their world. Benjamin Quarles' work Black Abolitionists provides the most extensive account of the role of Black abolitionists in the American anti slavery movement.

Black people generally settled in cities, creating the core of Black community life in the region. They established churches and fraternal orders. Many of these early efforts were weak and they often failed, but they represented the initial steps in the evolution of Black communities. During the early Antebellum period, the creation of free Black communities began to expand, laying out a foundation for African Americans' future. At first, only a few thousand African Americans had their freedom. As the years went by, the number of Blacks being freed expanded tremendously, building to 233,000 by the 1820s. They sometimes sued to gain their freedom or purchased it. Some slave owners freed their bondspeople and a few state legislatures abolished slavery. The rise of industrialization, which depended on power driven machinery more than human labor, might have afforded them employment, but many owners of textile mills refused to hire Black workers. These owners considered whites to be more reliable and educable. This resulted in many Black people performing unskilled labor. Black men worked as stevedores, construction worker, and as cellar , well and grave diggers. As for Black women workers, they worked as servants for white families. Some women were also cooks, seamstresses, basket makers, midwives, teachers, and nurses. Many Black people organized to help strengthen the Black community and continue the fight against slavery. One of these organizations was the American Society of Free Persons of Colour, founded in 1830. This organization provided social aid to poor Black people and organized responses to political issues. Further supporting the growth of the Black Community was the Black church, usually the first community institution to be established. Starting in the early 1800s with the African Methodist Episcopal Church, African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church and other churches, the Black church grew to be the focal point of the Black community. The Black church was both an expression of community and unique African American spirituality, and a reaction to European American discrimination. The church also served as neighborhood centers where free Black people could celebrate their African heritage without intrusion by white detractors. The church was the center of the Black communities, but it was also the center of education. Since the church was part of the community and wanted to provide education; they educated the freed and enslaved Black people. At first, Black preachers formed separate congregations within the existing denominations, such as social clubs or literary societies. Because of discrimination at the higher levels of the church hierarchy, some Black people like Richard Allen (bishop) simply founded separate Black denominations. Free Black people also established Black churches in the South before 1800. After the Great Awakening, many Black people joined the Baptist Church, which allowed for their participation, including roles as elders and preachers. For instance, First Baptist Church and Gillfield Baptist Church of Petersburg, Virginia, both had organized congregations by 1800 and were the first Baptist churches in the city. Petersburg, an industrial city, by 1860 had 3,224 free Black people (36% of Black people, and about 26% of all free persons), the largest population in the South. In Virginia, free Black people also created communities in Richmond, Virginia and other towns, where they could work as artisans and create businesses. Others were able to buy land and farm in frontier areas further from white control. The Black community also established schools for Black children, since they were often banned from entering public schools. Richard Allen organized the first Black Sunday school in America; it was established in Philadelphia during 1795. Then five years later, the priest Absalom Jones established a school for Black youth. These anti slavery sentiments were popular among both white abolitionists and African American slaves. Enslaved people rallied around these ideas with rebellions against their masters as well as white bystanders during the Denmark Vesey Conspiracy of 1822 and the Nat Turner's Rebellion of 1831. Leaders and plantation owners were also very concerned about the consequences Haiti's revolution would have on early America. Thomas Jefferson, for one, was wary of the "instability of the West Indies", referring to Haiti.

Dred Scott was an enslaved man whose owner had taken him to live in the free state of Illinois. After his owner's death, Dred Scott sued in court for his freedom on the basis of his having lived in a free state for a long period. The Black community received an enormous shock with the Supreme Court's "Dred Scott" decision in March 1857. Black people were not American citizens and could never be citizens, the court said in a decision roundly denounced by the Republican Party as well as the abolitionists. Because enslaved people were "property, not people", by this ruling they could not sue in court. The decision was finally reversed by the Civil Rights Act of 1865. In what is sometimes considered mere obiter dictum the Court went on to hold that Congress had no authority to prohibit slavery in federal territories because enslaved people are personal property and the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution protects property owners against deprivation of their property without due process of law. Although the Supreme Court has never explicitly overruled the Dred Scott case, the Court stated in the Slaughter House Cases that at least one part of it had already been overruled by the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, which begins by stating, "All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside."

