ORIGINAL AFRICAN AMERICAN OPERA AUTOGRAPH SOPRANO ANNABELLE BERNARD NEW ORLEANS For Sale

A SIGNED PHOTO OF AFRICAN AMERICAN SOPRANO OPERA STAR ANNABELLE BERNARD (1935-2005) MEASURING APPROXIMATELY 5 3/4 X 4 1/8
A Shining Star, Soprano Annabelle Bernard
Annabelle Bernard (1935-2005) was an internationally renowned opera star.Portrait of Annabelle Bernard, undated. Photo credit: Heidelberg-Rohrback, Kirschartensir.Portrait of Annabelle Bernard, undated. Photo credit: Heidelberg-Rohrback, Kirschartensir.Born in New Orleans, Bernard began singing publicly at a young age in her school, Fisk Elementary and church, the Fourth Baptist Church. As a student at McDonogh #35 in New Orleans, she received her first formal voice training at an opera workshop under the direction of her music teacher, Edwin Hogan. Professor Hogan obtained an audition for her with Sister Elise, the director of Xavier University’s music department. Bernard won a scholarship to attend Xavier and during her time there (1952-1956) sang in various operas and concerts on campus. While at Xavier, she was mentored by art patron, Mrs. Edith Stern, who assisted her in further study at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. After earning both a Master of Arts degree and an artists’ degree in 1958, she won the prestigious Eleanor Stebert Award and the Fran Huntington BeeBee Scholarship to continue her studies in Europe. She went to the Mozarteum in Salzburg, Austria and studied at the Stuttgart Conservatory of Music under Professor Hermann Reutter.Annabelle Bernard in “Manon Lescout” Act II, Premiere November 4, 1961. Photo credit: Heidelberg-Rohrbach, Kirschgartensir.Annabelle Bernard in “Manon Lescout” Act II, Premiere November 4, 1961. Photo credit: Heidelberg-Rohrbach, Kirschgartensir.Bernard gained international notice in 1960 after winning the top prize in the International Radio Competition in Munich, Germany. In 1961, she made her debut under Maestro Karl Bohm in the role of Verdi’s Aida at the Deutsche Oper Berlin – the Berlin Opera. Bernard was highlighted in the February 1, 1962 issue of Jet magazine as the \"Newest Negro Opera Star\" for the critical acclaim she received from her debut. At the Berlin Opera, she became a permanent member and leading soprano for forty years, and sang the title parts for many operas, including “Madame Butterfly”, “II Trovador,” Mozart’s “Coris Van Tutte,” and Tchaikovsky’s, “Eugene Onegin.” In 1970, Bernard received the West German honorific of the title, Kammersänerin (chamber singer).Even though Bernard sang internationally including a performance at the Vatican for Pope Paul VI, she didn’t perform often in the United States and had no plans to leave Berlin, admitting to a Stars and Stripes reporter, \"I would eventually like to return to the States but there\'s so little opportunity there if you want to sing opera. And if it means staying in Europe to sing – I stay.\"The color barrier at the Metropolitan Opera in New York was not broken until 1955 when the great Marian Anderson sang in Un Ballo in Maschera there. By the mid-1960s in New Orleans, Bernard\'s hometown, black singers were beginning to be part of the chorus and were singing a few supporting roles. However, no black vocalist would sing a major role at the New Orleans Opera until 1976 when Bernard starred in a local production of Giordano\'s Andrea Chenier in November of that year. After her appearance in New Orleans, Bernard performed at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. and Carnegie Hall in New York. The New York Post wrote, “Bernard has a creamy beautiful voice, easily produced and like an angel’s… why has she not sung here before is mind-boggling.”Bernard retired from the Berlin Opera in 2000 and returned to New Orleans and she received the 2002 “Lift Every Voice” Legacy Award from the National Opera Association. Annabelle Bernard died in 2005 and was interred at St. Louis Cemetery No. 3 in New Orleans.
Xavier alumna Annabelle Bernard was an internationally renowned opera star. She won won the top prize in the 1960 International Radio Competition in Munich, Germany. In 1961, she made her debut under Maestro Karl Bohm in the role of Verdi’s Aida at the Deutsche Oper Berlin – the Berlin Opera. At the Berlin Opera, she became a permanent member and leading soprano for forty years, and sang the title parts for many operas, including “Madame Butterfly”, “II Trovador,” Mozart’s “Coris Van Tutte,”A soprano [soˈpraːno] is a type of classical female singing voice and has the highest vocal range of all voice types. The soprano\'s vocal range (using scientific pitch notation) is from approximately middle C (C4) = 261 Hz to \"high A\" (A5) = 880 Hz in choral music, or to \"soprano C\" (C6, two octaves above middle C) = 1046 Hz or higher in operatic music. In four-part chorale style harmony, the soprano takes the highest part, which often encompasses the melody.[1] The soprano voice type is generally divided into the coloratura, soubrette, lyric, spinto, and dramatic soprano.[2]Contents1 Etymology2 Vocal range3 In choral music4 Subtypes and roles in opera4.1 Coloratura4.2 Soubrette4.3 Lyric4.4 Spinto4.5 Dramatic4.6 Other types5 See also6 References7 Further reading8 External linksEtymologyThe word \"soprano\" comes from the Italian word sopra (above, over, on top of),[3] as the soprano is the highest pitch human voice, often given to the leading female roles in operas.[4] \"Soprano\" refers mainly to women, but it can also be applied to men; \"sopranist\" is the term for a male countertenor able to sing in the soprano vocal range,[5] while a castrato is the term for a castrated male singer, typical of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries,[3] and a treble is a boy soprano who has not reached puberty yet and still able to sing in that range.[3]
The term \"soprano\" is also based on the Latin word superius which, like soprano, referred to the highest pitch vocal range of all human voice types.[3] The word superius was especially used in choral and other multi-part vocal music between the 13th and 16th centuries.[3]
Vocal range
Soprano vocal range (C4–C6) notated on the treble staff (left) and on piano keyboard in green with dot marking middle C{ \ew Staff \\with { \emove \"Time_signature_engraver\" } c\'4 c\'\'\'4 }The soprano has the highest vocal range of all voice types, with the highest tessitura. A soprano and a mezzo-soprano have a similar range, but their tessituras will lie in different parts of that range.[6]
The low extreme for sopranos is roughly A3 or B♭3 (just below middle C). Within opera, the lowest demanded note for sopranos is F3 (from Richard Strauss\'s Die Frau ohne Schatten[7]). Often low notes in higher voices will project less, lack timbre, and tend to \"count less\" in roles (although some Verdi, Strauss and Wagner roles call for stronger singing below the staff). However, rarely is a soprano simply unable to sing a low note in a song within a soprano role.[6] Low notes can be reached with a lowered position of the larynx.
The high extreme, at a minimum, for non-coloratura sopranos is \"soprano C\" (C6 two octaves above middle C), and many roles in the standard repertoire call for C♯6 or D6. A couple of roles have optional E♭6s, as well. In the coloratura repertoire several roles call for E♭6 on up to F6. In rare cases, some coloratura roles go as high as G6 or G♯6, such as Mozart\'s concert aria \"Popoli di Tessaglia!\", or the title role of Jules Massenet\'s opera Esclarmonde. While not necessarily within the tessitura, a good soprano will be able to sing her top notes full-throated, with timbre and dynamic control.[8]
In opera, the tessitura, vocal weight, and timbre of voices, and the roles they sing, are commonly categorized into voice types, often called fächer (sg. fach, from German Fach or Stimmfach, \"vocal category\").[8] A singer\'s tessitura is where the voice has the best timbre, easy volume, and most comfort.
In choral musicVoice classificationin choral musicSopranoAltoTenorBassvteIn SATB four-part mixed chorus, the soprano is the highest vocal range, above the alto, tenor, and bass. Sopranos commonly sing in the tessitura G4-A5. When the composer calls for divisi, sopranos can be separated into Soprano I (highest part) and Soprano II (lower soprano part).
In contrast to choral singing, in classical solo singing a person is classified through the identification of several vocal traits, including range, vocal timbre, vocal weight, vocal tessitura, vocal resonance, and vocal transition points (lifts or \"passaggio\") within the singer\'s voice.[citation needed]
These different traits are used to identify different sub-types within the voice, sometimes referred to as fächer (sg. fach, from German Fach or Stimmfach, \"vocal category\"). Within opera, particular roles are written with specific kinds of soprano voices in mind, causing certain roles to be associated with certain kinds of voices.[9]
Subtypes and roles in operaSee soprano subtype Main articles below for roles and singers.Within the soprano voice type category are five generally recognized subcategories: coloratura soprano, soubrette, lyric soprano, spinto soprano, and dramatic soprano.
ColoraturaMain article: Coloratura sopranoThe coloratura soprano may be a lyric coloratura or a dramatic coloratura. The lyric coloratura soprano is a very agile light voice with a high upper extension capable of fast vocal coloratura. Light coloraturas have a range of approximately middle C (C4) to \"high F\" (in alt) (F6) with some coloratura sopranos being able to sing somewhat lower or higher,[10] e.g. an interpolated A♭6 in the Doll Aria, \"Les oiseaux dans la charmille\", from The Tales of Hoffmann, e.g. by Rachele Gilmore in a 2009 performance, and a written A♮6 by Audrey Luna in 2017 in The Exterminating Angel, both at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.[11]
The dramatic coloratura soprano is a coloratura soprano with great flexibility in high-lying velocity passages, yet with great sustaining power comparable to that of a full spinto or dramatic soprano. Dramatic coloraturas have a range of approximately \"low B\" (B3) to \"high F\" (F6) with some coloratura sopranos being able to sing somewhat higher or lower.[8]
SoubretteMain article: SoubretteIn classical music and opera, a soubrette soprano refers to both a voice type and a particular type of opera role. A soubrette voice is light with a bright, sweet timbre, a tessitura in the mid-range, and with no extensive coloratura. The soubrette voice is not a weak voice, for it must carry over an orchestra without a microphone like all voices in opera. The voice, however, has a lighter vocal weight than other soprano voices with a brighter timbre. Many young singers start out as soubrettes, but, as they grow older and the voice matures more physically, they may be reclassified as another voice type, usually either a light lyric soprano, a lyric coloratura soprano, or a coloratura mezzo-soprano. Rarely does a singer remain a soubrette throughout her entire career.[1] A soubrette\'s range extends approximately from middle C (C4) to \"high D\" (D6).[12] The tessitura of the soubrette tends to lie a bit lower than the lyric soprano and spinto soprano.[6]
LyricMain article: Lyric sopranoThe lyric soprano is a warm voice with a bright, full timbre, which can be heard over a big orchestra. It generally has a higher tessitura than a soubrette and usually plays ingénues and other sympathetic characters in opera. Lyric sopranos have a range from approximately below middle C (C4) to \"high D\" (D6).[8]
The lyric soprano may be a light lyric soprano or a full lyric soprano.[6] The light lyric soprano has a bigger voice than a soubrette but still possesses a youthful quality.[6] The full lyric soprano has a more mature sound than a light-lyric soprano and can be heard over a bigger orchestra.[6]
SpintoMain article: Spinto sopranoAlso lirico-spinto, Italian for \"pushed lyric\", the spinto soprano has the brightness and height of a lyric soprano, but can be \"pushed\" to dramatic climaxes without strain, and may have a somewhat darker timbre. Spinto sopranos have a range from approximately from B (B3) to \"high D\" (D6).[8]
DramaticMain article: Dramatic sopranoA dramatic soprano (or soprano robusto) has a powerful, rich, emotive voice that can sing over a full orchestra. Usually (but not always) this voice has a lower tessitura than other sopranos, and a darker timbre. Dramatic sopranos have a range from approximately A (A3) to \"high C\" (C6).[8]
Some dramatic sopranos, known as Wagnerian sopranos, have a very big voice that can assert itself over an exceptionally large orchestra (over eighty pieces). These voices are substantial and very powerful and ideally even throughout the registers.[6]
Other typesTwo other types of soprano are the Dugazon and the Falcon, which are intermediate voice types between the soprano and the mezzo-soprano: a Dugazon is a darker-colored soubrette, a Falcon a darker-colored soprano drammatico.[8]
See alsoCategory of sopranosFach, the German system for classifying voicesVoice classification in non-classical musicList of sopranos in non-classical musicNew Orleans (/ˈɔːrl(i)ənz/ OR-l(ee)ənz, /ɔːrˈliːnz/ or-LEENZ,[3] locally /ˈɔːrlənz/ OR-lənz;[4] French: La Nouvelle-Orléans [la nuvɛlɔʁleɑ̃] (listen)) is a consolidated city-parish located along the Mississippi River in the southeastern region of the U.S. state of Louisiana. With a population of 383,997 according to the 2020 U.S. census,[5] it is the most populous city in Louisiana and the twelfth-most populous city in the Southeastern United States. Serving as a major port, New Orleans is considered an economic and commercial hub for the broader Gulf Coast region of the United States.
New Orleans is world-renowned for its distinctive music, Creole cuisine, unique dialects, and its annual celebrations and festivals, most notably Mardi Gras. The historic heart of the city is the French Quarter, known for its French and Spanish Creole architecture and vibrant nightlife along Bourbon Street. The city has been described as the \"most unique\" in the United States,[6][7][8][9] owing in large part to its cross-cultural and multilingual heritage.[10] Additionally, New Orleans has increasingly been known as \"Hollywood South\" due to its prominent role in the film industry and in pop culture.[11][12]
Founded in 1718 by French colonists, New Orleans was once the territorial capital of French Louisiana before becoming part of the United States in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. New Orleans in 1840 was the third most populous city in the United States,[13] and it was the largest city in the American South from the Antebellum era until after World War II. The city has historically been very vulnerable to flooding, due to its high rainfall, low lying elevation, poor natural drainage, and proximity to multiple bodies of water. State and federal authorities have installed a complex system of levees and drainage pumps in an effort to protect the city.[14][15]
New Orleans was severely affected by Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, which flooded more than 80% of the city, killed more than 1,800 people, and displaced thousands of residents, causing a population decline of over 50%.[16] Since Katrina, major redevelopment efforts have led to a rebound in the city\'s population. Concerns about gentrification, new residents buying property in formerly closely knit communities, and displacement of longtime residents have been expressed.[17][18][19][20]
The city and Orleans Parish (French: paroisse d\'Orléans) are coterminous.[21] As of 2017, Orleans Parish is the third most populous parish in Louisiana, behind East Baton Rouge Parish and neighboring Jefferson Parish.[22] The city and parish are bounded by St. Tammany Parish and Lake Pontchartrain to the north, St. Bernard Parish and Lake Borgne to the east, Plaquemines Parish to the south, and Jefferson Parish to the south and west.
The city anchors the larger Greater New Orleans metropolitan area, which had a population of 1,271,845 in 2020.[23] Greater New Orleans is the most populous metropolitan statistical area in Louisiana and, since the 2020 census, has been the 46th most populous MSA in the United States.[24]Contents1 Etymology and nicknames2 History2.1 French–Spanish colonial era2.2 United States territorial era2.3 Battle of New Orleans2.4 Port2.5 Civil War–Reconstruction era2.6 Jim Crow era2.7 20th century2.8 21st century3 Geography3.1 Elevation3.2 Cityscape3.3 Climate3.4 Threat from tropical cyclones4 Demographics4.1 Race and ethnicity4.2 Sexual orientation and gender identity4.3 Religion5 Economy5.1 Port5.2 Business5.3 Tourist and convention business5.4 Federal and military agencies6 Culture and contemporary life6.1 Tourism6.2 Entertainment and performing arts6.3 Cuisine6.4 Dialect7 Sports8 National protected areas9 Government10 Crime11 Education11.1 Colleges and universities11.2 Primary and secondary schools11.3 Libraries12 Media13 Transportation13.1 Public transportation13.2 Bicycling13.3 Roads13.4 Taxi service13.5 Airports13.6 Rail13.7 Modal characteristics14 Notable people15 Sister cities16 See also17 Notes18 References19 Further reading20 External linksEtymology and nicknames
The New Orleans cityscape in early February 2007The name of New Orleans, derives from the original French name (La Nouvelle-Orléans), which was given to the city in honor of Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, who served as Louis XV\'s Regent from 1715 to 1723.[25]
Following its defeat in the Seven Years\' War and the Treaty of Paris, which was signed in 1763, France gave possession of Louisiana to Spain. The Spanishs renamed the city to Nueva Orleans (pronounced [ˌnweβa oɾleˈans]), which it used until 1800.[26] When the United States acquired possession from France in 1803, the French name was adopted and anglicized to become the modern name, which is still in use today.
It has several nicknames:
Crescent City, alluding to the course of the Lower Mississippi River around and through the city.[27]The Big Easy, possibly a reference by musicians in the early 20th century to the relative ease of finding work there.[28][29]The City that Care Forgot, used since at least 1938,[30] referring to the outwardly easygoing, carefree nature of the residents.[29]HistoryMain article: History of New OrleansFor a chronological guide, see Timeline of New Orleans.French–Spanish colonial eraHistorical affiliationsKingdom of France 1718–1763Kingdom of Spain 1763–1802French First Republic 1802–1803United States of America 1803–1861State of Louisiana 1861Confederate States of America 1861–1862United States of America 1862–present
Main articles: Louisiana (New France) and Louisiana (New Spain)La Nouvelle-Orléans (New Orleans) was founded in the spring of 1718 (May 7 has become the traditional date to mark the anniversary, but the actual day is unknown)[31] by the French Mississippi Company, under the direction of Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, on land inhabited by the Chitimacha. It was named for Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, who was regent of the Kingdom of France at the time.[25] His title came from the French city of Orléans. The French colony of Louisiana was ceded to the Spanish Empire in the 1763 Treaty of Paris, following France\'s defeat by Great Britain in the Seven Years\' War. During the American Revolutionary War, New Orleans was an important port for smuggling aid to the American revolutionaries, and transporting military equipment and supplies up the Mississippi River. Beginning in the 1760s, Filipinos began to settle in and around New Orleans.[32] Bernardo de Gálvez y Madrid, Count of Gálvez successfully directed a southern campaign against the British from the city in 1779.[33] Nueva Orleans (the name of New Orleans in Spanish)[34] remained under Spanish control until 1803, when it reverted briefly to French rule. Nearly all of the surviving 18th-century architecture of the Vieux Carré (French Quarter) dates from the Spanish period, notably excepting the Old Ursuline Convent.[35]The Revolt took place in what is now Natchez National Historical Park in Natchez, Mississippi.As a French colony, Louisiana faced struggles with numerous Native American tribes, who were navigating the competing interests of France, Spain, and England, as well as traditional rivals. Notably, the Natchez, whose traditional lands were along the Mississippi near the modern city of Natchez, Mississippi, had a series of wars culminating in the Natchez Revolt that began in 1729 with the Natchez overrunning Fort Rosalie. Approximately 230 French colonists were killed and the Natchez settlement destroyed, causing fear and concern in New Orleans and the rest of the territory.[36] In retaliation, then-governor Étienne Perier launched a campaign to completely destroy the Natchez nation and its Native allies.[37] By 1731, the Natchez people had been killed, enslaved, or dispersed among other tribes, but the campaign soured relations between France and the territory\'s Native Americans leading directly into the Chickasaw Wars of the 1730s.[38]
Relations with Louisiana\'s Native American population remained a concern into the 1740s for governor Marquis de Vaudreuil. In the early 1740s traders from the Thirteen Colonies crossed into the Appalachian Mountains. The Native American tribes would now operate dependent on which of various European colonists would most benefit them. Several of these tribes and especially the Chickasaw and Choctaw would trade goods and gifts for their loyalty.[39] The economic issue in the colony, which continued under Vaudreuil, resulted in many raids by Native American tribes, taking advantage of the French weakness. In 1747 and 1748, the Chickasaw would raid along the east bank of the Mississippi all the way south to Baton Rouge. These raids would often force residents of French Louisiana to take refuge in New Orleans proper.
Inability to find labor was the most pressing issue in the young colony. The colonists turned to African slaves to make their investments in Louisiana profitable. In the late 1710s the transatlantic slave trade imported enslaved Africans into the colony. This led to the biggest shipment in 1716 where several trading ships appeared with slaves as cargo to the local residents in a one-year span.
By 1724, the large number of blacks in Louisiana prompted the institutionalizing of laws governing slavery within the colony.[40] These laws required that slaves be baptized in the Roman Catholic faith, slaves be married in the church, and gave slaves no legal rights. The slave law formed in the 1720s is known as the Code Noir, which would bleed into the antebellum period of the American South as well. Louisiana slave culture had its own distinct Afro-Creole society that called on past cultures and the situation for slaves in the New World. Afro-Creole was present in religious beliefs and the Louisiana Creole language. The religion most associated with this period for was called Voodoo.[41][42]
In the city of New Orleans an inspiring mixture of foreign influences created a melting pot of culture that is still celebrated today. By the end of French colonization in Louisiana, New Orleans was recognized commercially in the Atlantic world. Its inhabitants traded across the French commercial system. New Orleans was a hub for this trade both physically and culturally because it served as the exit point to the rest of the globe for the interior of the North American continent.
In one instance the French government established a chapter house of sisters in New Orleans. The Ursuline sisters after being sponsored by the Company of the Indies, founded a convent in the city in 1727.[43] At the end of the colonial era, the Ursuline Academy maintained a house of 70 boarding and 100 day students. Today numerous schools in New Orleans can trace their lineage from this academy.1724 plan for Saint Louis Parish Church, New Orleans, Louisiana, by Adrien de PaugerAnother notable example is the street plan and architecture still distinguishing New Orleans today. French Louisiana had early architects in the province who were trained as military engineers and were now assigned to design government buildings. Pierre Le Blond de Tour and Adrien de Pauger, for example, planned many early fortifications, along with the street plan for the city of New Orleans.[44] After them in the 1740s, Ignace François Broutin, as engineer-in-chief of Louisiana, reworked the architecture of New Orleans with an extensive public works program.
French policy-makers in Paris attempted to set political and economic norms for New Orleans. It acted autonomously in much of its cultural and physical aspects, but also stayed in communication with the foreign trends as well.
After the French relinquished West Louisiana to the Spanish, New Orleans merchants attempted to ignore Spanish rule and even re-institute French control on the colony. The citizens of New Orleans held a series of public meetings during 1765 to keep the populace in opposition of the establishment of Spanish rule. Anti-Spanish passions in New Orleans reached their highest level after two years of Spanish administration in Louisiana. On October 27, 1768, a mob of local residents, spiked the guns guarding New Orleans and took control of the city from the Spanish.[45] The rebellion organized a group to sail for Paris, where it met with officials of the French government. This group brought with them a long memorial to summarize the abuses the colony had endured from the Spanish. King Louis XV and his ministers reaffirmed Spain\'s sovereignty over Louisiana.
United States territorial eraNapoleon sold Louisiana to the United States in the Louisiana Purchase in 1803.[46] Thereafter, the city grew rapidly with influxes of Americans, French, Creoles and Africans. Later immigrants were Irish, Germans, Poles and Italians. Major commodity crops of sugar and cotton were cultivated with slave labor on nearby large plantations.
Between 1791 and 1810, thousands of Saint Dominican refugees from the Haitian Revolution, both whites and free people of color (affranchis or gens de couleur libres), arrived in New Orleans; a number brought their slaves with them, many of whom were native Africans or of full-blood descent.[47] While Governor Claiborne and other officials wanted to keep out additional free black people, the French Creoles wanted to increase the French-speaking population. In addition to bolstering the territory\'s French-speaking population, these refugees had a significant impact on the culture of Louisiana, including developing its sugar industry and cultural institutions.[48]
As more refugees were allowed into the Territory of Orleans, Saint Dominican refugees who had first gone to Cuba also arrived.[49] Many of the white Francophones had been deported by officials in Cuba in 1809 as retaliation for Bonapartist schemes.[50] Nearly 90 percent of these immigrants settled in New Orleans. The 1809 migration brought 2,731 whites, 3,102 free people of color (of mixed-race European and African descent), and 3,226 slaves of primarily African descent, doubling the city\'s population. The city became 63 percent black, a greater proportion than Charleston, South Carolina\'s 53 percent at that time.[49]
Battle of New OrleansMain article: Battle of New Orleans
The Battle of New Orleans (1815)Plan of the city and suburbs of New Orleans : from an actual survey made in 1815Plan of the city and suburbs of New Orleans: from a survey made in 1815[51]During the final campaign of the War of 1812, the British sent a force of 11,000 in an attempt to capture New Orleans. Despite great challenges, General Andrew Jackson, with support from the U.S. Navy, successfully cobbled together a force of militia from Louisiana and Mississippi, U.S. Army regulars, a large contingent of Tennessee state militia, Kentucky frontiersmen and local privateers (the latter led by the pirate Jean Lafitte), to decisively defeat the British, led by Sir Edward Pakenham, in the Battle of New Orleans on January 8, 1815.[52]
The armies had not learned of the Treaty of Ghent, which had been signed on December 24, 1814 (however, the treaty did not call for cessation of hostilities until after both governments had ratified it. The U.S. government ratified it on February 16, 1815). The fighting in Louisiana began in December 1814 and did not end until late January, after the Americans held off the Royal Navy during a ten-day siege of Fort St. Philip (the Royal Navy went on to capture Fort Bowyer near Mobile, before the commanders received news of the peace treaty).[52]
Port
Mississippi River steamboats at New Orleans, 1853As a port, New Orleans played a major role during the antebellum period in the Atlantic slave trade. The port handled commodities for export from the interior and imported goods from other countries, which were warehoused and transferred in New Orleans to smaller vessels and distributed along the Mississippi River watershed. The river was filled with steamboats, flatboats and sailing ships. Despite its role in the slave trade, New Orleans at the time also had the largest and most prosperous community of free persons of color in the nation, who were often educated, middle-class property owners.[53][54]
Dwarfing the other cities in the Antebellum South, New Orleans had the U.S.\'s largest slave market. The market expanded after the United States ended the international trade in 1808. Two-thirds of the more than one million slaves brought to the Deep South arrived via forced migration in the domestic slave trade. The money generated by the sale of slaves in the Upper South has been estimated at 15 percent of the value of the staple crop economy. The slaves were collectively valued at half a billion dollars. The trade spawned an ancillary economy—transportation, housing and clothing, fees, etc., estimated at 13.5% of the price per person, amounting to tens of billions of dollars (2005 dollars, adjusted for inflation) during the antebellum period, with New Orleans as a prime beneficiary.[55]
According to historian Paul Lachance,
the addition of white immigrants [from Saint-Domingue] to the white creole population enabled French-speakers to remain a majority of the white population until almost 1830. If a substantial proportion of free persons of color and slaves had not also spoken French, however, the Gallic community would have become a minority of the total population as early as 1820.[56]
After the Louisiana Purchase, numerous Anglo-Americans migrated to the city. The population doubled in the 1830s and by 1840, New Orleans had become the nation\'s wealthiest and the third-most populous city, after New York and Baltimore.[57] German and Irish immigrants began arriving in the 1840s, working as port laborers. In this period, the state legislature passed more restrictions on manumissions of slaves and virtually ended it in 1852.[58]
In the 1850s, white Francophones remained an intact and vibrant community in New Orleans. They maintained instruction in French in two of the city\'s four school districts (all served white students).[59] In 1860, the city had 13,000 free people of color (gens de couleur libres), the class of free, mostly mixed-race people that expanded in number during French and Spanish rule. They set up some private schools for their children. The census recorded 81 percent of the free people of color as mulatto, a term used to cover all degrees of mixed race.[58] Mostly part of the Francophone group, they constituted the artisan, educated and professional class of African Americans. The mass of blacks were still enslaved, working at the port, in domestic service, in crafts, and mostly on the many large, surrounding sugarcane plantations.
After growing by 45 percent in the 1850s, by 1860, the city had nearly 170,000 people.[60] It had grown in wealth, with a \"per capita income [that] was second in the nation and the highest in the South.\"[60] The city had a role as the \"primary commercial gateway for the nation\'s booming midsection.\"[60] The port was the nation\'s third largest in terms of tonnage of imported goods, after Boston and New York, handling 659,000 tons in 1859.[60]
Civil War–Reconstruction eraSee also: New Orleans in the American Civil War
The starving people of New Orleans under Union occupation during the Civil War, 1862As the Creole elite feared, the American Civil War changed their world. In April 1862, following the city\'s occupation by the Union Navy after the Battle of Forts Jackson and St. Philip, Gen. Benjamin F. Butler – a respected Massachusetts lawyer serving in that state\'s militia – was appointed military governor. New Orleans residents supportive of the Confederacy nicknamed him \"Beast\" Butler, because of an order he issued. After his troops had been assaulted and harassed in the streets by women still loyal to the Confederate cause, his order warned that such future occurrences would result in his men treating such women as those \"plying their avocation in the streets\", implying that they would treat the women like prostitutes. Accounts of this spread widely. He also came to be called \"Spoons\" Butler because of the alleged looting that his troops did while occupying the city, during which time he himself supposedly pilfered silver flatware.[61]
Significantly, Butler abolished French-language instruction in city schools. Statewide measures in 1864 and, after the war, 1868 further strengthened the English-only policy imposed by federal representatives. With the predominance of English speakers, that language had already become dominant in business and government.[59] By the end of the 19th century, French usage had faded. It was also under pressure from Irish, Italian and German immigrants.[62] However, as late as 1902 \"one-fourth of the population of the city spoke French in ordinary daily intercourse, while another two-fourths was able to understand the language perfectly,\"[63] and as late as 1945, many elderly Creole women spoke no English.[64] The last major French language newspaper, L\'Abeille de la Nouvelle-Orléans (New Orleans Bee), ceased publication on December 27, 1923, after ninety-six years.[65] According to some sources, Le Courrier de la Nouvelle Orleans continued until 1955.[66]
As the city was captured and occupied early in the war, it was spared the destruction through warfare suffered by many other cities of the American South. The Union Army eventually extended its control north along the Mississippi River and along the coastal areas. As a result, most of the southern portion of Louisiana was originally exempted from the liberating provisions of the 1863 \"Emancipation Proclamation\" issued by President Abraham Lincoln. Large numbers of rural ex-slaves and some free people of color from the city volunteered for the first regiments of Black troops in the War. Led by Brigadier General Daniel Ullman (1810–1892), of the 78th Regiment of New York State Volunteers Militia, they were known as the \"Corps d\'Afrique.\" While that name had been used by a militia before the war, that group was composed of free people of color. The new group was made up mostly of former slaves. They were supplemented in the last two years of the War by newly organized United States Colored Troops, who played an increasingly important part in the war.[67]
Violence throughout the South, especially the Memphis Riots of 1866 followed by the New Orleans Riot in the same year, led Congress to pass the Reconstruction Act and the Fourteenth Amendment, extending the protections of full citizenship to freedmen and free people of color. Louisiana and Texas were put under the authority of the \"Fifth Military District\" of the United States during Reconstruction. Louisiana was readmitted to the Union in 1868. Its Constitution of 1868 granted universal male suffrage and established universal public education. Both blacks and whites were elected to local and state offices. In 1872, lieutenant governor P.B.S. Pinchback, who was of mixed race, succeeded Henry Clay Warmouth for a brief period as Republican governor of Louisiana, becoming the first governor of African descent of a U.S. state (the next African American to serve as governor of a U.S. state was Douglas Wilder, elected in Virginia in 1989). New Orleans operated a racially integrated public school system during this period.
Wartime damage to levees and cities along the Mississippi River adversely affected southern crops and trade. The federal government contributed to restoring infrastructure. The nationwide financial recession and Panic of 1873 adversely affected businesses and slowed economic recovery.
From 1868, elections in Louisiana were marked by violence, as white insurgents tried to suppress black voting and disrupt Republican Party gatherings. The disputed 1872 gubernatorial election resulted in conflicts that ran for years. The \"White League\", an insurgent paramilitary group that supported the Democratic Party, was organized in 1874 and operated in the open, violently suppressing the black vote and running off Republican officeholders. In 1874, in the Battle of Liberty Place, 5,000 members of the White League fought with city police to take over the state offices for the Democratic candidate for governor, holding them for three days. By 1876, such tactics resulted in the white Democrats, the so-called Redeemers, regaining political control of the state legislature. The federal government gave up and withdrew its troops in 1877, ending Reconstruction.
Jim Crow eraDixiecrats passed Jim Crow laws, establishing racial segregation in public facilities. In 1889, the legislature passed a constitutional amendment incorporating a \"grandfather clause\" that effectively disfranchised freedmen as well as the propertied people of color manumitted before the war. Unable to vote, African Americans could not serve on juries or in local office, and were closed out of formal politics for generations. The Southern U.S. was ruled by a white Democratic Party. Public schools were racially segregated and remained so until 1960.
New Orleans\' large community of well-educated, often French-speaking free persons of color (gens de couleur libres), who had been free prior to the Civil War, fought against Jim Crow. They organized the Comité des Citoyens (Citizens Committee) to work for civil rights. As part of their legal campaign, they recruited one of their own, Homer Plessy, to test whether Louisiana\'s newly enacted Separate Car Act was constitutional. Plessy boarded a commuter train departing New Orleans for Covington, Louisiana, sat in the car reserved for whites only, and was arrested. The case resulting from this incident, Plessy v. Ferguson, was heard by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1896. The court ruled that \"separate but equal\" accommodations were constitutional, effectively upholding Jim Crow measures.
In practice, African American public schools and facilities were underfunded across the South. The Supreme Court ruling contributed to this period as the nadir of race relations in the United States. The rate of lynchings of black men was high across the South, as other states also disfranchised blacks and sought to impose Jim Crow. Nativist prejudices also surfaced. Anti-Italian sentiment in 1891 contributed to the lynchings of 11 Italians, some of whom had been acquitted of the murder of the police chief. Some were shot and killed in the jail where they were detained. It was the largest mass lynching in U.S. history.[68][69] In July 1900 the city was swept by white mobs rioting after Robert Charles, a young African American, killed a policeman and temporarily escaped. The mob killed him and an estimated 20 other blacks; seven whites died in the days-long conflict, until a state militia suppressed it.
Throughout New Orleans\' history, until the early 20th century when medical and scientific advances ameliorated the situation, the city suffered repeated epidemics of yellow fever and other tropical and infectious diseases.
20th century
Esplanade Avenue at Burgundy Street, looking lakewards (north) towards Lake Pontchartrain in 1900
1943 waiting line at wartime Rationing Board office in New Orleans
Richard Nixon in New Orleans, August 1970. Royal at Iberville Streets, heading to Canal Street.New Orleans\' economic and population zenith in relation to other American cities occurred in the antebellum period. It was the nation\'s fifth-largest city in 1860 (after New York, Philadelphia, Boston and Baltimore) and was significantly larger than all other southern cities.[70] From the mid-19th century onward rapid economic growth shifted to other areas, while New Orleans\' relative importance steadily declined. The growth of railways and highways decreased river traffic, diverting goods to other transportation corridors and markets.[70] Thousands of the most ambitious people of color left the state in the Great Migration around World War II and after, many for West Coast destinations. From the late 1800s, most censuses recorded New Orleans slipping down the ranks in the list of largest American cities (New Orleans\' population still continued to increase throughout the period, but at a slower rate than before the Civil War).
By the mid-20th century, New Orleanians recognized that their city was no longer the leading urban area in the South. By 1950, Houston, Dallas, and Atlanta exceeded New Orleans in size, and in 1960 Miami eclipsed New Orleans, even as the latter\'s population reached its historic peak.[70] As with other older American cities, highway construction and suburban development drew residents from the center city to newer housing outside. The 1970 census recorded the first absolute decline in population since the city became part of the United States in 1803. The Greater New Orleans metropolitan area continued expanding in population, albeit more slowly than other major Sun Belt cities. While the port remained one of the nation\'s largest, automation and containerization cost many jobs. The city\'s former role as banker to the South was supplanted by larger peer cities. New Orleans\' economy had always been based more on trade and financial services than on manufacturing, but the city\'s relatively small manufacturing sector also shrank after World War II. Despite some economic development successes under the administrations of DeLesseps \"Chep\" Morrison (1946–1961) and Victor \"Vic\" Schiro (1961–1970), metropolitan New Orleans\' growth rate consistently lagged behind more vigorous cities.
Civil Rights MovementDuring the later years of Morrison\'s administration, and for the entirety of Schiro\'s, the city was a center of the Civil Rights Movement. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference was founded in New Orleans, and lunch counter sit-ins were held in Canal Street department stores. A prominent and violent series of confrontations occurred in 1960 when the city attempted school desegregation, following the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). When six-year-old Ruby Bridges integrated William Frantz Elementary School in the Ninth Ward, she was the first child of color to attend a previously all-white school in the South. Much controversy preceded the 1956 Sugar Bowl at Tulane Stadium, when the Pitt Panthers, with African-American fullback Bobby Grier on the roster, met the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets.[71] There had been controversy over whether Grier should be allowed to play due to his race, and whether Georgia Tech should even play at all due to Georgia\'s Governor Marvin Griffin\'s opposition to racial integration.[72][73][74] After Griffin publicly sent a telegram to the state\'s Board Of Regents requesting Georgia Tech not to engage in racially integrated events, Georgia Tech\'s president Blake R. Van Leer rejected the request and threatened to resign. The game went on as planned [75]
The Civil Rights Movement\'s success in gaining federal passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 renewed constitutional rights, including voting for blacks. Together, these resulted in the most far-reaching changes in New Orleans\' 20th century history.[76] Though legal and civil equality were re-established by the end of the 1960s, a large gap in income levels and educational attainment persisted between the city\'s White and African American communities.[77] As the middle class and wealthier members of both races left the center city, its population\'s income level dropped, and it became proportionately more African American. From 1980, the African American majority elected primarily officials from its own community. They struggled to narrow the gap by creating conditions conducive to the economic uplift of the African American community.
New Orleans became increasingly dependent on tourism as an economic mainstay during the administrations of Sidney Barthelemy (1986–1994) and Marc Morial (1994–2002). Relatively low levels of educational attainment, high rates of household poverty, and rising crime threatened the city\'s prosperity in the later decades of the century.[77] The negative effects of these socioeconomic conditions aligned poorly with the changes in the late-20th century to the economy of the United States, which reflected a post-industrial, knowledge-based paradigm in which mental skills and education were more important to advancement than manual skills.
Drainage and flood controlSee also: Drainage in New Orleans
A view of the New Orleans Central Business District, as seen from the Mississippi River. USS New Orleans (LPD-18) in foreground (2007).In the 20th century, New Orleans\' government and business leaders believed they needed to drain and develop outlying areas to provide for the city\'s expansion. The most ambitious development during this period was a drainage plan devised by engineer and inventor A. Baldwin Wood, designed to break the surrounding swamp\'s stranglehold on the city\'s geographic expansion. Until then, urban development in New Orleans was largely limited to higher ground along the natural river levees and bayous.
Wood\'s pump system allowed the city to drain huge tracts of swamp and marshland and expand into low-lying areas. Over the 20th century, rapid subsidence, both natural and human-induced, resulted in these newly populated areas subsiding to several feet below sea level.[78][79]
New Orleans was vulnerable to flooding even before the city\'s footprint departed from the natural high ground near the Mississippi River. In the late 20th century, however, scientists and New Orleans residents gradually became aware of the city\'s increased vulnerability. In 1965, flooding from Hurricane Betsy killed dozens of residents, although the majority of the city remained dry. The rain-induced flood of May 8, 1995, demonstrated the weakness of the pumping system. After that event, measures were undertaken to dramatically upgrade pumping capacity. By the 1980s and 1990s, scientists observed that extensive, rapid, and ongoing erosion of the marshlands and swamp surrounding New Orleans, especially that related to the Mississippi River–Gulf Outlet Canal, had the unintended result of leaving the city more vulnerable than before to hurricane-induced catastrophic storm surges.