The Emancipation Proclamation was an executive order issued by President Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863. In a single stroke it changed the legal status, as recognized by the U. S. government, of 3 million enslaved people in designated areas of the Confederacy from "slave" to "free." Its practical effect was that as soon as an enslaved person escaped from slavery, by running away or through advances of federal troops, the enslaved person became legally and actually free. The owners were never compensated. Plantation owners, realizing that emancipation would destroy their economic system, sometimes moved their enslaved people as far as possible out of reach of the Union army. By June 1865, the Union Army controlled all of the Confederacy and liberated all the designated enslaved people. About 200,000 free Black people and former enslaved people served in the Union Army and Navy, thus providing a basis for a claim to full citizenship. The dislocations of war and Reconstruction had a severe negative impact on the Black population, with much sickness and death.

The Civil Rights Act of 1866 made Black people full U. S. citizens (and this repealed the Dred Scott decision). In 1868, the 14th Amendment granted full U. S. citizenship to African Americans. The 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870, extended the right to vote to Black males. The Freedmen's Bureau was an important institution established to create social and economic order in Southern states. From 1865 to 1877, under the protection of Union troops, some strides were made toward equal rights for African Americans. Southern Black men began to vote and they were also elected to serve in the United States Congress as well as in local offices such as the office of sheriff. The safety which was provided by the troops did not last long, however, and white Southerners frequently terrorized Black voters. Coalitions of white and Black Republicans passed bills in order to establish the first public school systems in most states of the South, although sufficient funding was hard to find. Black people established their own churches, towns, and businesses. Tens of thousands migrated to Mississippi for the chance to clear and own their own land, as 90 percent of the bottomlands were undeveloped. By the end of the 19th century, two thirds of the farmers who owned land in the Mississippi Delta bottomlands were Black. Hiram Revels became the first African American senator in the U. S. Congress in 1870. Other African Americans soon came to Congress from South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. These new politicians supported the Republicans and tried to bring further improvements to the lives of African Americans. Revels and others understood that white people may have felt threatened by the African American congressmen. Revels stated, "The white race has no better friend than I. I am true to my own race. I wish to see all done that can be done to assist [Black men]in acquiring property, in becoming intelligent, enlightened citizens but at the same time, I would not have anything done which would harm the white race," Blanche K. Bruce was the other African American who became a U. S. senator during this period. African Americans elected to the House of Representatives during this time included Benjamin S. Turner, Josiah T. Walls, Joseph H. Rainey, Robert Brown Elliot, Robert D. De Large, and Jefferson H. Long. Frederick Douglass also served in the different government jobs during Reconstruction, including Minister Resident and Counsel General to Haiti, Recorder of Deeds, and U. S. Marshall. Bruce became a Senator in 1874 and represented the state of Mississippi. He worked with white politicians from his region in order to hopefully help his fellow African Americans and other minority groups such as Chinese immigrants and Native Americans. He even supported efforts to end restrictions on former Confederates' political participation. Some civil rights activists, such as W. E. B. Du Bois, disagree that identity was achieved after the Civil War. African Americans in the post Civil War era were faced with many rules and regulations that, even though they were "free", prevented them from enjoying the same amount of freedom as white citizens had. Tens of thousands of Black northerners left homes and careers and also migrated to the defeated South, building schools, printing newspapers, and opening businesses. As Joel Williamson puts it:
Many of the migrants, women as well as men, came as teachers sponsored by a dozen or so benevolent societies, arriving in the still turbulent wake of Union armies. Others came to organize relief for the refugees Still others came south as religious missionaries Some came south as business or professional people seeking opportunity on this special Black frontier. Finally, thousands came as soldiers, and when the war was over, many of [their] young men remained there or after a stay of some months in the North, they returned in order to complete their education.

The Jim Crow laws were state and local laws in the United States enacted between 1876 and 1965. They mandated de jure segregation in all public facilities, with a supposedly "separate but equal" status for Black Americans. In reality, this led to treatment and accommodations that were usually inferior to those provided for white Americans, systematizing a number of economic, educational and social disadvantages. In the face of years of mounting violence and intimidation directed at Blacks as well as whites sympathetic to their cause, the U. S. government retreated from its pledge to guarantee constitutional protections to freedmen and women. When President Rutherford B. Hayes withdrew Union troops from the South in 1877 as a result of a national compromise on the election, Black people lost most of their political power. Men like Benjamin "Pap" Singleton began speaking of leaving the South. This idea culminated in the 1879–80 movement of the Exodusters, who migrated to Kansas, where Blacks had much more freedom and it was easier to acquire land. When Democrats took control of Tennessee in 1888, they passed laws making voter registration more complicated and ended the most competitive political state in the South. Voting by Black people in rural areas and small towns dropped sharply, as did voting by poor whites. From 1890 to 1908, starting with Mississippi and ending with Georgia, ten of eleven Southern states adopted new constitutions or amendments that effectively disenfranchised most Black people and many poor whites. Using a combination of provisions such as poll taxes, residency requirements and literacy tests, states dramatically decreased Black voter registration and turnout, in some cases to zero. The grandfather clause was used in many states temporarily to exempt illiterate white voters from literacy tests. As power became concentrated under the Democratic Party in the South, the party positioned itself as a private club and instituted white primaries, closing Black people out of the only competitive contests. By 1910 one party white rule was firmly established across the South. Although African Americans quickly started litigation to challenge such provisions, early court decisions at the state and national level went against them. In Williams v. Mississippi (1898), the US Supreme Court upheld state provisions. This encouraged other Southern states to adopt similar measures over the next few years, as noted above. Booker T. Washington, of Tuskegee Institute secretly worked with Northern supporters to raise funds and provide representation for African Americans in additional cases, such as Giles v. Harris (1903) and Giles v. Teasley (1904), but again the Supreme Court upheld the states. The anti Republican and anti freedmen sentiment only briefly went underground, as violence arose in other incidents, especially after Louisiana's disputed state election in 1872, which contributed to the Colfax and Coushatta massacres in Louisiana in 1873 and 1874. Tensions and rumors were high in many parts of the South. When violence erupted, African Americans consistently were killed at a much higher rate than were European Americans. Historians of the 20th century have renamed events long called "riots" in southern history. The common stories featured whites heroically saving the community from marauding Black people. Upon examination of the evidence, historians have called numerous such events "massacres", as at Colfax, because of the disproportionate number of fatalities for Black people as opposed to whites. The mob violence there resulted in 40–50 Black people dead for each of the three whites killed. While not as widely known as the Klan, the paramilitary organizations that arose in the South during the mid 1870s as the white Democrats mounted a stronger insurgency, were more directed and effective than the Klan in challenging Republican governments, suppressing the Black vote and achieving political goals. Unlike the Klan, paramilitary members operated openly, often solicited newspaper coverage, and had distinct political goals: to turn Republicans out of office and suppress or dissuade Black voting in order to regain power in 1876. Groups included the White League, that started from white militias in Grant Parish, Louisiana, in 1874 and spread in the Deep South; the Red Shirts, that started in Mississippi in 1875 but had chapters arise and was prominent in the 1876 election campaign in South Carolina, as well as in North Carolina; and other White Line organizations such as rifle clubs. The Jim Crow era accompanied the most cruel wave of "racial" suppression that America has yet experienced. Between 1890 and 1940, millions of African Americans were disenfranchised, killed, and brutalized. According to newspaper records kept at the Tuskegee Institute, about 5,000 men, women, and children were murdered in documented extrajudicial mob violence—called "lynchings." The journalist Ida B. Wells estimated that lynchings not reported by the newspapers, plus similar executions under the veneer of "due process", may have amounted to about 20,000 killings. Of the tens of thousands of lynchers and onlookers during this period, it is reported that fewer than 50 whites were ever indicted for their crimes, and only four were sentenced. Because Black people were disenfranchised, they could not sit on juries or have any part in the political process, including local offices. Meanwhile, the lynchings were used as a weapon of terror to keep millions of African Americans living in a constant state of anxiety and fear. Most Black people were denied their right to keep and bear arms under Jim Crow laws, and they were therefore unable to protect themselves or their families.