21st centuryHurricane Katrina
Hurricane Katrina at its New Orleans landfallSee also: Effects of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and Drainage in New OrleansNew Orleans was catastrophically affected by what Raymond B. Seed called \"the worst engineering disaster in the world since Chernobyl\", when the federal levee system failed during Hurricane Katrina on August 29, 2005.[80] By the time the hurricane approached the city on August 29, 2005, most residents had evacuated. As the hurricane passed through the Gulf Coast region, the city\'s federal flood protection system failed, resulting in the worst civil engineering disaster in American history at the time.[81] Floodwalls and levees constructed by the United States Army Corps of Engineers failed below design specifications and 80% of the city flooded. Tens of thousands of residents who had remained were rescued or otherwise made their way to shelters of last resort at the Louisiana Superdome or the New Orleans Morial Convention Center. More than 1,500 people were recorded as having died in Louisiana, most in New Orleans, while others remain unaccounted for.[82][83] Before Hurricane Katrina, the city called for the first mandatory evacuation in its history, to be followed by another mandatory evacuation three years later with Hurricane Gustav.
Hurricane RitaMain article: Hurricane RitaThe city was declared off-limits to residents while efforts to clean up after Hurricane Katrina began. The approach of Hurricane Rita in September 2005 caused repopulation efforts to be postponed,[84] and the Lower Ninth Ward was reflooded by Rita\'s storm surge.[83]
Post-disaster recoveryMain article: Reconstruction of New Orleans
An aerial view from a United States Navy helicopter showing floodwaters around the Louisiana Superdome (stadium) and surrounding area (2005)Because of the scale of damage, many people resettled permanently outside the area. Federal, state, and local efforts supported recovery and rebuilding in severely damaged neighborhoods. The U.S. Census Bureau in July 2006 estimated the population to be 223,000; a subsequent study estimated that 32,000 additional residents had moved to the city as of March 2007, bringing the estimated population to 255,000, approximately 56% of the pre-Katrina population level. Another estimate, based on utility usage from July 2007, estimated the population to be approximately 274,000 or 60% of the pre-Katrina population. These estimates are somewhat smaller to a third estimate, based on mail delivery records, from the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center in June 2007, which indicated that the city had regained approximately two-thirds of its pre-Katrina population.[85] In 2008, the U.S. Census Bureau revised its population estimate for the city upward, to 336,644.[86] Most recently, by July 2015, the population was back up to 386,617—80% of what it was in 2000.[87]
Several major tourist events and other forms of revenue for the city have returned. Large conventions returned.[88][89] College bowl games returned for the 2006–2007 season. The New Orleans Saints returned that season. The New Orleans Hornets (now named the Pelicans) returned to the city for the 2007–2008 season. New Orleans hosted the 2008 NBA All-Star Game. Additionally, the city hosted Super Bowl XLVII.
Major annual events such as Mardi Gras, Voodoo Experience, and the Jazz & Heritage Festival were never displaced or canceled. A new annual festival, \"The Running of the Bulls New Orleans\", was created in 2007.[90]
Hurricane IdaMain article: Hurricane IdaOn August 29, 2021, Hurricane Ida, a category 4 hurricane, made landfall in New Orleans, where the Hurricane Ida tornado outbreak caused damage.
Geography
A true-color satellite image taken on NASA\'s Landsat 7, 2004New Orleans is located in the Mississippi River Delta, south of Lake Pontchartrain, on the banks of the Mississippi River, approximately 105 miles (169 km) upriver from the Gulf of Mexico. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the city\'s area is 350 square miles (910 km2), of which 169 square miles (440 km2) is land and 181 square miles (470 km2) (52%) is water.[91] The area along the river is characterized by ridges and hollows.
ElevationSee also: Drainage in New Orleans
Vertical cross-section, showing maximum levee height of 23 feet (7.0 m)New Orleans was originally settled on the river\'s natural levees or high ground. After the Flood Control Act of 1965, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built floodwalls and man-made levees around a much larger geographic footprint that included previous marshland and swamp. Over time, pumping of water from marshland allowed for development into lower elevation areas. Today, half of the city is at or below local mean sea level, while the other half is slightly above sea level. Evidence suggests that portions of the city may be dropping in elevation due to subsidence.[92]
A 2007 study by Tulane and Xavier University suggested that \"51%... of the contiguous urbanized portions of Orleans, Jefferson, and St. Bernard parishes lie at or above sea level,\" with the more densely populated areas generally on higher ground. The average elevation of the city is currently between 1 foot (0.30 m) and 2 feet (0.61 m) below sea level, with some portions of the city as high as 20 feet (6 m) at the base of the river levee in Uptown and others as low as 7 feet (2 m) below sea level in the farthest reaches of Eastern New Orleans.[93][94] A study published by the ASCE Journal of Hydrologic Engineering in 2016, however, stated:
...most of New Orleans proper—about 65%—is at or below mean sea level, as defined by the average elevation of Lake Pontchartrain[95]
The magnitude of subsidence potentially caused by the draining of natural marsh in the New Orleans area and southeast Louisiana is a topic of debate. A study published in Geology in 2006 by an associate professor at Tulane University claims:
While erosion and wetland loss are huge problems along Louisiana\'s coast, the basement 30 feet (9.1 m) to 50 feet (15 m) beneath much of the Mississippi Delta has been highly stable for the past 8,000 years with negligible subsidence rates.[96]
The study noted, however, that the results did not necessarily apply to the Mississippi River Delta, nor the New Orleans metropolitan area proper. On the other hand, a report by the American Society of Civil Engineers claims that \"New Orleans is subsiding (sinking)\":[97]
Large portions of Orleans, St. Bernard, and Jefferson parishes are currently below sea level—and continue to sink. New Orleans is built on thousands of feet of soft sand, silt, and clay. Subsidence, or settling of the ground surface, occurs naturally due to the consolidation and oxidation of organic soils (called \"marsh\" in New Orleans) and local groundwater pumping. In the past, flooding and deposition of sediments from the Mississippi River counterbalanced the natural subsidence, leaving southeast Louisiana at or above sea level. However, due to major flood control structures being built upstream on the Mississippi River and levees being built around New Orleans, fresh layers of sediment are not replenishing the ground lost by subsidence.[97]
In May 2016, NASA published a study which suggested that most areas were, in fact, experiencing subsidence at a \"highly variable rate\" which was \"generally consistent with, but somewhat higher than, previous studies.\"[98]
CityscapeSee also: Wards of New Orleans and Neighborhoods in New Orleans
Bourbon Street, New Orleans, in 2003, looking towards Canal Street
New Orleans contains many distinctive neighborhoods.The Central Business District is located immediately north and west of the Mississippi and was historically called the \"American Quarter\" or \"American Sector.\" It was developed after the heart of French and Spanish settlement. It includes Lafayette Square. Most streets in this area fan out from a central point. Major streets include Canal Street, Poydras Street, Tulane Avenue and Loyola Avenue. Canal Street divides the traditional \"downtown\" area from the \"uptown\" area.
Every street crossing Canal Street between the Mississippi River and Rampart Street, which is the northern edge of the French Quarter, has a different name for the \"uptown\" and \"downtown\" portions. For example, St. Charles Avenue, known for its street car line, is called Royal Street below Canal Street, though where it traverses the Central Business District between Canal and Lee Circle, it is properly called St. Charles Street.[99] Elsewhere in the city, Canal Street serves as the dividing point between the \"South\" and \"North\" portions of various streets. In the local parlance downtown means \"downriver from Canal Street\", while uptown means \"upriver from Canal Street\". Downtown neighborhoods include the French Quarter, Tremé, the 7th Ward, Faubourg Marigny, Bywater (the Upper Ninth Ward), and the Lower Ninth Ward. Uptown neighborhoods include the Warehouse District, the Lower Garden District, the Garden District, the Irish Channel, the University District, Carrollton, Gert Town, Fontainebleau and Broadmoor. However, the Warehouse and the Central Business District are frequently called \"Downtown\" as a specific region, as in the Downtown Development District.
Other major districts within the city include Bayou St. John, Mid-City, Gentilly, Lakeview, Lakefront, New Orleans East and Algiers.
Historic and residential architectureSee also: Buildings and architecture of New OrleansNew Orleans is world-famous for its abundance of architectural styles that reflect the city\'s multicultural heritage. Though New Orleans possesses numerous structures of national architectural significance, it is equally, if not more, revered for its enormous, largely intact (even post-Katrina) historic built environment. Twenty National Register Historic Districts have been established, and fourteen local historic districts aid in preservation. Thirteen of the districts are administered by the New Orleans Historic District Landmarks Commission (HDLC), while one—the French Quarter—is administered by the Vieux Carre Commission (VCC). Additionally, both the National Park Service, via the National Register of Historic Places, and the HDLC have landmarked individual buildings, many of which lie outside the boundaries of existing historic districts.[100]
Housing styles include the shotgun house and the bungalow style. Creole cottages and townhouses, notable for their large courtyards and intricate iron balconies, line the streets of the French Quarter. American townhouses, double-gallery houses, and Raised Center-Hall Cottages are notable. St. Charles Avenue is famed for its large antebellum homes. Its mansions are in various styles, such as Greek Revival, American Colonial and the Victorian styles of Queen Anne and Italianate architecture. New Orleans is also noted for its large, European-style Catholic cemeteries.
Tallest buildingsSee also: List of tallest buildings in New Orleans
Skyline of the Central Business District of New OrleansFor much of its history, New Orleans\' skyline displayed only low- and mid-rise structures. The soft soils are susceptible to subsidence, and there was doubt about the feasibility of constructing high rises. Developments in engineering throughout the 20th century eventually made it possible to build sturdy foundations in the foundations that underlie the structures. In the 1960s, the World Trade Center New Orleans and Plaza Tower demonstrated skyscrapers\' viability. One Shell Square became the city\'s tallest building in 1972. The oil boom of the 1970s and early 1980s redefined New Orleans\' skyline with the development of the Poydras Street corridor. Most are clustered along Canal Street and Poydras Street in the Central Business District.
Name Stories HeightOne Shell Square 51 697 ft (212 m)Place St. Charles 53 645 ft (197 m)Plaza Tower 45 531 ft (162 m)Energy Centre 39 530 ft (160 m)First Bank and Trust Tower 36 481 ft (147 m)ClimateSee also: Hurricane preparedness for New Orleans
Snow falls on St. Charles Avenue in December 2008.The climate of New Orleans is humid subtropical (Köppen: Cfa), with short, generally mild winters and hot, humid summers; most suburbs and parts of Wards 9 and 15 fall in USDA Plant Hardiness Zone 9a, while the city\'s other 15 wards are rated 9b in whole.[101] The monthly daily average temperature ranges from 53.4 °F (11.9 °C) in January to 83.3 °F (28.5 °C) in July and August. Officially, as measured at New Orleans International Airport, temperature records range from 11 to 102 °F (−12 to 39 °C) on December 23, 1989, and August 22, 1980, respectively; Audubon Park has recorded temperatures ranging from 6 °F (−14 °C) on February 13, 1899, up to 104 °F (40 °C) on June 24, 2009.[102] Dewpoints in the summer months (June–August) are relatively high, ranging from 71.1 to 73.4 °F (21.7 to 23.0 °C).[103]
The average precipitation is 62.5 inches (1,590 mm) annually; the summer months are the wettest, while October is the driest month.[102] Precipitation in winter usually accompanies the passing of a cold front. On average, there are 77 days of 90 °F (32 °C)+ highs, 8.1 days per winter where the high does not exceed 50 °F (10 °C), and 8.0 nights with freezing lows annually. It is rare for the temperature to reach 20 or 100 °F (−7 or 38 °C), with the last occurrence of each being February 5, 1996, and June 26, 2016, respectively.[102]
New Orleans experiences snowfall only on rare occasions. A small amount of snow fell during the 2004 Christmas Eve Snowstorm and again on Christmas (December 25) when a combination of rain, sleet, and snow fell on the city, leaving some bridges icy. The New Year\'s Eve 1963 snowstorm affected New Orleans and brought 4.5 inches (11 cm). Snow fell again on December 22, 1989, during the December 1989 United States cold wave, when most of the city received 1–2 inches (2.5–5.1 cm).
The last significant snowfall in New Orleans was on the morning of December 11, 2008.[104]
Climate data for Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport (1991–2020 normals,[a] extremes 1946–present)[b]Month Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec YearRecord high °F (°C) 83(28) 85(29) 89(32) 92(33) 97(36) 101(38) 101(38) 102(39) 101(38) 97(36) 88(31) 85(29) 102(39)Mean maximum °F (°C) 77.5(25.3) 79.7(26.5) 82.9(28.3) 86.5(30.3) 91.9(33.3) 95.2(35.1) 96.6(35.9) 96.7(35.9) 94.3(34.6) 89.8(32.1) 83.8(28.8) 80.3(26.8) 97.6(36.4)Average high °F (°C) 62.5(16.9) 66.4(19.1) 72.3(22.4) 78.5(25.8) 85.3(29.6) 90.0(32.2) 91.4(33.0) 91.3(32.9) 88.1(31.2) 80.6(27.0) 71.2(21.8) 64.8(18.2) 78.5(25.8)Daily mean °F (°C) 54.3(12.4) 58.0(14.4) 63.8(17.7) 70.1(21.2) 77.1(25.1) 82.4(28.0) 83.9(28.8) 84.0(28.9) 80.8(27.1) 72.5(22.5) 62.4(16.9) 56.6(13.7) 70.5(21.4)Average low °F (°C) 46.1(7.8) 49.7(9.8) 55.3(12.9) 61.7(16.5) 69.0(20.6) 74.7(23.7) 76.5(24.7) 76.6(24.8) 73.5(23.1) 64.3(17.9) 53.7(12.1) 48.4(9.1) 62.5(16.9)Mean minimum °F (°C) 29.5(−1.4) 33.4(0.8) 38.0(3.3) 47.1(8.4) 57.3(14.1) 67.4(19.7) 71.4(21.9) 71.1(21.7) 63.3(17.4) 47.7(8.7) 37.7(3.2) 32.6(0.3) 27.6(−2.4)Record low °F (°C) 14(−10) 16(−9) 25(−4) 32(0) 41(5) 50(10) 60(16) 60(16) 42(6) 35(2) 24(−4) 11(−12) 11(−12)Average precipitation inches (mm) 5.18(132) 4.13(105) 4.36(111) 5.22(133) 5.64(143) 7.62(194) 6.79(172) 6.91(176) 5.11(130) 3.70(94) 3.87(98) 4.82(122) 63.35(1,609)Average precipitation days (≥ 0.01 in) 9.5 9.0 8.1 7.3 7.8 12.7 13.9 13.6 9.8 7.1 7.1 9.2 115.1Average relative humidity (%) 75.6 73.0 72.9 73.4 74.4 76.4 79.2 79.4 77.8 74.9 77.2 76.9 75.9Mean monthly sunshine hours 153.0 161.5 219.4 251.9 278.9 274.3 257.1 251.9 228.7 242.6 171.8 157.8 2,648.9Percent possible sunshine 47 52 59 65 66 65 60 62 62 68 54 50 60Source: NOAA (relative humidity and sun 1961–1990)[c][102][106][103]Climate data for Audubon Park, New Orleans (1991–2020 normals, extremes 1893–present)Threat from tropical cyclones
Hurricanes of Category 3 or greater passing within 100 miles, from 1852 to 2005 (NOAA)Hurricanes pose a severe threat to the area, and the city is particularly at risk because of its low elevation, because it is surrounded by water from the north, east, and south and because of Louisiana\'s sinking coast.[108] According to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, New Orleans is the nation\'s most vulnerable city to hurricanes.[109] Indeed, portions of Greater New Orleans have been flooded by the Grand Isle Hurricane of 1909,[110] the New Orleans Hurricane of 1915,[110] 1947 Fort Lauderdale Hurricane,[110] Hurricane Flossy[111] in 1956, Hurricane Betsy in 1965, Hurricane Georges in 1998, Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005, Hurricane Gustav in 2008, and Hurricane Zeta in 2020 (Zeta was also the most intense hurricane to pass over New Orleans) with the flooding in Betsy being significant and in a few neighborhoods severe, and that in Katrina being disastrous in the majority of the city.[112][113][114]
On August 29, 2005, storm surge from Hurricane Katrina caused catastrophic failure of the federally designed and built levees, flooding 80% of the city.[115][116] A report by the American Society of Civil Engineers says that \"had the levees and floodwalls not failed and had the pump stations operated, nearly two-thirds of the deaths would not have occurred\".[97]
New Orleans has always had to consider the risk of hurricanes, but the risks are dramatically greater today due to coastal erosion from human interference.[117] Since the beginning of the 20th century, it has been estimated that Louisiana has lost 2,000 square miles (5,000 km2) of coast (including many of its barrier islands), which once protected New Orleans against storm surge. Following Hurricane Katrina, the Army Corps of Engineers has instituted massive levee repair and hurricane protection measures to protect the city.
In 2006, Louisiana voters overwhelmingly adopted an amendment to the state\'s constitution to dedicate all revenues from off-shore drilling to restore Louisiana\'s eroding coast line.[118] U.S. Congress has allocated $7 billion to bolster New Orleans\' flood protection.[119]
According to a study by the National Academy of Engineering and the National Research Council, levees and floodwalls surrounding New Orleans—no matter how large or sturdy—cannot provide absolute protection against overtopping or failure in extreme events. Levees and floodwalls should be viewed as a way to reduce risks from hurricanes and storm surges, not as measures that eliminate risk. For structures in hazardous areas and residents who do not relocate, the committee recommended major floodproofing measures—such as elevating the first floor of buildings to at least the 100-year flood level.[120]
DemographicsHistorical populationYear Pop. ±%1769 3,190 — 1778 3,060 −4.1%1791 5,497 +79.6%1810 17,242 +213.7%1820 27,176 +57.6%1830 46,082 +69.6%1840 102,193 +121.8%1850 116,375 +13.9%1860 168,675 +44.9%1870 191,418 +13.5%1880 216,090 +12.9%1890 242,039 +12.0%1900 287,104 +18.6%1910 339,075 +18.1%1920 387,219 +14.2%1930 458,762 +18.5%1940 494,537 +7.8%1950 570,445 +15.3%1960 627,525 +10.0%1970 593,471 −5.4%1980 557,515 −6.1%1990 496,938 −10.9%2000 484,674 −2.5%2010 343,829 −29.1%2020 383,997 +11.7%Population given for the City of New Orleans, not for Orleans Parish, before New Orleans absorbed suburbs and rural areas of Orleans Parish in 1874, since which time the city and parish have been coterminous.Population for Orleans Parish was 41,351 in 1820; 49,826 in 1830; 102,193 in 1840; 119,460 in 1850; 174,491 in 1860; and 191,418 in 1870.Source: U.S. Decennial Census[121]Historical Population 1900–1990[127]1990–2000[128] 2010–2013[129]2020 estimate[130]
Map of racial distribution in New Orleans, 2010 U.S. census. Each dot is 25 people: ⬤ White ⬤ Black ⬤ Asian ⬤ Hispanic ⬤ OtherAs of the 2020 United States census, there were 383,997 people, 151,753 households, and 69,370 families residing in the city. Prior to 1960, the population of New Orleans steadily increased to a historic 627,525.