In response to these and other setbacks, in the summer of 1905, W. E. B. Du Bois and 28 other prominent, African American men met secretly at Niagara Falls, Ontario. There, they produced a manifesto in which they called for an end to racial discrimination, full civil liberties for African Americans and recognition of human brotherhood. The organization which they established came to be called the Niagara Movement. After the notorious Springfield, Illinois race riot of 1908, a group of concerned Whites joined the leadership of the Niagara Movement and formed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) a year later, in 1909. Under the leadership of Du Bois, the NAACP mounted legal challenges to segregation and it also lobbied legislatures on behalf of Black Americans. While the NAACP used the court system to promote equality, at the local level, African Americans adopted a self help strategy. They pooled their resources to create independent community and institutional lives for themselves. They established schools, churches, social welfare institutions, banks, African American newspapers and small businesses which could serve their communities. The main organizer of national and local self help organizations was Alabama educator Booker T. Washington. Some Progressive Era reformers were concerned about the Black condition. In 1908 after the 1906 Atlanta Race Riot got him involved, Ray Stannard Baker published the book Following the Color Line: An Account of Negro Citizenship in the American Democracy, becoming the first prominent journalist to examine America's racial divide; it was extremely successful. Sociologist Rupert Vance says it is:
the best account of race relations in the South during the period—one that reads like field notes for the future historian. This account was written during the zenith of Washingtonian movement and shows the optimism that it inspired among both liberals and moderates. The book is also notable for its realistic accounts of Negro town life.

During the first half of the 20th century, the largest internal population shift in U. S. history took place. Starting about 1910, through the Great Migration over five million African Americans made choices and "voted with their feet" by moving from the South to northern and western cities in hopes of escaping political discrimination and hatred, violence, finding better jobs, voting and enjoying greater equality and education for their children. In the 1920s, the concentration of Black people in New York led to the cultural movement known as the Harlem Renaissance, whose influence reached nationwide. Black intellectual and cultural circles were influenced by thinkers such as Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor, who celebrated Blackness, or négritude; arts and letters flourished. Writers Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, Claude McKay and Richard Wright; and artists Lois Mailou Jones, William H. Johnson, Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence and Archibald Motley gained prominence. The South Side of Chicago, a destination for many on the trains up from Mississippi, Arkansas and Louisiana, joined Harlem as a sort of Black capital for the nation. It generated flourishing businesses, music, arts and foods. A new generation of powerful African American political leaders and organizations also came to the fore, Typified by Congressman William Dawson (1886–1970). Membership in the NAACP rapidly increased as it mounted an anti lynching campaign in reaction to ongoing southern white violence against blacks. Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League, the Nation of Islam, and union organizer A. Philip Randolph's Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (part of the American Federation of labor) all were established during this period and found support among African Americans, who became urbanized.

Businesses operated at the local level, and included beauty shops, barber shops, funeral parlors and the like. Booker T. Washington organized them nationally into the National Negro Business League. The more ambitious Black businessman with a larger vision avoided small towns and rural areas and headed to progressive large cities. They sent their children to elite Black colleges such as Howard, Spellman, and Morehouse; by the 1970s they were accepted in more than token numbers at national schools such as the Ivy League. Graduates were hired by major national corporations. They were active in the Urban League, the United Negro College Fund and the NAACP, and were much more likely to be Episcopalians than Baptists.

Although most prominent African American businesses have been owned by men, women played a major role especially in the area of beauty. Standards of beauty were different for whites and Black people, and the Black community developed its own standards, with an emphasis on hair care. Beauticians could work out of their own homes, and did not need storefronts. As a result, Black beauticians were numerous in the rural South, despite the absence of cities and towns. They pioneered the use of cosmetics, at a time when rural white women in the South avoided them. As Blain Roberts has shown, beauticians offered their clients a space to feel pampered and beautiful in the context of their own community because, "Inside Black beauty shops, rituals of beautification converged with rituals of socialization." Beauty contests emerged in the 1920s, and in the white community they were linked to agricultural county fairs. By contrast in the Black community, beauty contests were developed out of the homecoming ceremonies at their high schools and colleges. The most famous entrepreneur was Madame C. J. Walker (1867–1919); she built a national franchise business called Madame C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company based on her invention of the first successful hair straightening process.

thumb|right|Black soldiers tracking a sniper Omaha Beachhead, near Vierville sur Mer, France. 10 June 1944

The African American newspaper The Pittsburgh Courier called for the "double victory" or "Double V campaign" in a 1942 editorial, saying that all Black people should work for "victory over our enemies at home and victory over our enemies on the battlefield abroad". The newspaper argued that a victory of the Axis powers, especially Nazi Germany, would be a disaster for African Americans while at the same time the war presented the opportunity "to persuade, embarrass, compel and shame our government and our nation into a more enlightened attitude towards a tenth of its people". Black women served in the Army's WAAC and WAC, but very few served in the Navy. The draft starkly exposed the poor living conditions of most African Americans with the Selective Service Boards turning down 46% of the Black men called up on health grounds as compared to 30% of the white men called up. Of the Black men from the South drafted, 84% fell into the two lowest categories on the AGCT. Owing to the high failure rate caused by the almost non existent education system for African Americans in the South, the Army was forced to offer remedial instruction for Afro Americans who fell into the lower categories of the AGCT. Most of the Army's 231 training camps were located in the South, which was mostly rural and where land was cheaper. Black people from outside of the South that were sent to the training camps found life in the South almost unbearable. Tensions at army and navy training bases between Black and white trainees resulted in several outbreaks of racial violence with Black trainees sometimes being lynched. In an attempt to solve the problem of racial violence, the War Department in 1943 commissioned the director Frank Capra to make the propaganda film The Negro Soldier. At Port Chicago on 17 July 1944, while mostly Black stevedores were loading up two Navy supply ships, an explosion occurred that killed 320 men, of which 202 were Black. The explosion was widely blamed on the lack of training for Black stevedores, and 50 of the survivors of the explosion refused an order to return to work, demanding safety training first. At the subsequent court martial for the "Port Chicago 50" on the charges of mutiny, their defense lawyer, Thurgood Marshall stated: "Negroes in the Navy don't mind loading ammunition. They just want to know why they are the only ones doing the loading! They want to know why they are segregated; why they don't get promoted, and why the Navy disregarded official warnings by the San Francisco waterfront unions that an explosion was inevitable if they persisted in using untrained seamen in the loading of ammunition". Approximately 75 percent of the soldiers who served in the European theater as truckers for the Red Ball Express and kept Allied supply lines open were African American. During the crisis of the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944, the Army allowed several integrated infantry platoons to be formed, through these were broken up once the crisis passed. The distinguished service of these units was a factor in President Harry S. Truman's order to end discrimination in the Armed Forces in July 1948, with the promulgation of Executive Order 9981. This led in turn to the integration of the Air Force and the other services by the early 1950s. In his book A Rising Wind, Walter Francis White of the NAACP wrote: "World War II has immeasurably magnified the Negro's awareness of the American profession and practice of democracy [Black veterans] will return home convinced that whatever betterment of their lot is achieved must come largely from their own efforts. They will return determined to use those efforts to the utmost".

thumb|400px|Graph showing the percentage of the African American population living in the American South, 1790–2010. thumb|First and Second Great Migrations shown through changes in African American share of population in major U. S. cities, 1916–1930 and 1940–1970