Beginning in 1960, the population decreased due to factors such as the cycles of oil production and tourism,[131][132] and as suburbanization increased (as with many cities),[133] and jobs migrated to surrounding parishes.[134] This economic and population decline resulted in high levels of poverty in the city; in 1960 it had the fifth-highest poverty rate of all U.S. cities,[135] and was almost twice the national average in 2005, at 24.5%.[133] New Orleans experienced an increase in residential segregation from 1900 to 1980, leaving the disproportionately Black and African American poor in older, low-lying locations.[134] These areas were especially susceptible to flood and storm damage.[136]
The last population estimate before Hurricane Katrina was 454,865, as of July 1, 2005.[137] A population analysis released in August 2007 estimated the population to be 273,000, 60% of the pre-Katrina population and an increase of about 50,000 since July 2006.[138] A September 2007 report by The Greater New Orleans Community Data Center, which tracks population based on U.S. Postal Service figures, found that in August 2007, just over 137,000 households received mail. That compares with about 198,000 households in July 2005, representing about 70% of pre-Katrina population.[139] In 2010, the U.S. Census Bureau revised upward its 2008 population estimate for the city, to 336,644 inhabitants.[86] Estimates from 2010 showed that neighborhoods that did not flood were near or even greater than 100% of their pre-Katrina populations.[140]
Katrina displaced 800,000 people, contributing significantly to the decline.[141] Black and African Americans, renters, the elderly, and people with low income were disproportionately affected by Katrina, compared to affluent and white residents.[142][143] In Katrina\'s aftermath, city government commissioned groups such as Bring New Orleans Back Commission, the New Orleans Neighborhood Rebuilding Plan, the Unified New Orleans Plan, and the Office of Recovery Management to contribute to plans addressing depopulation. Their ideas included shrinking the city\'s footprint from before the storm, incorporating community voices into development plans, and creating green spaces,[142] some of which incited controversy.[144][145]
A 2006 study by researchers at Tulane University and the University of California, Berkeley determined that as many as 10,000 to 14,000 undocumented immigrants, many from Mexico, resided in New Orleans.[146] In 2016, the Pew Research Center estimated at least 35,000 undocumented immigrants lived in New Orleans and its metropolitan area.[147] The New Orleans Police Department began a new policy to \"no longer cooperate with federal immigration enforcement\" beginning on February 28, 2016.[148]
As of 2010, 90.3% of residents age 5 and older spoke English at home as a primary language, while 4.8% spoke Spanish, 1.9% Vietnamese, and 1.1% spoke French. In total, 9.7% population age 5 and older spoke a mother language other than English.[149]
Race and ethnicitySee also: Hondurans in New Orleans, Italians in New Orleans, and Vietnamese in New OrleansRacial and ethnic composition 2020[150] 2010[151] 1990[152] 1970[152] 1940[152]White n/a 33.0% 34.9% 54.5% 69.7%—Non-Hispanic 31.61% 30.5% 33.1% 50.6%[153] n/aBlack or African American 53.61% 60.2% 61.9% 45.0% 30.1%Hispanic or Latino (of any race) 8.08% 5.2% 3.5% 4.4%[153] n/aAsian 2.75% 2.9% 1.9% 0.2% 0.1%Pacific Islander 0.03% n/a n/a n/a n/aTwo or more races 3.71% 1.7% n/a n/a n/aGrowing into a predominant Black and African American city by race and ethnicity since 1990,[152] in 2010 the racial and ethnic makeup of New Orleans was: 60.2% Black and African American, 33.0% White, 2.9% Asian (1.7% Vietnamese, 0.3% Indian, 0.3% Chinese, 0.1% Filipino, 0.1% Korean), 0.0% Pacific Islander, and 1.7% people of two or more races.[154] People of Hispanic or Latino American origin made up 5.3% of the population; 1.3% were Mexican, 1.3% Honduran, 0.4% Cuban, 0.3% Puerto Rican, and 0.3% Nicaraguan. In 2020, the racial and ethnic makeup of the city was 53.61% Black or African American, 31.61% non-Hispanic white, 0.2% American Indian and Alaska Native, 0.03% Pacific Islander, 3.71% multiracial or of another race, and 8.08% Hispanic and Latino American of any race.[150] The growth of the Hispanic and Latino population in New Orleans proper from 2010 to 2020 reflected national demographic trends of diversification throughout regions once predominantly non-Hispanic white.[155]
As of 2011, the Hispanic and Latino American population had also grown in the Greater New Orleans area alongside Black and African American residents, including in Kenner, central Metairie, and Terrytown in Jefferson Parish and Eastern New Orleans and Mid-City in New Orleans proper.[156] Janet Murguía, president and chief executive officer of the National Council of La Raza, stated that up to 120,000 Hispanic and Latino Americans workers lived in New Orleans. In June 2007, one study stated that the Hispanic and Latino American population had risen from 15,000, pre-Katrina, to over 50,000.[157] From 2010 to 2014 the city grew by 12%, adding an average of more than 10,000 new residents each year following the 2010 U.S. census.[122]
After Katrina the small Brazilian American population expanded. Portuguese speakers were the second most numerous group to take English as a second language classes in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New Orleans, after Spanish speakers. Many Brazilians worked in skilled trades such as tile and flooring, although fewer worked as day laborers than other Hispanic and Latino Americans. Many had moved from Brazilian communities in the northeastern United States, and Florida and Georgia. Brazilians settled throughout the metropolitan area; most were undocumented. In January 2008, the New Orleans Brazilian population had a mid-range estimate of 3,000 people. By 2008, Brazilians had opened many small churches, shops and restaurants catering to their community.[158]
Among the growing Asian American community, the earliest Filipino Americans to live within the city arrived in the early 1800s.[159] The Vietnamese American community grew to become the largest by 2010 as many fled the aftermath of the Vietnam War in the 1970s.[160]
Sexual orientation and gender identity
2016 New Orleans PrideNew Orleans and its metropolitan area have historically been popular destinations for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender communities.[161][162] In 2015, a Gallup survey determined New Orleans was one of the largest cities in the American South with a large LGBT population.[163][164] Much of the LGBT New Orleans population live near the Central Business District, Mid-City, and Uptown; many gay bars and night clubs are present in those of St. Louis, King of France
Beth Israel synagogue building on Carondelet StreetNew Orleans\' colonial history of French and Spanish settlement generated a strong Roman Catholic tradition. Catholic missions ministered to slaves and free people of color and established schools for them. In addition, many late 19th and early 20th century European immigrants, such as the Irish, some Germans, and Italians were Catholic. Within the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New Orleans (which includes not only the city but the surrounding parishes as well), 40% percent of the population was Roman Catholic since 2016.[166] Catholicism is reflected in French and Spanish cultural traditions, including its many parochial schools, street names, architecture and festivals, including Mardi Gras.
Influenced by the Bible Belt\'s prominent Protestant population, New Orleans also has a sizable non-Catholic Christian demographic. Roughly 12.2% of the population were Baptist, followed by 5.1% from another Christian faith including Eastern Orthodox Christianity or Oriental Orthodoxy, 3.1% Methodism, 1.8% Episcopalianism, 0.9% Presbyterianism, 0.8% Lutheranism, 0.8% from the Latter-Day Saints, and 0.6% Pentecostalism in 2019.[167] Of the Baptist population, the majority form the National Baptist Convention (USA), National Baptist Convention of America, and the Southern Baptist Convention.[168]
New Orleans displays a distinctive variety of Louisiana Voodoo, due in part to syncretism with African and Afro-Caribbean Roman Catholic beliefs. The fame of voodoo practitioner Marie Laveau contributed to this, as did New Orleans\' Caribbean cultural influences.[169][170][171] Although the tourism industry strongly associated Voodoo with the city, only a small number of people are serious adherents.
New Orleans was also home to the occultist Mary Oneida Toups, who was nicknamed the \"Witch Queen of New Orleans\". Toups\' coven, The Religious Order of Witchcraft, was the first coven to be officially recognized as a religious institution by the state of Louisiana.[172]
Jewish settlers, primarily Sephardim, settled in New Orleans from the early nineteenth century. Some migrated from the communities established in the colonial years in Charleston, South Carolina and Savannah, Georgia. The merchant Abraham Cohen Labatt helped found the first Jewish congregation in New Orleans in the 1830s, which became known as the Portuguese Jewish Nefutzot Yehudah congregation (he and some other members were Sephardic Jews, whose ancestors had lived in Portugal and Spain). Ashkenazi Jews from eastern Europe immigrated in the late 19th and 20th centuries.
By the 21st century, 10,000 Jews lived in New Orleans. This number dropped to 7,000 after Hurricane Katrina, but rose again after efforts to incentivize the community\'s growth resulted in the arrival of about an additional 2,000 Jews.[173] New Orleans synagogues lost members, but most re-opened in their original locations. The exception was Congregation Beth Israel, the oldest and most prominent Orthodox synagogue in the New Orleans region. Beth Israel\'s building in Lakeview was destroyed by flooding. After seven years of holding services in temporary quarters, the congregation consecrated a new synagogue on land purchased from the Reform Congregation Gates of Prayer in Metairie.[174]
A visible religious minority,[175][176] Muslims constituted 0.6% of the religious population as of 2019.[167] The Islamic demographic in New Orleans and its metropolitan area have been mainly made up of Middle Eastern immigrants and African Americans.
Economy
A tanker on the Mississippi River in New Orleans
Intracoastal Waterway near New OrleansNew Orleans operates one of the world\'s largest and busiest ports and metropolitan New Orleans is a center of maritime industry.[177] The region accounts for a significant portion of the nation\'s oil refining and petrochemical production, and serves as a white-collar corporate base for onshore and offshore petroleum and natural gas production. Since the beginning of the 21st century, New Orleans has also grown into a technology hub.[178][179]
New Orleans is also a center for higher learning, with over 50,000 students enrolled in the region\'s eleven two- and four-year degree-granting institutions. Tulane University, a top-50 research university, is located in Uptown. Metropolitan New Orleans is a major regional hub for the health care industry and boasts a small, globally competitive manufacturing sector. The center city possesses a rapidly growing, entrepreneurial creative industries sector and is renowned for its cultural tourism. Greater New Orleans, Inc. (GNO, Inc.)[180] acts as the first point-of-contact for regional economic development, coordinating between Louisiana\'s Department of Economic Development and the various business development agencies.
PortNew Orleans began as a strategically located trading entrepôt and it remains, above all, a crucial transportation hub and distribution center for waterborne commerce. The Port of New Orleans is the fifth-largest in the United States based on cargo volume, and second-largest in the state after the Port of South Louisiana. It is the twelfth-largest in the U.S. based on cargo value. The Port of South Louisiana, also located in the New Orleans area, is the world\'s busiest in terms of bulk tonnage. When combined with Port of New Orleans, it forms the 4th-largest port system in volume. Many shipbuilding, shipping, logistics, freight forwarding and commodity brokerage firms either are based in metropolitan New Orleans or maintain a local presence. Examples include Intermarine,[181] Bisso Towboat,[182] Northrop Grumman Ship Systems,[183] Trinity Yachts, Expeditors International,[184] Bollinger Shipyards, IMTT, International Coffee Corp, Boasso America, Transoceanic Shipping, Transportation Consultants Inc., Dupuy Storage & Forwarding and Silocaf.[185] The largest coffee-roasting plant in the world, operated by Folgers, is located in New Orleans East.[186][187]The steamboat Natchez operates out of New Orleans.New Orleans is located near to the Gulf of Mexico and its many oil rigs. Louisiana ranks fifth among states in oil production and eighth in reserves. It has two of the four Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) storage facilities: West Hackberry in Cameron Parish and Bayou Choctaw in Iberville Parish. The area hosts 17 petroleum refineries, with a combined crude oil distillation capacity of nearly 2.8 million barrels per day (450,000 m3/d), the second highest after Texas. Louisiana\'s numerous ports include the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port (LOOP), which is capable of receiving the largest oil tankers. Given the quantity of oil imports, Louisiana is home to many major pipelines: Crude Oil (Exxon, Chevron, BP, Texaco, Shell, Scurloch-Permian, Mid-Valley, Calumet, Conoco, Koch Industries, Unocal, U.S. Dept. of Energy, Locap); Product (TEPPCO Partners, Colonial, Plantation, Explorer, Texaco, Collins); and Liquefied Petroleum Gas (Dixie, TEPPCO, Black Lake, Koch, Chevron, Dynegy, Kinder Morgan Energy Partners, Dow Chemical Company, Bridgeline, FMP, Tejas, Texaco, UTP).[188] Several energy companies have regional headquarters in the area, including Royal Dutch Shell, Eni and Chevron. Other energy producers and oilfield services companies are headquartered in the city or region, and the sector supports a large professional services base of specialized engineering and design firms, as well as a term office for the federal government\'s Minerals Management Service.
BusinessThe city is the home to a single Fortune 500 company: Entergy, a power generation utility and nuclear power plant operations specialist.[189] After Katrina, the city lost its other Fortune 500 company, Freeport-McMoRan, when it merged its copper and gold exploration unit with an Arizona company and relocated that division to Phoenix. Its McMoRan Exploration affiliate remains headquartered in New Orleans.[190]
Companies with significant operations or headquarters in New Orleans include: Pan American Life Insurance, Pool Corp, Rolls-Royce, Newpark Resources, AT&T, TurboSquid, iSeatz, IBM, Navtech, Superior Energy Services, Textron Marine & Land Systems, McDermott International, Pellerin Milnor, Lockheed Martin, Imperial Trading, Laitram, Harrah\'s Entertainment, Stewart Enterprises, Edison Chouest Offshore, Zatarain\'s, Waldemar S. Nelson & Co., Whitney National Bank, Capital One, Tidewater Marine, Popeyes Chicken & Biscuits, Parsons Brinckerhoff, MWH Global, CH2M Hill, Energy Partners Ltd, The Receivables Exchange, GE Capital, and Smoothie King.
Tourist and convention businessTourism is a staple of the city\'s economy. Perhaps more visible than any other sector, New Orleans\' tourist and convention industry is a $5.5 billion industry that accounts for 40 percent of city tax revenues. In 2004, the hospitality industry employed 85,000 people, making it the city\'s top economic sector as measured by employment.[191] New Orleans also hosts the World Cultural Economic Forum (WCEF). The forum, held annually at the New Orleans Morial Convention Center, is directed toward promoting cultural and economic development opportunities through the strategic convening of cultural ambassadors and leaders from around the world. The first WCEF took place in October 2008.[192]
Federal and military agencies
Aerial view of NASA\'s Michoud Assembly FacilityFederal agencies and the Armed forces operate significant facilities there. The U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals operates at the US. Courthouse downtown. NASA\'s Michoud Assembly Facility is located in New Orleans East and has multiple tenants including Lockheed Martin and Boeing. It is a huge manufacturing complex that produced the external fuel tanks for the Space Shuttles, the Saturn V first stage, the Integrated Truss Structure of the International Space Station, and is now used for the construction of NASA\'s Space Launch System. The rocket factory lies within the enormous New Orleans Regional Business Park, also home to the National Finance Center, operated by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), and the Crescent Crown distribution center. Other large governmental installations include the U.S. Navy\'s Space and Naval Warfare (SPAWAR) Systems Command, located within the University of New Orleans Research and Technology Park in Gentilly, Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base New Orleans; and the headquarters for the Marine Force Reserves in Federal City in Algiers.
Culture and contemporary lifeMain article: Culture of New OrleansTourismSee also: Culture of New Orleans § Museums and other attractionsNew Orleans has many visitor attractions, from the world-renowned French Quarter to St. Charles Avenue, (home of Tulane and Loyola universities, the historic Pontchartrain Hotel and many 19th-century mansions) to Magazine Street with its boutique stores and antique shops.French Quarter in 2009
Street artist in the French Quarter (1988)According to current travel guides, New Orleans is one of the top ten most-visited cities in the United States; 10.1 million visitors came to New Orleans in 2004.[191][193] Prior to Katrina, 265 hotels with 38,338 rooms operated in the Greater New Orleans Area. In May 2007, that had declined to some 140 hotels and motels with over 31,000 rooms.[194]
A 2009 Travel + Leisure poll of \"America\'s Favorite Cities\" ranked New Orleans first in ten categories, the most first-place rankings of the 30 cities included. According to the poll, New Orleans was the best U.S. city as a spring break destination and for \"wild weekends\", stylish boutique hotels, cocktail hours, singles/bar scenes, live music/concerts and bands, antique and vintage shops, cafés/coffee bars, neighborhood restaurants, and people watching. The city ranked second for: friendliness (behind Charleston, South Carolina), gay-friendliness (behind San Francisco), bed and breakfast hotels/inns, and ethnic food. However, the city placed near the bottom in cleanliness, safety and as a family destination.[195][196]
The French Quarter (known locally as \"the Quarter\" or Vieux Carré), which was the colonial-era city and is bounded by the Mississippi River, Rampart Street, Canal Street, and Esplanade Avenue, contains popular hotels, bars and nightclubs. Notable tourist attractions in the Quarter include Bourbon Street, Jackson Square, St. Louis Cathedral, the French Market (including Café du Monde, famous for café au lait and beignets) and Preservation Hall. Also in the French Quarter is the old New Orleans Mint, a former branch of the United States Mint which now operates as a museum, and The Historic New Orleans Collection, a museum and research center housing art and artifacts relating to the history and the Gulf South.
Close to the Quarter is the Tremé community, which contains the New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park and the New Orleans African American Museum—a site which is listed on the Louisiana African American Heritage Trail.
The Natchez is an authentic steamboat with a calliope that cruises the length of the city twice daily. Unlike most other places in the United States, New Orleans has become widely known for its elegant decay. The city\'s historic cemeteries and their distinct above-ground tombs are attractions in themselves, the oldest and most famous of which, Saint Louis Cemetery, greatly resembles Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.The New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA) located in City ParkThe National WWII Museum offers a multi-building odyssey through the history of the Pacific and European theaters. Nearby, Confederate Memorial Hall Museum, the oldest continually operating museum in Louisiana (although under renovation since Hurricane Katrina), contains the second-largest collection of Confederate memorabilia. Art museums include the Contemporary Arts Center, the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA) in City Park, and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art.
New Orleans is home to the Audubon Nature Institute (which consists of Audubon Park, the Audubon Zoo, the Aquarium of the Americas and the Audubon Insectarium), and home to gardens which include Longue Vue House and Gardens and the New Orleans Botanical Garden. City Park, one of the country\'s most expansive and visited urban parks, has one of the largest stands of oak trees in the world.
Other points of interest can be found in the surrounding areas. Many wetlands are found nearby, including Honey Island Swamp and Barataria Preserve. Chalmette Battlefield and National Cemetery, located just south of the city, is the site of the 1815 Battle of New Orleans.
Entertainment and performing artsMain article: Music of New Orleans
New Orleans Mardi Gras in the early 1890s
Mounted krewe officers in the Thoth Parade during Mardi GrasThe New Orleans area is home to numerous annual celebrations. The most well known is Carnival, or Mardi Gras. Carnival officially begins on the Feast of the Epiphany, also known in some Christian traditions as the \"Twelfth Night\" of Christams. Mardi Gras (French for \"Fat Tuesday\"), the final and grandest day of traditional Catholic festivities, is the last Tuesday before the Christian liturgical season of Lent, which commences on Ash Wednesday.
The largest of the city\'s many music festivals is the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. Commonly referred to simply as \"Jazz Fest\", it is one of the nation\'s largest music festivals. The festival features a variety of music, including both native Louisiana and international artists. Along with Jazz Fest, New Orleans\' Voodoo Experience (\"Voodoo Fest\") and the Essence Music Festival also feature local and international artists.
Other major festivals include Southern Decadence, the French Quarter Festival, and the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival. The American playwright lived and wrote in New Orleans early in his career, and set his play, Streetcar Named Desire, there.
In 2002, Louisiana began offering tax incentives for film and television production. This has resulted in a substantial increase in activity and brought the nickname of \"Hollywood South\" for New Orleans. Films produced in and around the city include Ray, Runaway Jury, The Pelican Brief, Glory Road, All the King\'s Men, Déjà Vu, Last Holiday, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, 12 Years a Slave, and Project Power. In 2006, work began on the Louisiana Film & Television studio complex, based in the Tremé neighborhood.[197] Louisiana began to offer similar tax incentives for music and theater productions in 2007, and some commentators began to refer to New Orleans as \"Broadway South.\"[198]Louis Armstrong, famous New Orleans jazz musicianThe first theatre in New Orleans was the French-language Theatre de la Rue Saint Pierre, which opened in 1792. The first opera in New Orleans was performed there in 1796. In the nineteenth century, the city was the home of two of America\'s most important venues for French opera, the Théâtre d\'Orléans and later the French Opera House. Today, opera is performed by the New Orleans Opera. The Marigny Opera House is home to the Marigny Opera Ballet and also hosts opera, jazz, and classical music performances.Frank Ocean is a musician from New Orleans.New Orleans has long been a significant center for music, showcasing its intertwined European, African and Latino American cultures. The city\'s unique musical heritage was born in its colonial and early American days from a unique blending of European musical instruments with African rhythms. As the only North American city to have allowed slaves to gather in public and play their native music (largely in Congo Square, now located within Louis Armstrong Park), New Orleans gave birth in the early 20th century to an epochal indigenous music: jazz. Soon, African American brass bands formed, beginning a century-long tradition. The Louis Armstrong Park area, near the French Quarter in Tremé, contains the New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park. The city\'s music was later also significantly influenced by Acadiana, home of Cajun and Zydeco music, and by Delta blues.