The Second Great Migration was the migration of more than 5 million African Americans from the South to the other three regions of the United States. It took place from 1941 through World War II, and it lasted until 1970. It was much larger and of a different character than the first Great Migration (1910–1940). Some historians prefer to distinguish between the movements for those reasons. In the Second Great Migration, more than five million African Americans moved to cities in states in the Northeast, Midwest, and West, including the West Coast, where many skilled jobs in the defense industry were concentrated. More of these migrants were already urban laborers who came from the cities of the South. They were better educated and they had better skills than the people who did not migrate. Writers have often assumed that Southern migrants contributed disproportionately to changes in the African American family in the inner city. However, census data for 1940 through 1990 show that these families actually exhibited more traditional family patterns—more children living with two parents, more ever married women living with their spouses, and fewer never married mothers. By the end of the Second Great Migration, African Americans had become an urbanized population. More than 80 percent of them lived in cities. Fifty three percent of them remained in the Southern United States, 40 percent of them lived in the Northeast and North Central states and 7 percent of them lived in the West. White students were able to attend private schools established by the community for the sole purpose of circumventing integration. The largely Black rural population of the county had little recourse. Some families were split up as parents sent their children to live with relatives in other locales to attend public school; but the majority of Prince Edward's more than 2,000 black children, as well as many poor whites, simply remained unschooled until federal court action forced the schools to reopen five years later. thumb|Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his famous "I Have a Dream" speech during the March on Washington
Perhaps the high point of the Civil Rights Movement was the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which brought more than 250,000 marchers to the grounds of the Lincoln Memorial and the National Mall in Washington, D. C., to speak out for an end to southern racial violence and police brutality, equal opportunity in employment, equal access in education and public accommodations. The organizers of the march were called the "Big Six" of the Civil Rights Movement: Bayard Rustin the strategist who has been called the "invisible man" of the Civil Rights Movement; labor organizer and initiator of the march, A. Philip Randolph; Roy Wilkins of the NAACP; Whitney Young, Jr., of the National Urban League; Martin Luther King Jr., of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC); James Farmer of the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE); and John Lewis of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Also active behind the scenes and sharing the podium with King was Dorothy Height, head of the National Council of Negro Women. It was at this event, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, that King delivered his historic "I Have a Dream" speech. This march, the 1963 Birmingham Children's Crusade, and other events were credited with putting pressure on President John F. Kennedy, and then Lyndon B. Johnson, that culminated in the passage the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that banned discrimination in public accommodations, employment, and labor unions. thumb|President Johnson signs the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964. The "Mississippi Freedom Summer" of 1964 brought thousands of idealistic youth, black and white, to the state to run "freedom schools", to teach basic literacy, history and civics. Other volunteers were involved in voter registration drives. The season was marked by harassment, intimidation and violence directed at civil rights workers and their host families. The disappearance of three youths, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner in Philadelphia, Mississippi, captured the attention of the nation. Six weeks later, searchers found the savagely beaten body of Chaney, a Black man, in a muddy dam alongside the remains of his two white companions, who had been shot to death. There was national outrage at the escalating injustices of the "Mississippi Blood Summer", as it by then had come to be known, and at the brutality of the murders. In 1965, the Selma Voting Rights Movement, its Selma to Montgomery marches, and the tragic murders of two activists associated with the march, inspired President Lyndon B. Johnson to call for the full Voting Rights Act of 1965, which struck down barriers to black enfranchisement. In 1966 the Chicago Open Housing Movement, followed by the passage of the 1968 Fair Housing Act, was a capstone to more than a decade of major legislation during the civil rights movement. By this time, African Americans who questioned the effectiveness of nonviolent protest had gained a greater voice. More militant Black leaders, such as Malcolm X of the Nation of Islam and Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panther Party, called for Black people to defend themselves, using violence, if necessary. From the mid 1960s to the mid 1970s, the Black Power movement urged African Americans to look to Africa for inspiration and emphasized Black solidarity, rather than integration.

After the civil rights movement gains of the 1950s–1970s, due to government neglect, unfavorable social policies, high poverty rates, changes implemented in the criminal justice system and laws, and a breakdown in traditional family units, African American communities have been suffering from extremely high incarceration rates. African Americans have the highest imprisonment rate of any major ethnic group in the world. The Southern states, which historically had been involved in slavery and post Reconstruction oppression, now produce the highest rates of incarceration and death penalty application.

The history of slavery in the United States has always been a major research topic among white scholars, but until the 1950s, they generally focused on the political and constitutional themes of slavery which were debated over by white politicians; they did not study the lives of the enslaved black people. During Reconstruction and the late 19th century, Black people became major actors in the South. The Dunning School of white scholars generally cast Black people as pawns of white Carpetbaggers during this period, but W. E. B. Du Bois, a Black historian, and Ulrich B. Phillips, a white historian, studied the African American experience in depth. Du Bois' study of Reconstruction provided a more objective context for evaluating its achievements and weaknesses; Additionally, he conducted studies of contemporary Black life. Phillips set the main topics of inquiry that still guide the analysis of slave economics. During the first half of the 20th century, Carter G. Woodson was the major Black scholar who studied and promoted the Black historical experience. Woodson insisted that the scholarly study of the African American experience should be sound, creative, restorative, and, most important, it should be directly relevant to the Black community. He popularized Black history with a variety of innovative strategies, including the founding of the Association for the Study of Negro Life, the development of outreach activities, the creation of Negro History Week (now Black History Month, in February), and the publication of a popular Black history magazine. Woodson democratized, legitimized, and popularized Black history. Benjamin Quarles (1904–1996) had a significant impact on the teaching of African American history. Quarles and John Hope Franklin provided a bridge between the work of historians in historically Black colleges, such as Woodson, and the Black history that is now well established in mainline universities. Quarles grew up in Boston, attended Shaw University as an undergraduate, and received a graduate degree at the University of Wisconsin. In 1953, he began teaching at Morgan State College in Baltimore, where he stayed, despite the fact that he received a lucrative offer from Johns Hopkins University. Quarles' books included The Negro in the Civil War (1953), The Negro in the American Revolution (1961), Lincoln and the Negro (1962), The Negro in the Making of America (1964, updated 1987), and Black Abolitionists (1969), which are all narrative accounts of critical wartime episodes that focused on how Black people interacted with their white allies. Black historians attempted to reverse centuries of ignorance. While they were not alone in advocating a new examination of slavery and racism in the United States, the study of African American history has frequently been a political and scholarly struggle which has been waged by historians who wish to refute incorrect assumptions. One of the foremost assumptions was the belief that enslaved people did not rebel because they were passive. A series of historians transformed the image of African Americans, revealing that they had a much richer and a more complex experience. Historians such as Leon F. Litwack documented how former enslaved people fought to keep their families together and he also documented that they struggled against tremendous odds in order to define themselves as free people. Other historians wrote about rebellions, both small and large. In the 21st century, Black history is considered mainstream. Since it was recognized by President Gerald Ford in 1976, "Black History Month" is celebrated in the United States every year during the month of February. Proponents of Black history believe that it promotes diversity, develops self esteem, and corrects myths and stereotypes. Opponents of it argue that such curricula are dishonest, divisive, and lack academic credibility and rigor. In 2021, College Board announced that it will pilot an AP African American Studies course between 2022 and 2024. The course is expected to be launched in 2024. The goal of the course is to expand student understanding of black history, culture, art, literature, and academics.

Surveys of 11th and 12th grade students and adults in 2005 show that American schools have given students an awareness of some famous figures in Black history. Both groups were asked to name 10 famous Americans, excluding presidents. Of those named, the three most mentioned were Black: 67% named Martin Luther King Jr., 60% Rosa Parks, and 44% Harriet Tubman. Among adults, King was second (at 36%) and Parks was tied for fourth with 30%, while Tubman tied for 10th place with Henry Ford, at 16%. When distinguished historians were asked in 2006 to name the most prominent Americans, Parks and Tubman did not make the top 100.

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