New Orleans\' unique musical culture is on display in its traditional funerals. A spin on military funerals, New Orleans\' traditional funerals feature sad music (mostly dirges and hymns) in processions on the way to the cemetery and happier music (hot jazz) on the way back. Until the 1990s, most locals preferred to call these \"funerals with music.\" Visitors to the city have long dubbed them \"jazz funerals.\"
Much later in its musical development, New Orleans was home to a distinctive brand of rhythm and blues that contributed greatly to the growth of rock and roll. An example of the New Orleans\' sound in the 1960s is the #1 U.S. hit \"Chapel of Love\" by the Dixie Cups, a song which knocked the Beatles out of the top spot on the Billboard Hot 100. New Orleans became a hotbed for funk music in the 1960s and 1970s, and by the late 1980s, it had developed its own localized variant of hip hop, called bounce music. While not commercially successful outside of the Deep South, bounce music was immensely popular in poorer neighborhoods throughout the 1990s.
A cousin of bounce, New Orleans hip hop achieved commercial success locally and internationally, producing Lil Wayne, Master P, Birdman, Juvenile, Suicideboys, Cash Money Records and No Limit Records. Additionally, the popularity of cowpunk, a fast form of southern rock, originated with the help of several local bands, such as The Radiators, Better Than Ezra, Cowboy Mouth and Dash Rip Rock. Throughout the 1990s, many sludge metal bands started. New Orleans\' heavy metal bands such as Eyehategod,[199] Soilent Green,[200] Crowbar,[201] and Down incorporated styles such as hardcore punk,[202] doom metal, and southern rock to create an original and heady brew of swampy and aggravated metal that has largely avoided Orleans is the southern terminus of the famed Highway 61, made musically famous by musician Bob Dylan in his song, \"Highway 61 Revisited\".
Cuisine
Steamship Bienville on-board restaurant menu (April 7, 1861)Main articles: Cuisine of New Orleans, Louisiana Creole cuisine, and Cajun cuisineNew Orleans is world-famous for its cuisine. The indigenous cuisine is distinctive and influential. New Orleans food combined local Creole, haute Creole and New Orleans French cuisines. Local ingredients, French, Spanish, Italian, African, Native American, Cajun, Chinese, and a hint of Cuban traditions combine to produce a truly unique and easily recognizable New Orleans flavor.
New Orleans is known for specialties including beignets (locally pronounced like \"ben-yays\"), square-shaped fried dough that could be called \"French doughnuts\" (served with café au lait made with a blend of coffee and chicory rather than only coffee); and po\' boy[203] and Italian muffuletta sandwiches; Gulf oysters on the half-shell, fried oysters, boiled crawfish and other seafood; étouffée, jambalaya, gumbo and other Creole dishes; and the Monday favorite of red beans and rice (Louis Armstrong often signed his letters, \"Red beans and ricely yours\"). Another New Orleans specialty is the praline locally /ˈprɑːliːn/, a candy made with brown sugar, granulated sugar, cream, butter, and pecans. The city offers notable street food[204] including the Asian inspired beef Yaka mein.
DialectMain article: New Orleans EnglishSee also: Culture of New Orleans § Language
Café du Monde, a landmark New Orleans beignet cafe established in 1862New Orleans developed a distinctive local dialect that is neither Cajun English nor the stereotypical Southern accent that is often misportrayed by film and television actors. Like earlier Southern Englishes, it features frequent deletion of the pre-consonantal \"r\", though the local white dialect also came to be quite similar to New York accents.[205] No consensus describes how this happened, but it likely resulted from New Orleans\' geographic isolation by water and the fact that the city was a major immigration port throughout the 19th century and early 20th century. Specifically, many members of European immigrant families originally raised in the cities of the Northeast, namely New York, moved to New Orleans during this time frame, bringing their Northeastern accents along with their Irish, Italian (especially Sicilian), German, and Jewish culture.[206]
One of the strongest varieties of the New Orleans accent is sometimes identified as the Yat dialect, from the greeting \"Where y\'at?\" This distinctive accent is dying out in the city, but remains strong in the surrounding parishes.
Less visibly, various ethnic groups throughout the area have retained distinct language traditions. Since Louisiana became the first U.S. state to join the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie in 2018, New Orleans has reemerged as an important center for the state’s francophone and creolophone cultures and languages, as seen in new organizations such as the Nous Foundation.[207] Although rare, Louisiana French and Louisiana Creole are still spoken in the city. There is also Louisiana-Canarian Spanish dialect spoken by the Isleño people and older members of the population.
SportsMain article: Sports in New OrleansClub Sport League Venue (capacity) Founded Titles Record attendanceNew Orleans Saints American football NFL Caesars Superdome (73,208) 1967 1 73,373New Orleans Pelicans Basketball NBA Smoothie King Center (16,867) 2002 0 18,444New Orleans Jesters Soccer NPSL Pan American Stadium (5,000) 2003 0 5,000NOLA Gold Rugby Union MLR Goldmine on Airline (10,000) 2017 0
The fleur-de-lis is often a symbol of New Orleans and its sports teams.New Orleans\' professional sports teams include the 2009 Super Bowl XLIV champion New Orleans Saints (NFL) and the New Orleans Pelicans (NBA).[208] It is also home to the Big Easy Rollergirls, an all-female flat track roller derby team, and the New Orleans Blaze, a women\'s football team.[209][210] New Orleans is also home to two NCAA Division I athletic programs, the Tulane Green Wave of the American Athletic Conference and the UNO Privateers of the Southland Conference.
The Caesars Superdome is the home of the Saints, the Sugar Bowl, and other prominent events. It has hosted the Super Bowl a record seven times (1978, 1981, 1986, 1990, 1997, 2002, and 2013). The Smoothie King Center is the home of the Pelicans, VooDoo, and many events that are not large enough to need the Superdome. New Orleans is also home to the Fair Grounds Race Course, the nation\'s third-oldest thoroughbred track. The city\'s Lakefront Arena has also been home to sporting events.
Each year New Orleans plays host to the Sugar Bowl, the New Orleans Bowl, the Bayou Classic, and the Zurich Classic, a golf tournament on the PGA Tour. In addition, it has often hosted major sporting events that have no permanent home, such as the Super Bowl, ArenaBowl, NBA All-Star Game, BCS National Championship Game, and the NCAA Final Four. The Rock \'n\' Roll Mardi Gras Marathon and the Crescent City Classic are two annual road running events.
In 2017 Major League Rugby had its inaugural season, and NOLA Gold were one of the first teams in the league.[211] They play at the Gold mine on Airline, a former minor league baseball stadium in the suburb of Metairie. In 2022, a consortium started an attempt to bring professional soccer to New Orleans, hoping to place teams in the male USL Championship and women\'s USL Super League by 2025.[212]
National protected areasBayou Sauvage National Wildlife RefugeJean Lafitte National Historical Park and PreserveNew Orleans Jazz National Historical ParkVieux Carre Historic DistrictGovernmentSee also: List of mayors of New OrleansPresidential Elections Results[213]The city is a political subdivision of the U.S. state of Louisiana. It has a mayor-council government, following a home rule charter adopted in 1954, as later amended. The city council consists of seven members, who are elected by single-member districts and two members elected at-large, that is, across the city-parish. LaToya Cantrell assumed the mayor\'s office in 2018 as the first female mayor of the city. The Orleans Parish Civil Sheriff\'s Office serves papers involving lawsuits and provides security for the Civil District Court and Juvenile Courts. The criminal sheriff, Susan Hutson, maintains the parish prison system, provides security for the Criminal District Court, and provides backup for the New Orleans Police Department on an as-needed basis. An ordinance in 2006 established an Office of Inspector General to review city government activities.
The city and the parish of Orleans operate as a merged city-parish government.[214] The original city was composed of what are now the 1st through 9th wards. The city of Lafayette (including the Garden District) was added in 1852 as the 10th and 11th wards. In 1870, Jefferson City, including Faubourg Bouligny and much of the Audubon and University areas, was annexed as the 12th, 13th, and 14th wards. Algiers, on the west bank of the Mississippi, was also annexed in 1870, becoming the 15th ward.
New Orleans\' government is largely centralized in the city council and mayor\'s office, but it maintains earlier systems from when various sections of the city managed their affairs separately. For example, New Orleans had seven elected tax assessors, each with their own staff, representing various districts of the city, rather than one centralized office. A constitutional amendment passed on November 7, 2006, consolidated the seven assessors into one in 2010.[215]
The City of New Orleans, used Archon Information Systems software and services to host multiple online tax sales. The first tax sale was held after Hurricane Katrina.[216] The New Orleans government operates both a fire department and the New Orleans Emergency Medical Services.
New Orleans is the only city in Louisiana that refuses to pay court-ordered judgements when it loses a case that were awarded to the other party.[217] The city uses a provision in the Louisiana Constitution that prohibits the seizure of a city\'s property to pay a judgment when it loses a lawsuit. According to an article, \"The constitution says the funds can’t be seized and can only be paid out if the government appropriates the money. In other words, if the City of New Orleans doesn’t budget the funds for judgments, no judge can force the city to pay.\"[218] Only if the city council chooses to vote to pay a judgment can the other party be paid. Since the city can\'t be forced to pay judgments unless it chooses to do so, it simply doesn\'t pay. More than $36 million in over 500 unpaid judgements issued against the city are simply ignored, some going as far back as 1996.[219]
CrimeSee also: New Orleans Police Department and Culture of New Orleans § CrimeCrime is an ongoing problem in New Orleans. As in comparable U.S. cities, the incidence of homicide and other violent crimes is highly concentrated in certain impoverished neighborhoods.[220] Arrested offenders in New Orleans are almost exclusively black males from impoverished communities: in 2011, 97% were black and 95% were male; 91% of victims were black as well.[221] The city\'s murder rate has been historically high and consistently among the highest rates nationwide since the 1970s. From 1994 to 2013, New Orleans was the country\'s \"Murder Capital\", annually averaging over 200 murders.[222] The first record was broken in 1979 when the city reached 242 homicides.[223] The record was broken again reaching 250 by 1989 to 345 by the end of 1991.[224][225] By 1993, New Orleans had 395 murders: 80.5 for every 100,000 residents.[226] In 1994, the city was officially named the \"Murder Capital of America\", hitting a historic peak of 424 murders. The murder count was one of the highest in the world and surpassed that of such cities as Gary, Indiana, Washington D.C. and Baltimore.[227][228][229][230] In 1999, the city\'s murder rate dropped down to a low of 158 and climbed to the high 200s in the early 2000s. Between 2000 and 2004, New Orleans had the highest homicide rate per capita of any city in the U.S., with 59 people killed per year per 100,000 citizens.[231][232][233][229]
In 2006, with nearly half the population gone and widespread disruption and dislocation because of deaths and refugee relocations from Hurricane Katrina, the city hit another record of homicides. It was ranked as the most dangerous city in the country.[234][235] By 2009, there was a 17% decrease in violent crime, a decrease seen in other cities across the country. But the homicide rate remained among the highest[236] in the United States, at between 55 and 64 per 100,000 residents.[237] In 2010, New Orleans\' homicide rate dropped to 49.1 per 100,000, but increased again in 2012, to 53.2,[238][239] the highest rate among cities of 250,000 population or larger.[240]
The violent crime rate was a key issue in the 2010 mayoral race. In January 2007, several thousand New Orleans residents marched to City Hall for a rally demanding police and city leaders tackle the crime problem. Then-Mayor Ray Nagin said he was \"totally and solely focused\" on addressing the problem. Later, the city implemented checkpoints during late night hours in problem areas.[241] The murder rate climbed 14% in 2011 to 57.88 per 100,000[242] rising to #21 in the world.[243] In 2016, according to annual crime statistics released by the New Orleans Police Department, 176 were murdered.[244][245][238] In 2017, New Orleans had the highest rate of gun violence, surpassing the more populated Chicago and Detroit.[246][247] In 2020, murders increased 68% from 2019 with a total of 202 murders. Criminal justice observers blamed impacts from -19 and changes in police strategies for the uptick.[248][249]
African Americans, also known as Black Americans and formerly called Afro-Americans, or, historically, Negroes or Colored (both now considered to be pejorative), are an American racial and ethnic group who, as defined by the United States census, consists of Americans who have ancestry from \"any of the Black racial groups of Africa\".[3] African Americans constitute the second largest racial and ethnic group in the U.S. after White Americans.[4] The term \"African American\" generally denotes descendants of Africans enslaved in the United States.[5][6] According to annual estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau, as of July 1, 2024, the overall Black population was estimated at 42,951,595, representing approximately 12.63% of the total U.S. population.[7]
African-American history began in the 16th century, when mainly West African and Central 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. A few were able to achieve freedom through manumission or escape, and founded independent communities before and during the American Revolution. After the United States was founded in 1783, most American Black people continued to be enslaved, primarily in the American South, with four million enslaved people only liberated after the Northern victory over the South in the Civil War of 1861 to 1865.[8]
During Reconstruction, African Americans gained citizenship and adult-males the right to vote; however, due to widespread belief in White supremacy, they were treated as second-class citizens and soon effectively 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. However, racism against African Americans and racial socioeconomic disparity remain a problem into the 21st century.
In the 20th and 21st centuries, immigration has played an increasingly significant role in the African-American community. As of 2022, 10% of the U.S. Black population were immigrants, and 20% were either immigrants or the children of immigrants.[9] While some Black immigrants or their children may also come to identify as African American, the majority of first-generation immigrants do not, preferring to identify with their nation of origin.[10][11] Most African Americans are of West African and coastal Central African ancestry, with varying amounts of Western European and Native American ancestry.[12]
African-American culture has had a significant influence on worldwide culture, making numerous contributions to the English language, literature, politics, cuisine, sports, and music. The African-American contribution to popular music is so profound that most American popular music, including gospel, blues, jazz, rock and roll, R&B, soul, funk, disco, hip hop, and house has its origins either partially or entirely in the African-American community.[13][14]
HistoryMain article: African American historySee also: African immigration to the United StatesColonial eraMain article: Slavery in the colonial history of the United StatesSee also: Atlantic slave trade
Major slave trading regions of Africa, 15th?19th centuriesThe vast majority of those who were enslaved and transported in the transatlantic slave trade were people from several Central and West African ethnic groups. They had been captured directly by European slave traders in coastal raids,[15] or captured and sold by West African slave traders or by half-European \"merchant princes\"[16] to European slave traders, who brought them to the Americas.[17]
The first African slaves in what is now the United States arrived in the early 16th century. Africans were among Juan Ponce de León\'s 1513 voyage that landed in what would become Spanish Florida, and enslaved Africans arrived around the same time to Spanish Puerto Rico.[18][19]
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.[20] 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 settlers and the slaves who had not escaped returned to the Island of Hispaniola, whence they had come.[20]
The enslaved explorer Esteban arrived in Florida with the Narváez expedition in 1528, a journey that first landed in Santo Domingo and later traveled into Spanish Texas and the Southwest before ending in Mexico.[21]
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 and recorded Christian marriage anywhere in what is now the continental United States.[22]Slaves processing tobacco in 17th-century Virginia, illustration from 1670The first recorded Africans in English America (including most of the future United States) were \"20 and odd negroes\" who arrived in Jamestown, Virginia via Cape Comfort in August 1619 as indentured servants.[23] As many Virginian settlers began to die from harsh conditions, more and more Africans were brought to work as laborers.[24]
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. Their children did not inherit their status, and on their release from contract they received \"a year\'s provision of corn, double apparel, tools necessary\", and a small cash payment called \"freedom dues\".[25] Africans could legally raise crops and cattle to purchase their freedom.[26] They raised families, married other Africans and sometimes intermarried with Native Americans or European settlers.[27]The first slave sale at New Amsterdam in 1655; illustration from 1895 by Howard Pyle[28]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 1640, the Virginia General Court recorded the earliest documentation of lifetime slavery when they sentenced John Punch, a Negro, to lifetime servitude under his master Hugh Gwyn, for running away.[29][30]
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. St. Augustine had mustered an all-Black militia unit defending Spanish Florida as early as 1683.[31]Reproduction of a handbill advertising a slave sale in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1769One of the Dutch African arrivals, Anthony Johnson, would later own one of the first Black \"slaves\", John Casor, resulting from the court ruling of a civil case.[32][33]
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). All the colony\'s slaves, however, were freed upon its surrender to the English.[34]
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. This legal principle was called partus sequitur ventrum.[35][36]
By an act of 1699, Virginia ordered the deportation of all free Blacks, effectively defining all people of African descent who remained in the colony as slaves.[37] In 1670, the colonial assembly passed a law prohibiting free and baptized Blacks (and Native Americans) from purchasing Christians (in this act meaning White Europeans) but allowing them to buy people \"of their owne nation\".[38]1774 image of a fugitive slave in a New York newspaper, offering a $10 reward (equivalent to $288 in 2024). Slave owners, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, placed around 200,000 runaway slave adverts in newspapers across the US before slavery ended in 1865.[39][40]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.[41] 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. The French creoles cited that measure as one of the system\'s worst elements.[42]
First established in South Carolina in 1704, groups of armed White men?slave patrols?were formed to monitor enslaved Black people.[43] 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. These patrols were used to detect, encounter, and crush any organized slave meetings which might lead to revolts or rebellions.[43]
The earliest African American congregations and churches were organized before 1800 in both northern and southern cities following the Great Awakening. By 1775, Africans made up 20% of the population in the American colonies, which made them the second largest ethnic group after English Americans.[44]
From the American Revolution to the Civil WarMain article: Slavery in the United States
Crispus Attucks, the first \"martyr\" of the American Revolution. He was of Native American and African American descent.During the 1770s, Africans, both enslaved and free, helped rebellious American colonists secure their independence by defeating the British in the American Revolutionary War.[45] Blacks played a role in both sides in the American Revolution. Activists in the Patriot cause included James Armistead, Prince Whipple, and Oliver Cromwell.[46][47] Around 15,000 Black Loyalists left with the British after the war, most of them ending up as free Black people in England[48] or its colonies, such as the Black Nova Scotians and the Sierra Leone Creole people.[49][50]
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. However, actually these privileges distanced free Black men from enslaved Blacks and encouraged them to identify with Whites.[42]
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. Due to the restrictions of Section 9, Clause 1, Congress was unable to pass an Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves until 1807.[51] 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.[40] 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.[39] 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. Among these were the Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, the infamous Dred Scott decision, and John Brown\'s raid on Harpers Ferry.Frederick Douglass, c.?1850Prior to the Civil War, eight serving presidents had owned slaves, a practice that was legally protected under the US Constitution.[52] 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. In addition, 488,000?500,000 Black people lived free (with legislated limits)[53] across the country.[54] With legislated limits imposed upon them in addition to \"unconquerable prejudice\" from Whites according to Henry Clay.[55] In response to these conditions, some free Black people chose to leave the US and emigrate to Liberia in West Africa.[53] Liberia had been established in 1821 as a settlement by the American Colonization Society (ACS), with many abolitionist members of the ACS believing Black Americans would have greater opportunities for freedom and equality in Africa than they would in the US.[53]
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. Enslaved people were instrumental in the construction of several prominent structures such as, the United States Capitol, the White House and other Washington, D.C.?based buildings.[56] Similar building projects existed in the slave states.Slaves Waiting for Sale: Richmond, Virginia, 1853. Note the new clothes. The domestic slave trade broke up many families, and individuals lost their connection to families and clans.By 1815, the domestic slave trade had become a significant and major economic activity in the United States, continuing to flourish until the 1860s.[57] 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. Berlin emphasized that whether enslaved individuals were directly uprooted or lived in constant fear that they or their families would be involuntarily relocated, \"the massive deportation traumatized Black people\" throughout the US.[58] As a result of this large-scale forced movement, countless individuals lost their connection to families and clans, and many ethnic Africans lost their knowledge of varying tribal origins in Africa.[57]
The 1863 photograph of Wilson Chinn, a branded slave from Louisiana, along with the famous image of Gordon and his scarred back, served as two of the earliest and most powerful examples of how the newborn medium of photography could be used to visually document and encapsulate the brutality and cruelty of slavery.[59]Slave trader\'s business on Whitehall Street Atlanta, Georgia, 1864 during the American Civil War with a Union corporal of the United States Colored Troops sitting by the doorEmigration 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.[60] 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. It lasted for a number of decades and provided a destination for about 200 Black families emigrating from a number of locations in the United States.[60]
In 1863, during the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. The proclamation declared that all slaves in Confederate-held territory were free.[61] Advancing Union troops enforced the proclamation, with Texas being the last state to be emancipated, in 1865.[62]Harriet Tubman, c.?1869Slavery in a few border states continued until the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in December 1865.[63] While the Naturalization Act of 1790 limited US citizenship to Whites only,[64][65] the 14th Amendment (1868) gave Black people citizenship, and the 15th Amendment (1870) gave Black men the right to vote.[66]
Reconstruction era and Jim CrowMain articles: Reconstruction era and Jim Crow lawsAfrican 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.[67] Segregation was now imposed with Jim Crow laws, using signs used to show Blacks where they could legally walk, talk, drink, rest, or eat.[68] For those places that were racially mixed, non-Whites had to wait until all White customers were dealt with.[68] Most African Americans obeyed the Jim Crow laws, to avoid racially motivated violence. To maintain self-esteem and dignity, African Americans such as Anthony Overton and Mary McLeod Bethune continued to build their own schools, churches, banks, social clubs, and other businesses.[69]
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. Ferguson in 1896?which was legally mandated by southern states and nationwide at the local level of government, voter suppression or disenfranchisement in the southern states, denial of economic opportunity or resources nationwide, and private acts of violence and mass racial violence aimed at African Americans unhindered or encouraged by government authorities.[70]
Great migration and civil rights movementMain articles: Great Migration and civil rights movement
A group of White men pose for a 1919 photograph as they stand over the Black victim, Will Brown, who had been lynched and had his body mutilated and burned during the Omaha race riot of 1919 in Omaha, Nebraska. Postcards and photographs of lynchings were popular souvenirs in the US.[71]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.[72] 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.[73] 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. At the 1900 Hampton Negro Conference, Reverend Matthew Anderson said: \"...the lines along most of the avenues of wage earning are more rigidly drawn in the North than in the South.\"[74] Within the housing market, stronger discriminatory measures were used in correlation to the influx, resulting in a mix of \"targeted violence, restrictive covenants, redlining and racial steering\".[75] While many Whites defended their space with violence, intimidation, or legal tactics toward African Americans, many other Whites migrated to more racially homogeneous suburban or exurban regions, a process known as White flight.[76]Rosa Parks being fingerprinted after being arrested for not giving up her seat on a bus to a White personDespite 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). The Cotton Club in Harlem was a Whites-only establishment, with Blacks (such as Duke Ellington) allowed to perform, but to a White audience.[77] Black Americans also found a new ground for political power in Northern cities, without the enforced disabilities of Jim Crow.[78][79]
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 visceral response to his mother\'s decision to have an open-casket funeral mobilized the Black community throughout the US.[80] Vann Newkirk wrote \"the trial of his killers became a pageant illuminating the tyranny of White supremacy\".[80] The state of Mississippi tried two defendants, but they were speedily acquitted by an all-White jury.[81] One hundred days after Emmett Till\'s murder, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus in Alabama?indeed, Parks told Emmett\'s mother Mamie Till that \"the photograph of Emmett\'s disfigured face in the casket was set in her mind when she refused to give up her seat on the Montgomery bus.\"[82]March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, August 28, 1963, shows civil rights leaders and union leaders.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. Johnson put his support behind passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that banned discrimination in public accommodations, employment, and labor unions, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which expanded federal authority over states to ensure Black political participation through protection of voter registration and elections.[83] By 1966, the emergence of the Black Power movement, which lasted from 1966 to 1975, expanded upon the aims of the civil rights movement to include economic and political self-sufficiency, and freedom from White authority.[84]
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. The 1960s saw improvements in the social and economic conditions of many Black Americans.[85]
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. In 1960, the median level of education for Blacks had been 10.8 years, and by the late 1960s, the figure rose to 12.2 years, half a year behind the median for Whites.[85]
Post?civil rights eraMain article: Post?civil rights era in African-American history
U.S. President Barack Obama\'s official photograph in the Oval Office on 6 December 2012.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 2001, there were 484 Black mayors.[86]
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.[87] 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. At least 95 percent of African American voters voted for Obama.[88][89] He also received overwhelming support from young and educated Whites, a majority of Asians,[90] and Hispanics,[90] picking up a number of new states in the Democratic electoral column.[88][89] Obama lost the overall White vote, although he won a larger proportion of White votes than any previous non-incumbent Democratic presidential candidate since Jimmy Carter.[91] Obama was reelected for a second and final term, by a similar margin on November 6, 2012.[92] In 2021, Kamala Harris, the daughter of a Jamaican father and Indian mother, became the first woman, the first African American, and the first Asian American to serve as Vice President of the United States.[93][failed verification] In June 2021, Juneteenth, a day which commemorates the end of slavery in the US, became a federal holiday.[94]
DemographicsFurther information: Historical racial and ethnic demographics of the United States § Black population as a percentage of the total population by U.S. region and state (1790?2010), List of U.S. communities with African-American majority populations, List of U.S. counties with African-American majority populations, and List of U.S. states by African-American population
Black Americans (alone) population pyramid in 2020
Proportion of African Americans in each US state, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico as of the 2020 United States Census
Proportion of Black Americans (alone or in combination) in each county of the fifty states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico as of the 2020 United States census
Majority Black American counties in the United States according to the 2020 census
US census map indicating US counties with fewer than 25 Black or African American inhabitants
Graph showing the percentage of the African American population living in the American South, 1790?2010. Note the major declines between 1910 and 1940 and 1940?1970, and the reverse trend post-1970. Nonetheless, the absolute majority of the African American population has always lived in the American South.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 of the country. The vast majority were slaves, with only 488,000 counted as \"freemen\". By 1900, the Black population had doubled and reached 8.8 million.[95]
In 1910, about 90% of African Americans lived in the South. Large numbers began migrating north looking for better job opportunities and living conditions, and to escape Jim Crow laws and racial violence. The Great Migration, as it was called, spanned the 1890s to the 1970s. From 1916 through the 1960s, more than 6 million Black people moved north. But in the 1970s and 1980s, that trend reversed, with more African Americans moving south to the Sun Belt than leaving it.[96]
The African American population in the United States declined over time as a percentage of the total population until 1930, and has been rising since then:
African Americans in the United States[97]Year Number % of totalpopulation % Change(10 yr) Slaves % in slavery1790 757,208 19.3% (highest) ? 697,681 92%1800 1,002,037 18.9% 32.3% 893,602 89%1810 1,377,808 19.0% 37.5% 1,191,362 86%1820 1,771,656 18.4% 28.6% 1,538,022 87%1830 2,328,642 18.1% 31.4% 2,009,043 86%1840 2,873,648 16.8% 23.4% 2,487,355 87%1850 3,638,808 15.7% 26.6% 3,204,287 88%1860 4,441,830 14.1% 22.1% 3,953,731 89%1870 4,880,009 12.7% 9.9% ? ?1880 6,580,793 13.1% 34.9% ? ?1890 7,488,788 11.9% 13.8% ? ?1900 8,833,994 11.6% 18.0% ? ?1910 9,827,763 10.7% 11.2% ? ?1920 10.5 million 9.9% 6.8% ? ?1930 11.9 million 9.7% (lowest) 13% ? ?1940 12.9 million 9.8% 8.4% ? ?1950 15.0 million 10.0% 16% ? ?1960 18.9 million 10.5% 26% ? ?1970 22.6 million 11.1% 20% ? ?1980 26.5 million 11.7% 17% ? ?1990 30.0 million 12.1% 13% ? ?2000 34.6 million 12.3% 15% ? ?2010 38.9 million 12.6% 12% ? ?2020 41.1 million 12.4% 5.6% ? ?By 1990, the African American population reached about 30 million and represented 12% of the US population, roughly the same proportion as in 1900.[98]
African American groups in the USAYears Non-Hispanic Blacks Black Hispanics Total# % # %2020 39,940,338 12.1% 1,163,862 0.3% 41,104,200At the time of the 2000 US census, 54.8% of African Americans lived in the South. In that year, 17.6% of African Americans lived in the Northeast and 18.7% in the Midwest, while only 8.9% lived in the Western states. The west does have a sizable Black population in certain areas, however. California, the nation\'s most populous state, has the fifth largest African American population, only behind New York, Texas, Georgia, and Florida. According to the 2000 census, approximately 2.05% of African Americans identified as Hispanic or Latino in origin,[99] many of whom may be of Brazilian, Puerto Rican, Dominican, Cuban, Haitian, or other Latin American descent. The only self-reported ancestral groups larger than African Americans are the Irish and Germans.[100]Band rehearsal on 125th Street in Harlem, the historic epicenter of African American culture. New York City is home by a significant margin to the world\'s largest Black population of any city outside Africa, at over 2.2 million. African immigration to New York City is now driving the growth of the city\'s Black population.[101]According to the 2010 census, nearly 3% of people who self-identified as Black had recent ancestors who immigrated from another country. Self-reported non-Hispanic Black immigrants from the Caribbean, mostly from Jamaica and Haiti, represented 0.9% of the US population, at 2.6 million.[102] Self-reported Black immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa also represented 0.9%, at about 2.8 million.[102] Additionally, self-identified Black Hispanics represented 0.4% of the United States population, at about 1.2 million people, largely found within the Puerto Rican and Dominican communities.[103] Self-reported Black immigrants hailing from other countries in the Americas, such as Brazil and Canada, as well as several European countries, represented less than 0.1% of the population. Mixed-race Hispanic and non-Hispanic Americans who identified as being part Black, represented 0.9% of the population. Of the 12.6% of United States residents who identified as Black, around 10.3% were \"native Black American\" or ethnic African Americans, who are direct descendants of West/Central Africans brought to the US as slaves. These individuals make up well over 80% of all Blacks in the country. When including people of mixed-race origin, about 13.5% of the US population self-identified as Black or \"mixed with Black\".[104] However, according to the US Census Bureau, evidence from the 2000 census indicates that many African and Caribbean immigrant ethnic groups do not identify as \"Black, African Am., or Negro\". Instead, they wrote in their own respective ethnic groups in the \"Some Other Race\" write-in entry. As a result, the census bureau devised a new, separate \"African American\" ethnic group category in 2010 for ethnic African Americans.[105] Nigerian Americans and Ethiopian Americans were the most reported sub-Saharan African groups in the United States.[106]
In the 2020 census, the African American population was undercounted at an estimated rate of 3.3%, up from 2.1% in 2010.[107]
Proportion in each countyAfrican American (Alone) population distribution over has the largest African American population by state with approximately 4 million.[108] Followed by Texas is Florida, with 3.8 million, and Georgia, with 3.6 million.[109] Mississippi is the state with the highest African American share of the population at 39%. Followed by Mississippi is Louisiana at 34%, and Georgia at 32%.[108]
US citiesFurther information: List of U.S. cities with large Black populations and List of U.S. metropolitan areas with large African-American populationsAfter 100 years of African Americans leaving the south in large numbers seeking better opportunities and treatment in the west and north, a movement known as the Great Migration, there is now a reverse trend, called the New Great Migration. As with the earlier Great Migration, the New Great Migration is primarily directed toward cities and large urban areas, such as Charlotte, Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, Huntsville, Raleigh, Tampa, San Antonio, New Orleans, Memphis, Nashville, Jacksonville, and so forth.[110] A growing percentage of African Americans from the west and north are migrating to the southern region of the US for economic and cultural reasons. In 2020, New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles metropolitan areas had the highest decline in African Americans, while Atlanta, Dallas, and Houston had the highest increase respectively.[111][112] Despite recent declines, as of 2020, the New York City metropolitan area still has the largest African American metropolitan population in the United States and the only to have over 3 million African Americans.[113][114]
Among cities of 100,000 or more, South Fulton, Georgia had the highest percentage of Black residents of any large US city in 2020, with 93%. Other large cities with African American majorities include Jackson, Mississippi (80%), Detroit, Michigan (80%), Birmingham, Alabama (70%), Miami Gardens, Florida (67%), Memphis, Tennessee (63%), Montgomery, Alabama (62%), Baltimore, Maryland (60%), Augusta, Georgia (59%), Shreveport, Louisiana (58%), New Orleans, Louisiana (57%), Macon, Georgia (56%), Baton Rouge, Louisiana (55%), Hampton, Virginia (53%), Newark, New Jersey (53%), Mobile, Alabama (53%), Cleveland, Ohio (52%), and Brockton, Massachusetts (51%).
Claiborne County, Mississippi is the Blackest county in the U.S. at 87% Black in 2020. Cook County, Illinois has the largest Black population in the U.S. with 1,185,601 Black residents in 2020.
The nation\'s most affluent community with an African American majority resides in View Park?Windsor Hills, California, with an annual median household income of $159,618 and median home price of about $1.5 million in 2025.[115][116] Other largely affluent and African American communities include Prince George\'s County (namely Mitchellville, Woodmore, Upper Marlboro) and Charles County in Maryland,[117] DeKalb County (namely Stonecrest, Lithonia, Smoke Rise) and South Fulton in Georgia, Charles City County in Virginia, Baldwin Hills in California, Hillcrest and Uniondale in New York, and Cedar Hill, DeSoto, and Missouri City in Texas. Additionally, there is a significant affluent Black presence in the southern Chicago suburbs of Cook County, Illinois. A report from the National Association of Real Estate Brokers (NAREB) indicated that 5 of the top 10 municipalities nationwide (with at least 500 Black households) registering the highest Black homeownership rates were in this area - including Olympia Fields, South Holland, Flossmoor, Matteson, and Lynwood.[118] In 2006, Queens County, New York was the only county with a population of 65,000 or more where African Americans had a higher median household income than White Americans.[119]
Seatack, Virginia is currently the oldest African American community in the United States.[120] It survives today with a vibrant and active civic community.[121]
EducationMain article: History of African-American education
Former slave reading, 1870During slavery, anti-literacy laws were enacted in the US that prohibited education for Black people. Slave owners saw literacy as a threat to the institution of slavery. As a North Carolina statute stated, \"Teaching slaves to read and write, tends to excite dissatisfaction in their minds, and to produce insurrection and rebellion.\"[122]
When slavery was finally abolished in 1865, public educational systems were expanding across the country. By 1870, around seventy-four institutions in the south provided a form of advanced education for African American students. By 1900, over a hundred programs at these schools provided training for Black professionals, including teachers. Many of the students at Fisk University, including the young W. E. B. Du Bois, taught school during the summers to support their studies.[123]
African Americans were very concerned to provide quality education for their children, but White supremacy limited their ability to participate in educational policymaking on the political level. State governments soon moved to undermine their citizenship by restricting their right to vote. By the late 1870s, Blacks were disenfranchised and segregated across the American South.[124] White politicians in Mississippi and other states withheld financial resources and supplies from Black schools. Nevertheless, the presence of Black teachers, and their engagement with their communities both inside and outside the classroom, ensured that Black students had access to education despite these external constraints.[125][126]
During World War II, demands for unity and racial tolerance on the home front provided an opening for the first Black history curriculum in the country.[127] For example, during the early 1940s, Madeline Morgan, a Black teacher in the Chicago public schools, created a curriculum for students in grades one through eight highlighting the contributions of Black people to the history of the United States. At the close of the war, Chicago\'s Board of Education downgraded the curriculum\'s status from mandatory to optional.[128]
Predominantly Black schools for kindergarten through twelfth grade students were common throughout the US before the 1970s. By 1972, however, desegregation efforts meant that only 25% of Black students were in schools with more than 90% non-White students. However, since then, a trend towards re-segregation affected communities across the country: by 2011, 2.9 million African American students were in such overwhelmingly minority schools, including 53% of Black students in school districts that were formerly under desegregation orders.[129][130]
As late as 1947, about one third of African Americans over 65 were considered to lack the literacy to read and write their own names. By 1969, illiteracy as it had been traditionally defined, had been largely eradicated among younger African Americans.[131]Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson is director of New York City\'s Hayden Planetarium.Between 1995 and 2009, freshmen college enrollment for African Americans increased by 73 percent and only 15 percent for Whites.[132] Black women are enrolled in college more than any other race and gender group, leading all with 9.7% enrolled according to the 2011 US census.[133][134] The average high school graduation rate of Blacks in the United States has steadily increased to 71% in 2013.[135] Separating this statistic into component parts shows it varies greatly depending upon the state and the school district examined. 38% of Black males graduated in the state of New York but in Maine 97% graduated and exceeded the White male graduation rate by 11 percentage points.[136] In much of the southeastern United States and some parts of the southwestern United States the graduation rate of White males was in fact below 70% such as in Florida where 62% of White males graduated from high school. Examining specific school districts paints an even more complex picture. In the Detroit school district, the graduation rate of Black males was 20% but 7% for White males. In the New York City school district 28% of Black males graduate from high school compared to 57% of White males. In Newark County[where?] 76% of Black males graduated compared to 67% for White males. Further academic improvement has occurred in 2015. Roughly 23% of all Blacks have bachelor\'s degrees. In 1988, 21% of Whites had obtained a bachelor\'s degree versus 11% of Blacks. In 2015, 23% of Blacks had obtained a bachelor\'s degree versus 36% of Whites.[137] Foreign born Blacks, 9% of the Black population, made even greater strides. They exceed native born Blacks by 10 percentage points.[137]
College Board, which runs the official college-level advanced placement (AP) programs in American high schools, have has received criticism in recent years that its curricula have focused too much on Euro-centric history.[138] In 2020, College Board reshaped some curricula among history-based courses to further reflect the African diaspora.[139] In 2021, College Board announced it would be piloting an AP African American Studies course between 2022 and 2024. The course officially launched in August 2024.[140][141]
In June 2023, the Supreme Court ended race-based affirmative action at American colleges and universities. This landmark Supreme Court decision is widely believed to contribute to a decline in African American enrollment at the nation\'s most selective and prominent colleges and universities, where African American applicants often have, on average, lower standardized test scores and GPAs compared to the overall applicant pool. In response, many of the nation\'s most popular historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) have reported a significant surge in applications and to a 2025 study, African Americans have the highest average student debt. African Americans with bachelor\'s degrees owe an average of $52,726 in student loans. Nearly 70% of African Americans took out a loan to fund their undergraduate education.[146]
Historically Black colleges and universitiesMain articles: Historically black colleges and universities, List of historically black colleges and universities, and African American student access to medical schoolsHistorically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), which were founded when segregated institutions of higher learning did not admit African Americans, continue to thrive and educate students of all races today. There are 107 HBCUs representing three percent of the nation\'s colleges and universities with the majority established in the Southeast.[147][148] HBCUs have been largely responsible for establishing and expanding the African American middle-class by providing more career opportunities for African Americans.[149][150]
Economic statusFurther information: Black-owned businessThe economic disparity between the races in the US has marginally improved since the end of slavery. In 1863, two years prior to emancipation, Black people owned 0.5 percent of the national wealth, while in 2019 it is just over 1.5 percent.[151] Racial disparity in poverty rates has narrowed since the civil rights era, with the poverty rate among African Americans decreasing from 24.7% in 2004 to 18.8% in 2020, compared to 10.5% for all Americans.[152][153] Poverty is associated with higher rates of marital stress and dissolution, physical and mental health problems, disability, cognitive deficits, low educational attainment, and crime.[154]
African Americans have a long and diverse history of business ownership. Although the first African American business is unknown, slaves captured from West Africa are believed to have established commercial enterprises as peddlers and skilled craftspeople as far back as the 17th century. Around 1900, Booker T. Washington became the most famous proponent of African American businesses. His critic and rival W. E. B. DuBois also commended business as a vehicle for African American advancement.[155]This graph shows the real median US household income by race: 1967 to 2011, in 2011 dollars.[156]African Americans had a combined buying power of over $1.6 trillion as of 2021, a 171% increase of their buying power in 2000 but lagging significantly in growth behind American Latinos and Asians in the same timer period (with 288% and 383%, respectively; for reference, US growth overall was 144% in the same period); however, African American net worth had shrunk 14% in the previous year despite strong growth in property prices and the S&P 500. In 2002, African American-owned businesses accounted for 1.2 million of the US\'s 23 million businesses.[157] As of 2011, African American-owned businesses account for approximately 2 million US businesses.[158] Black-owned businesses experienced the largest growth in number of businesses among minorities from 2002 to 2011.[158]
Twenty-five percent of Blacks had white-collar occupations (management, professional, and related fields) in 2000, compared with 33.6% of Americans overall.[159][160] In 2001, over half of African American households of married couples earned $50,000 or more.[160] Although in the same year African Americans were over-represented among the nation\'s poor, this was directly related to the disproportionate percentage of African American families headed by single women; such families are collectively poorer, regardless of ethnicity.[160]
In 2006, the median earnings of African American men was more than Black and non-Black American women overall, and in all educational levels.[161][162][163][164][165] At the same time, among American men, income disparities were significant; the median income of African American men was approximately 76 cents for every dollar of their European American counterparts, although the gap narrowed somewhat with a rise in educational level.[161][166]
Overall, the median earnings of African American men were 72 cents for every dollar earned of their Asian American counterparts, and $1.17 for every dollar earned by Hispanic men.[161][164][167] On the other hand, by 2006, among American women with post-secondary education, African American women have made significant advances; the median income of African American women was more than those of their Asian-, European- and Hispanic American counterparts with at least some college education.[162][163][168]
The US public sector is the single most important source of employment for African Americans.[169] During 2008?2010, 21.2% of all Black workers were public employees, compared with 16.3% of non-Black workers.[169] Both before and after the onset of the Great Recession, African Americans were 30% more likely than other workers to be employed in the public sector.[169] The public sector is also a critical source of decent-paying jobs for Black Americans. For both men and women, the median wage earned by Black employees is significantly higher in the public sector than in other industries.[169]
In 1999, the median income of African American families was $33,255 compared to $53,356 of European Americans. In times of economic hardship for the nation, African Americans suffer disproportionately from job loss and underemployment, with the Black underclass being hardest hit. The phrase \"last hired and first fired\" is reflected in the Bureau of Labor Statistics unemployment figures. Nationwide, the October 2008 unemployment rate for African Americans was 11.1%,[170] while the nationwide rate was 6.5%.[171] In 2007, the average income for African Americans was approximately $34,000, compared to $55,000 for Whites.[172] African Americans experience a higher rate of unemployment than the general population.[173]
The income gap between Black and White families is also significant. In 2005, employed Blacks earned 65% of the wages of Whites, down from 82% in 1975.[152] The New York Times reported in 2006 that in Queens, New York, the median income among African American families exceeded that of White families, which the newspaper attributed to the growth in the number of two-parent Black families. It noted that Queens was the only county with more than 65,000 residents where that was true.[119] In 2011, it was reported that 72% of Black babies were born to unwed mothers.[174] The poverty rate among single-parent Black families was 39.5% in 2005, according to Walter E. Williams, while it was 9.9% among married-couple Black families. Among White families, the respective rates were 26.4% and 6% in poverty.[175]
Collectively, African Americans are more involved in the American political process than other minority groups in the United States, indicated by the highest level of voter registration and participation in elections among these groups in 2004.[176] African Americans also have the highest level of Congressional representation of any minority group in the US.[177]
African American homeownership
The US homeownership rate according to race[178]Homeownership in the US is the strongest indicator of financial stability and the primary asset most Americans use to generate wealth. African Americans continue to lag behind other racial groups in homeownership.[179] In the first quarter of 2021, 45.1% of African Americans owned their homes, compared to 65.3% of all Americans.[180] The African American homeownership rate has remained relatively flat since the 1970s despite an increase in anti-discrimination housing laws and protections.[181] The African American homeownership rate peaked in 2004 at 49.7%.[182]
The average White high school drop-out still has a slightly better chance of owning a home than the average African American college graduate usually due to unfavorable debt-to-income ratios or credit scores among most African American college graduates.[183][184] Since 2000, fast-growing housing costs in most cities have made it even more difficult for the US African American homeownership rate to significantly grow and reach over 50% for the first time in history. From 2000 to 2022, the median home price in the US grew 160%, outpacing average annual household income growth in that same period, which only grew about 30%.[185][186][187] South Carolina is the state with the most African American homeownership, with about 55% of African Americans owning their own homes.[188][189]
Black people, who make up 12% of the total U.S. population, make up 32% of all people experiencing homelessness, according to the data.[190]
PoliticsYear Candidate ofthe plurality Politicalparty % ofBlackvote Result1980 Jimmy Carter Democratic 83% Lost1984 Walter Mondale Democratic 91% Lost1988 Michael Dukakis Democratic 89% Lost1992 Bill Clinton Democratic 83% Won1996 Bill Clinton Democratic 84% Won2000 Al Gore Democratic 90% Lost2004 John Kerry Democratic 88% Lost2008 Barack Obama Democratic 95% Won2012 Barack Obama Democratic 93% Won2016 Hillary Clinton Democratic 88% Lost2020 Joe offeren Democratic 87% Won2024 Kamala Harris Democratic 85% LostSince the mid 20th century, a large majority of African Americans support the Democratic Party. In the 2024 Presidential election, 86% of African American voters supported Democrat Kamala Harris, while 13% supported Republican Donald Trump.[191] Although there is an African American lobby in foreign policy, it has not had the impact that African American organizations have had in domestic policy.[192]
Many African Americans were excluded from electoral politics in the decades following the end of Reconstruction. For those that could participate, until the New Deal, African Americans were supporters of the Republican Party because it was Republican President Abraham Lincoln who helped in granting freedom to American slaves; at the time, the Republicans and Democrats represented the sectional interests of the North and South, respectively, rather than any specific ideology, and both conservative and liberal were represented equally in both parties.
The African American trend of voting for Democrats can be traced back to the 1930s during the Great Depression, when Franklin D. Roosevelt\'s New Deal program provided economic relief to African Americans. Roosevelt\'s New Deal coalition turned the Democratic Party into an organization of the working class and their liberal allies, regardless of region. The African American vote became even more solidly Democratic when Democratic presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson pushed for civil rights legislation during the 1960s. In 1960, nearly a third of African Americans voted for Republican Richard Nixon.[193]
Conservatism has been growing among African Americans, particularly since the 2020 Presidential election. In the 2024 election, Trump secured a slightly larger share of the African American vote compared to his 2020 performance.[194][195][196]
Black national anthem
\"Lift Every Voice and Sing\" being sung by the family of Barack Obama, Smokey Robinson and others in the White House in 2014\"Lift Every Voice and Sing\" is often referred to as the Black national anthem in the United States.[197] In 1919, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) had dubbed it the \"Negro national anthem\" for its power in voicing a cry for liberation and affirmation for African-American people.[198]
ReligionReligious affiliation of African Americans in 2007[199]Black Protestant (59.0%)Evangelical Protestant (15.0%)Mainline Protestant (4.00%)Roman Catholic (5.00%)Jehovah\'s Witness (1.00%)Other Christian (1.00%)Muslim (1.00%)Other religion (1.00%)Unaffiliated (11.0%)Atheist or agnostic (2.00%)Main article: Religion of Black AmericansFurther information: Black church, Hoodoo (folk magic), and Louisiana Voodoo
Mount Zion United Methodist Church is the oldest African American congregation in Washington, D.C.
Masjid Malcolm Shabazz in Harlem, New York CityThe majority of African Americans are Protestant, many of whom follow the historically Black churches.[200] The term Black church refers to churches which minister to predominantly African American congregations. Black congregations were first established by freed slaves at the end of the 17th century, and later when slavery was abolished more African Americans were allowed to create a unique form of Christianity that was culturally influenced by African spiritual traditions.[201] One of these early African American Christian cultural traditions in the Black Church is the Watchnight service, also called Freedom\'s Eve, where African American congregations all over the nation come together on New Year\'s Eve through New Years morning in remembrance of the eve and New Year of their emancipation, sharing testimonies, being baptized and partaking in praise and worship.[202]
According to a 2007 survey, more than half of the African American population are part of the historically Black churches.[203] The largest Protestant denomination among African Americans are the Baptists,[204] distributed mainly in four denominations, the largest being the National Baptist Convention, USA and the National Baptist Convention of America.[205] The second largest are the Methodists,[206] the largest denominations are the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church.[205][207]
Pentecostals are distributed among several different religious bodies, with the Church of God in Christ as the largest among them by far.[205] About 16% of African American Christians are members of White Protestant communions,[206] these denominations (which include the United Church of Christ) mostly have a 2 to 3% African American membership.[208] There are also large numbers of Catholics, constituting 5% of the African American population.[203] Of the total number of Jehovah\'s Witnesses, 22% are Black.[200]
Some African Americans follow Islam. Historically, between 15 and 30% of enslaved Africans brought to the Americas were Muslims, but most of these Africans were converted to Christianity during the era of American slavery.[209] During the twentieth century, some African Americans converted to Islam, mainly through the influence of Black nationalist groups that preached with distinctive Islamic practices; including the Moorish Science Temple of America, and the largest organization, the Nation of Islam, founded in the 1930s, which attracted at least 20,000 people by 1963.[210][211] Prominent members included activist Malcolm X and boxer Muhammad Ali.[212]Muhammad Ali converted to Islam in 1964.Malcolm X is considered the first person to start the movement among African Americans towards mainstream Islam, after he left the Nation and made the pilgrimage to Mecca.[213] In 1975, Warith Deen Mohammed, the son of Elijah Muhammad took control of the Nation after his father\'s death and guided the majority of its members to orthodox Islam.[214]
African American Muslims constitute 20% of the total US Muslim population,[215] the majority are Sunni or orthodox Muslims, some of these identify under the community of W. Deen Mohammed.[216][217] The Nation of Islam led by Louis Farrakhan has a membership ranging from 20,000 to 50,000 members.[218]
There is also a small but growing group of African American Jews, making up less than 0.5% of African Americans or about 2% of the Jewish population in the United States. The majority of African-American Jews are Ashkenazi, while smaller numbers identify as Sephardi, Mizrahi, or other.[219][220][221] Many African-American Jews are affiliated with denominations such as the Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist, or Orthodox branches of Judaism, but the majority identify as \"Jews of no religion\", commonly known as secular Jews. A significant number of people who identify themselves as \"Black Jews\" are affiliated with syncretic religious groups, largely the Black Hebrew Israelites, whose beliefs include the claim that African Americans are descended from the Biblical Israelites.[222] Jews of all races typically do not accept Black Hebrew Israelites as Jews, in part because they are usually not Jewish according to Jewish law,[223] and in part because these groups are sometimes associated with antisemitism.[224][225] African-American Jews have criticized the Black Hebrew Israelites, regarding the movement as primarily composed of Black non-Jews who have appropriated Black-Jewish identity.[226]
Confirmed atheists are less than one half of one percent, similar to numbers for also: African-American LGBT communityAccording to a Gallup survey, 4.6% of Black or African Americans self-identified as LGBT in 2016,[230] while the total portion of American adults in all ethnic groups identifying as LGBT was 4.1% in 2016.[230] African Americans are more likely to identify themselves as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender than any other racial or ethnic group in the United States.[231]
HealthFurther information: Race and health in the United States § African AmericansSee also: Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on black people § United StatesGeneral healthSee also: Alzheimer\'s disease in African AmericansThe life expectancy for Black men in 2008 was 70.8 years.[232] Life expectancy for Black women was 77.5 years in 2008.[232] In 1900, when information on Black life expectancy started being collated, a Black man could expect to live to 32.5 years and a Black woman 33.5 years.[232] In 1900, White men lived an average of 46.3 years and White women lived an average of 48.3 years.[232] African American life expectancy at birth is persistently five to seven years lower than European Americans.[233] Black men have shorter lifespans than any other group in the US besides Native American men.[234]
Black people have higher rates of obesity, diabetes, and hypertension than the US average.[232] For adult Black men, the rate of obesity was 31.6% in 2010.[235] For adult Black women, the rate of obesity was 41.2% in 2010.[235] African Americans have higher rates of mortality than any other racial or ethnic group for 8 of the top 10 causes of death.[236] In 2013, among men, Black men had the highest rate of getting cancer, followed by White, Hispanic, Asian/Pacific Islander (A/PI), and American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) men. Among women, White women had the highest rate of getting cancer, followed by Black, Hispanic, Asian/Pacific Islander, and American Indian/Alaska Native women.[237] African Americans also have higher prevalence and incidence of Alzheimer\'s disease compared to the overall average.[238][239]
Black women lead the nation in abortions. According to a 2022 report, Black women made up 40% of abortions despite making up 13% of the U.S. woman population.[240][241] African-Americans are more likely than White Americans to die due to health-related problems developed by alcoholism. Alcohol abuse is the main contributor to the top 3 causes of death among African Americans.[242]
In December 2020, African Americans were less likely to be vaccinated against COVID-19 due to mistrust in the US medical system. From 2021 to 2022, there was an increase in African Americans who became vaccinated.[243][244][245] Still, in 2022, COVID-19 complications became the third leading cause of death for African Americans.[246]
Violence is a major problem within the African American community.[247][248] A report from the US Department of Justice states \"In 2005, homicide victimization rates for Blacks were 6 times higher than the rates for Whites\".[249] The report also found that \"94% of Black victims were killed by Blacks.\"[249] Of the nearly 20,000 recorded US homicides in 2022, African Americans made up the majority of offenders and victims despite making up less than 15% of the population.[250] In 2024, all of the top 5 most dangerous US cities have a significant Black population and highly concerning Black-on-Black violent crime rate.[251] Black males age 15?44 are the only race/sex category for which homicide is a top 5 cause of death.[234] Black women are 3 times more likely to be killed by an intimate partner than White women.[247] Black children are 3 times more likely to die due to parental abuse and neglect than White children.[252]
Sexual healthAccording to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, African Americans have higher rates of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) compared to Whites, with 5 times the rates of syphilis and chlamydia, and 7.5 times the rate of gonorrhea.[253]
The disproportionately high incidence of HIV/AIDS among African Americans has been attributed to homophobic influences, lack of condom usage, and lack of proper healthcare.[254] The prevalence of HIV/AIDS among Black men is seven times higher than the prevalence for White men, and Black men are more than nine times as likely to die from HIV/AIDS-related illness than White men.[234] The prevalence of HIV/AIDS among Black women is 20 times higher than White women, and Black women are more than 15 times as likely to die from HIV/AIDS-related illness than White women.[255][256]
Mental healthAfrican Americans have several barriers for accessing mental health services. Counseling has been frowned upon and distant in utility and proximity to many people in the African American community. In 2004, a qualitative research study explored the disconnect with African Americans and mental health. The study was conducted as a semi-structured discussion which allowed the focus group to express their opinions and life experiences. The results revealed a couple key variables that create barriers for many African American communities to seek mental health services such as the stigma, lack of four important necessities; trust, affordability, cultural understanding and impersonal services.[257]
Historically, many African American communities did not seek counseling because religion was a part of the family values.[258] African American who have a faith background are more likely to seek prayer as a coping mechanism for mental issues rather than seeking professional mental health services.[257] In 2015 a study concluded, African Americans with high value in religion are less likely to utilize mental health services compared to those who have low value in religion.[259]
In the United States, counseling approaches are based on the experience of White Americans and do not fit within the African American culture. African American families tend to resolve concerns within the family, and it is viewed by the family as a strength. On the other hand, when African Americans seek counseling, they face a social backlash and are criticized. They may be labeled \"crazy\", viewed as weak, and their pride is diminished.[257] Because of this, many African Americans instead seek mentorship within communities they trust.
Terminology is another barrier in relation to African Americans and mental health. There is more stigma on the term psychotherapy versus counseling. In one study, psychotherapy is associated with mental illness whereas counseling approaches problem-solving, guidance and help.[257] More African Americans seek assistance when it is called counseling and not psychotherapy because it is more welcoming within the cultural and community.[260] Counselors are encouraged to be aware of such barriers for the well-being of African American clients. Without cultural competency training in health care, many African Americans go unheard and misunderstood.[257]
In 2021, African Americans had the third highest suicide rate trailing American Indians/Alaska Natives and White Americans. However, African Americans had the second highest increase of its suicide rate from 2011 to 2021, growing 58%.[261] As of 2024, suicide is the second leading cause of death among African-Americans between the ages of 15 and 24, with Black men being four times more likely to kill themselves than Black women.[262]
GeneticsSee also: Genetic history of the African diasporaGenome-wide studies
Genetic clustering of 128 African Americans, by Zakharia et al. (2009). Each vertical bar represents an individual. The color scheme of the bar plot matches that in the PCA plot.[263]Recent studies of African Americans using genetic testing have found ancestry to vary by region and sex of ancestors. These studies found that on average, African Americans have 73.2?82.1% Sub-Saharan African, 16.7?24% European, and 0.8?1.2% Native American genetic ancestry, with large variation between individuals.[264][265][266] Commercial testing services have reported similar variation, with ranges from 0.6 to 2 percent Native American, 19 to 29 percent European, and 65 to 80 percent Sub-Saharan African ancestry.[267]
According to a genome-wide study by Bryc et al. (2009), the mixed ancestry of African Americans in varying ratios came about as the result of sexual contact between West/Central Africans (more frequently females) and Europeans (more frequently males). This can be understood as being the result of enslaved African American females being raped by White males.[268] Consequently, the 365 African Americans in their sample have a genome-wide average of 78.1% West African ancestry and 18.5% European ancestry, with large variation among individuals (ranging from 99% to 1% West African ancestry). The West African ancestral component in African Americans is most similar to that in present-day speakers from the non-Bantu branches of the Niger-Congo family.[264][note 2]
Correspondingly, Montinaro et al. (2014) observed that around 50% of the overall ancestry of African Americans traces comes from a population similar to the Niger-Congo-speaking Yoruba of southern Nigeria and southern Benin, reflecting the centrality of this West African region in the Atlantic slave trade. The next most frequent ancestral component found among African Americans was derived from Great Britain, in keeping with historical records. It constitutes a little over 10% of their overall ancestry and is most similar to the Northwest European ancestral component also carried by Barbadians.[270] Zakharia et al. (2009) found a similar proportion of Yoruba-like ancestry in their African American samples, with a minority also drawn from Mandenka and Bantu populations. Additionally, the researchers observed an average European ancestry of 21.9%, again with significant variation between individuals.[263] Bryc et al. (2009) note that populations from other parts of the continent may also constitute adequate proxies for the ancestors of some African American individuals; namely, ancestral populations from Guinea Bissau, Senegal and Sierra Leone in West Africa and Angola in Southern Africa.[264] An individual African American person can have over fifteen African ethnic groups in their genetic makeup alone due to the slave trade covering such vast areas.[271]
Altogether, genetic studies suggest that African Americans are a genetically diverse people. According to DNA analysis led in 2006 by Penn State geneticist Mark D. Shriver, around 58 percent of African Americans have at least 12.5% European ancestry (equivalent to one European great-grandparent and their forebears), 19.6 percent of African Americans have at least 25% European ancestry (equivalent to one European grandparent and their forebears), and 1 percent of African Americans have at least 50% European ancestry (equivalent to one European parent and their forebears).[272][273] According to Shriver, around 5 percent of African Americans also have at least 12.5% Native American ancestry (equivalent to one Native American great-grandparent and their forebears).[274][275] Research suggests that Native American ancestry among people who identify as African American is a result of relationships that occurred soon after slave ships arrived in the American colonies, and European ancestry is of more recent origin, often from the decades before the Civil War.[276]
Y-DNAAfricans bearing the E-V38 (E1b1a) likely traversed across the Sahara, from east to west, approximately 19,000 years ago.[277] E-M2 (E1b1a1) likely originated in West Africa or Central Africa.[278] According to a Y-DNA study by Sims et al. (2007), the majority (?60%) of African Americans belong to various subclades of the E-M2 (E1b1a1, formerly E3a) paternal haplogroup. This is the most common genetic paternal lineage found today among West/Central African males and is also a signature of the historical Bantu migrations. The next most frequent Y-DNA haplogroup observed among African Americans is the R1b clade, which around 15% of African Americans carry. This lineage is most common today among Northwestern European males. The remaining African Americans mainly belong to the paternal haplogroup I (?7%), which is also frequent in Northwestern Europe.[279]
mtDNAAccording to an mtDNA study by Salas et al. (2005), the maternal lineages of African Americans are most similar to haplogroups that are today especially common in West Africa (>55%), followed closely by West-Central Africa and Southwestern Africa (<41%). The characteristic West African haplogroups L1b, L2b,c,d, and L3b,d and West-Central African haplogroups L1c and L3e in particular occur at high frequencies among African Americans. As with the paternal DNA of African Americans, contributions from other parts of the continent to their maternal gene pool are insignificant.[280]
Racism and social statusSee also: Income inequality in the United StatesFormal political, economic and social discrimination against minorities has been present throughout American history. Leland T. Saito, Associate Professor of Sociology and American Studies & Ethnicity at the University of Southern California, writes, \"Political rights have been circumscribed by race, class and gender since the founding of the United States, when the right to vote was restricted to White men of property. Throughout the history of the United States, race has been used by Whites for legitimizing and creating difference and social, economic and political exclusion.\"[65]
Those who economically gained the most from slavery were the planter class, owners of large-scale plantations where large numbers of enslaved Africans were held captive and forced to produce crops to create wealth for a White elite.[281] Having a prominent role in politics with eight presidents owning slaves while in office, upon the end of the Civil War the planter class kept control of their land and remained politically influential, with the London School of Economics stating, \"this persistence in \"de facto power\" in turn allowed them to block economic reforms, disenfranchise Black voters, and restrict the mobility of workers.\"[282]
Although they have gained a greater degree of social equality since the civil rights movement, African Americans have remained stagnant economically, which has hindered their ability to break into the middle class and beyond. As of 2020, the racial wealth gap between Whites and Blacks remains as large as it was in 1968, with the typical net worth of a White household equivalent to that of 11.5 Black households.[283] Despite this, African Americans have increased employment rates and gained representation in the highest levels of American government in the post?civil rights era.[284] However, widespread racism remains an issue that continues to undermine the development of social status.[284][285]
Economically, of all the racially Black ethnic groups on the globe, African Americans are the wealthiest and most successful, with one in every fifty African American families being millionaires.[286] This equates in 2023 to approximately 1.79 million African American millionaires in the United States,[287][288] which is more than the number of millionaires in any racially Black country, and many other countries, around the world.
Policing and criminal justiceSee also: Race and crime in the United States and Racial profiling in the United StatesIn the US, which has the largest per-capita prison population in the world, African Americans are overrepresented as the second largest population of prison inmates (38%) in 2023, coming second to Whites who made up 57% of the prison population.[289] According to the National Registry of Exonerations, Blacks are roughly 7.5 times more likely to be wrongfully convicted of murder in the US than Whites.[290] In 2012, the New York City Police Department detained people more than 500,000 times under the city\'s stop-and-frisk law. Of the total detained, 55% were African-Americans, while Black people made up 20% of the city\'s population.[291]Al Sharpton led the Commitment March: Get Your Knee Off Our Necks protest on August 28, 2020.African American males are more likely to be killed by police when compared to other races.[292] This is one of the factors that led to the creation of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2013.[293] A historical issue in the US where women have weaponized their White privilege in the country by reporting on Black people, often instigating racial violence,[294][295] difficult White women?who have been given a different name over the centuries by African Americans?calling the police on Black people became widely publicized in 2020.[296][297] According to The Guardian, \"The specter of Karen persisted as Black Lives Matter protests and civil unrest spread around the country following Floyd\'s murder and reckonings with racism began to roil institutions, toppling careers as well as statues\".[298]
In the aftermath of the peak Black Lives Matter protests and widespread police reform efforts in the early 2020s, crime rates surged across the nation, especially in predominantly Black neighborhoods. Many cities experienced near-record or record levels of violence and other criminal activity. As a result, numerous municipalities scaled back police reform initiatives and increased funding for law enforcement.[299][300][301]
Social issuesAfter over 50 years, marriage rates for all Americans began to decline while divorce rates and out-of-wedlock births have climbed.[302] These changes have been greatest among African Americans. After more than 70 years of racial parity Black marriage rates began to fall behind Whites.[302] Single-parent households have become common, and according to US census figures released in January 2010, only 38 percent of Black children live with both their parents.[303] In 2021, statistics show that over 80 percent marriages in the African American ethnic group marry within their ethnic group.[304]Although the ban on interracial marriage ended in California in 1948, entertainer Sammy Davis Jr. faced a backlash for his involvement with a White woman in 1957.The first ever anti-miscegenation law was passed by the Maryland General Assembly in 1691, criminalizing interracial marriage.[305] In a speech in Charleston, Illinois in 1858, Abraham Lincoln stated, \"I am not, nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people\".[306] By the late 1800s, 38 US states had anti-miscegenation statutes.[305] By 1924, the ban on interracial marriage was still in force in 29 states.[305] While interracial marriage had been legal in California since 1948, in 1957 actor Sammy Davis Jr. faced a backlash for his involvement with White actress Kim Novak.[307] Harry Cohn, the president of Columbia Pictures, with whom Novak was under contract, gave in to his concerns that a racist backlash against the relationship could hurt the studio.[307] Davis briefly married Black dancer Loray White in 1958 to protect himself from mob violence.[307] Inebriated at the wedding ceremony, Davis despairingly said to his best friend, Arthur Silber Jr., \"Why won\'t they let me live my life?\" The couple never lived together, and commenced divorce proceedings in September 1958.[307] In 1958, officers in Virginia entered the home of Mildred and Richard Loving and dragged them out of bed for living together as an interracial couple, on the basis that \"any white person intermarry with a colored person\"?or vice versa?each party \"shall be guilty of a felony\" and face prison terms of five years.[305] In 1967 the law was ruled unconstitutional (via the 14th Amendment adopted in 1868) by the US Supreme Court in Loving v. Virginia.[305]
In 2008, Democrats overwhelmingly voted 70% against California Proposition 8, African Americans voted 58% in favor of it while 42% voted against Proposition 8.[308] On May 9, 2012, Barack Obama, the first Black president, became the first US president to support same-sex marriage. Since Obama\'s endorsement there has been a rapid growth in support for same-sex marriage among African Americans. As of 2012, 59% of African Americans support same-sex marriage, which is higher than support among the national average (53%) and White Americans (50%).[309]
Polls in North Carolina,[310] Pennsylvania,[311] Missouri,[312] Maryland,[313] Ohio,[314] Florida,[315] and Nevada[316] have also shown an increase in support for same sex marriage among African Americans. On November 6, 2012, Maryland, Maine, and Washington all voted for approve of same-sex marriage, along with Minnesota rejecting a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. Exit polls in Maryland show about 50% of African Americans voted for same-sex marriage, showing a vast evolution among African Americans on the issue and was crucial in helping pass same-sex marriage in Maryland.[317]
Black Americans hold far more conservative opinions on abortion, extramarital sex, and raising children out of wedlock than Democrats as a whole.[318] On financial issues, however, African Americans are in line with Democrats, generally supporting a more progressive tax structure to provide more government spending on social services.[319]
Political legacy
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. remains the most prominent political leader in the American civil rights movement and perhaps the most influential African American political figure in general.African Americans have fought in every war in the history of the United States.[320]
The gains made by African Americans in the civil rights movement and in the Black Power movement not only obtained certain rights for African Americans but changed American society in far-reaching and fundamentally important ways. Prior to the 1950s, Black Americans in the South were subject to de jure discrimination, or Jim Crow laws. They were often the victims of extreme cruelty and violence, sometimes resulting in deaths: by the post World War II era, African Americans became increasingly discontented with their long-standing inequality. In the words of Martin Luther King Jr., African Americans and their supporters challenged the nation to \"rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed that all men are created equal ...\"[321]
The civil rights movement marked an enormous change in American social, political, economic and civic life. It brought with it boycotts, sit-ins, nonviolent demonstrations and marches, court battles, bombings and other violence; prompted worldwide media coverage and intense public debate; forged enduring civic, economic and religious alliances; and disrupted and realigned the nation\'s two major political parties.
Over time, it has changed in fundamental ways the manner in which Blacks and Whites interact with and relate to one another. The movement resulted in the removal of codified, de jure racial segregation and discrimination from American life and law, and heavily influenced other groups and movements in struggles for civil rights and social equality within American society, including the Free Speech Movement, the disabled, the women\'s movement, and migrant workers. It also inspired the Native American rights movement, and in King\'s 1964 book Why We Can\'t Wait he wrote the US \"was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race.\"[322][323]
Media and coverageSee also: Representation of African Americans in media and African-American newspapers
BET founder Robert L. Johnson with former US President George W. BushSome activists and academics contend that American news media coverage of African American news, concerns, or dilemmas is inadequate,[324][325][326] or that the news media present distorted images of African Americans.[327]
To combat this, Robert L. Johnson founded Black Entertainment Television (BET), a network that targets young African Americans and urban audiences in the United States. Over the years, the network has aired such programming as rap and R&B music videos, urban-oriented movies and television series, and some public affairs programs. On Sunday mornings, BET would broadcast Christian programming; the network would also broadcast non-affiliated Christian programs during the early morning hours daily. According to Viacom, BET is now a global network that reaches households in the United States, Caribbean, Canada, and the United Kingdom.[328] The network has gone on to spawn several spin-off channels, including BET Her (originally launched as BET on Jazz).[329]
Another network targeting African Americans is TV One. TV One is owned by Urban One, founded and controlled by Catherine Hughes. Urban One is one of the nation\'s largest radio broadcasting companies and the largest African American-owned radio broadcasting company in the United States.[330]
In June 2009, NBC News launched a new website named TheGrio.[331] It is the first African American video news site that focuses on underrepresented stories in existing national news.[332]
Black-owned and oriented media outletsThe Africa Channel ? Dedicated to programming about African culture.aspireTV ? a digital cable and satellite channel owned by businessman and former basketball player Magic Johnson.ATTV ? an independent public affairs and educational channel.BET Media Group ? The most prominent multimedia outlet targeting Afro-Americans.BETBET HerVH1 ? Originally a MTV spin-off focused on light genres of music, the network\'s programming became slanted towards African American culture during the 2010s.[333]Bounce TV ? a digital multicast network owned by the E. W. Scripps Company.Fox Soul ? a digital television and streaming network primarily airing original talk shows and syndicated programmingOprah Winfrey Network ? a cable and satellite network founded by Oprah Winfrey and jointly owned by Warner Bros. Discovery and Harpo Studios. While not exclusively targeting African Americans, much of its original programming is geared towards a similar demographic.Revolt ? a music channel and media company founded by Sean \"Puff Daddy\" Combs.Soul of the South Network ? a regional broadcast network.TheGrio ? a digital multicast network focused on news and opinion-based programming.TV One ? a general entertainment network targeting adults.Cleo TV ? a sister network targeting millennial and Generation X womenWe TV ? Owned by AMC Networks, became slanted towards Black women during the 2010sCultureFurther information: African-American cultureSee also: African-American art
A traditional soul food dinner consisting of fried chicken with macaroni and cheese, collard greens, breaded fried okra, and cornbreadFrom their earliest presence in North America, African Americans have significantly contributed literature, art, agricultural skills, cuisine, clothing styles, music, language, and social and technological innovation to American culture. The cultivation and use of many agricultural products in the United States, such as yams, peanuts, rice, okra, sorghum, grits, watermelon, indigo dyes, and cotton, can be traced to West African and African American influences. Notable examples include George Washington Carver, who created nearly 500 products from peanuts, sweet potatoes, and pecans.[334] Soul food is a variety of cuisine popular among African Americans. It is closely related to the cuisine of the Southern United States. The descriptive terminology may have originated in the mid-1960s, when soul was a common definer used to describe African American culture (for example, soul music). African Americans were the first peoples in the United States to make fried chicken, along with Scottish immigrants to the South. Although the Scottish had been frying chicken before they emigrated, they lacked the spices and flavor that African Americans had used when preparing the meal. The Scottish American settlers therefore adopted the African American method of seasoning chicken.[335] However, fried chicken was generally a rare meal in the African American community and was usually reserved for special events or celebrations.[336]
LanguageMain article: African-American EnglishSee also: Black American Sign Language, Gullah language, Afro-Seminole Creole, and Louisiana CreoleAfrican-American English is a variety (dialect, ethnolect, and sociolect) of American English, commonly spoken by urban working-class and largely bi-dialectal middle-class African Americans.[337] It shares parts of its grammar and phonology with the Southern American English dialect. African American English differs from Standard American English (SAE) in certain pronunciation characteristics, tense usage, and grammatical structures, which were derived from West African languages (particularly those belonging to the Niger?Congo family).[338]
Virtually all habitual speakers of African American English can understand and communicate in Standard American English. As with all linguistic forms, AAVE\'s usage is influenced by various factors, including geographical, educational and socioeconomic background, as well as formality of setting.[338] Additionally, there are many literary uses of this variety of English, particularly in African American literature.[339]
Other languages are spoken by specific sub-communities. The Gullah language is an English-based creole language spoken mostly in the coastal regions of South Carolina and Georgia by the Gullah;[340] an off-shoot of this is Afro-Seminole Creole spoken by Black Seminoles mostly now in Mexico and Brackettville, Texas.[341] Louisiana Creole is a French-based creole and spoken mostly in Louisiana.[342]
Traditional namesMain article: African-American namesAfrican-American names are part of the cultural traditions of African Americans, most of these cultural names having no connection to Africa but strictly an African American cultural practice that developed in the United States during enslavement.[343] This new evidence became apparent by census records which show African Americans and White Americans, though they spoke the same language, chose to use different names even during times of enslavement, which is where and when the development of African American cultural names began.[343]
Prior to this newer information, it was only thought that before the 1950s, and 1960s, most African-American names closely resembled those used within European-American culture.[344] Babies of that era were generally given a few common names, with children using nicknames to distinguish the various people with the same name. With the rise of 1960s civil rights movement, there was a dramatic increase in names of various origins.[345]
By the 1970s, and 1980s, it had become common among African Americans to invent new names for themselves, although many of these invented names took elements from popular existing names. Prefixes such as La/Le, Da/De, Ra/Re and Ja/Je, and suffixes like -ique/iqua, -isha and -aun/-awn are common, as are inventive spellings for common names. The book Baby Names Now: From Classic to Cool?The Very Last Word on First Names places the origins of \"La\" names in African-American culture in New Orleans.[346]
Even with the rise of inventive names, it is still common for African Americans to use biblical, historical, or traditional European names. Daniel, Christopher, Michael, David, James, Joseph, and Matthew were thus among the most frequent names for African-American boys in 2013.[344][347][348]
The name LaKeisha is typically considered American in origin but has elements that were drawn from both French and West/Central African roots. Names such as LaTanisha, JaMarcus, DeAndre, and Shaniqua were created in the same way. Punctuation marks are seen more often within African American names than other American names, such as the names Mo\'nique and D\'Andre.[344]
Music
The King & Carter Jazzing Orchestra photographed in Houston, Texas, January 1921
Chuck Berry is considered a pioneer of rock and roll.African American music is one of the most pervasive African American cultural influences in the United States today and is among the most dominant in mainstream popular music. Hip hop, R&B, funk, rock and roll, soul, blues, and other contemporary American musical forms originated in Black communities and evolved from other Black forms of music, including blues, doo-wop, barbershop, ragtime, bluegrass, jazz, and gospel music.
African American-derived musical forms have also influenced and been incorporated into virtually every other popular music genre in the world, including country and techno. African American genres are the most important ethnic vernacular tradition in America, as they have developed independent of African traditions from which they arise more so than any other immigrant groups, including Europeans; make up the broadest and longest lasting range of styles in America; and have, historically, been more influential, interculturally, geographically, and economically, than other American vernacular traditions.[349]
DanceAfrican Americans have also had an important role in American dance. Bill T. Jones, a prominent modern choreographer and dancer, has included historical African American themes in his work, particularly in the piece \"Last Supper at Uncle Tom\'s Cabin/The Promised Land\". Likewise, Alvin Ailey\'s artistic work, including his \"Revelations\" based on his experience growing up as an African American in the South during the 1930s, has had a significant influence on modern dance. Another form of dance, stepping, is an African American tradition whose performance and competition has been formalized through the traditionally Black fraternities and sororities at universities.[350]
SportsThis section is an excerpt from African Americans in sports.[edit]Discussions of race and sports in the United States, where the two subjects have always been intertwined in American history, have focused to a great extent on African Americans. Depending on the type of sport and performance level, African Americans are reported to be over- or under-represented. African Americans compose the highest percentage of the minority groups active at the professional level, but are among those who show the lowest participation overall. And though the list of African Americans in professional sports remains high, it only represents a small fraction of aspiring black athletes.
Literature and academics
Toni Morrison, recipient of the Nobel Prize for literatureMany African American authors have written stories, poems, and essays influenced by their experiences as African Americans. African American literature is a major genre in American literature. Famous examples include Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison, and Maya Angelou.
African American inventors have created many widely used devices in the world and have contributed to international innovation. Norbert Rillieux created the technique for converting sugar cane juice into white sugar crystals. Moreover, Rillieux left Louisiana in 1854 and went to France, where he spent ten years working with the Champollions deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics from the Rosetta Stone.[351] Most slave inventors were nameless, such as the slave owned by the Confederate President Jefferson Davis who designed the ship propeller used by the Confederate navy.[352]
By 1913, over 1,000 inventions were patented by Black Americans. Among the most notable inventors were Jan Matzeliger, who developed the first machine to mass-produce shoes,[353] and Elijah McCoy, who invented automatic lubrication devices for steam engines.[354] Granville Woods had 35 patents to improve electric railway systems, including the first system to allow moving trains to communicate.[355] Garrett A. Morgan developed the first automatic traffic signal and gas mask.[356]
Lewis Howard Latimer invented an improvement for the incandescent light bulb.[357] More recent inventors include Frederick McKinley Jones, who invented the movable refrigeration unit for food transport in trucks and trains.[358] Lloyd Quarterman worked with six other Black scientists on the creation of the atomic bomb (code named the Manhattan Project)[359] and helped develop the first nuclear reactor.[360]
As part of the preservation of their culture, African Americans have continuously launched their own publications and publishing houses, such as Robert Sengstacke Abbott, founder of the Chicago Defender newspaper, and Carter G. Woodson, the founder of Black History Month who spent over thirty years documenting and publishing African American history in journals and books. The Johnson Publishing Company, founded by John H. Johnson in 1942, is a National Historic parade float displayed the word \"Afro-Americans\" in 1911.The term African American was popularized by Jesse Jackson in the 1980s,[6] although there are recorded uses from the 18th and 19th centuries,[362] for example, in post-emancipation holidays and conferences.[363][364] Earlier terms also used to describe Americans of African ancestry referred more to skin color than to ancestry. Other terms (such as colored, person of color, or negro) were included in the wording of various laws and legal decisions which some thought were being used as tools of White supremacy and oppression.[365]Michelle Obama was the First Lady of the United States; she and her husband, President Barack Obama, are the first African Americans to hold these positions.A 16-page pamphlet entitled \"A Sermon on the Capture of Lord Cornwallis\" is notable for the attribution of its authorship to \"An African American\". Published in 1782, the book\'s use of this phrase predates any other yet identified by more than 50 years.[366]
In the 1980s, the term African American was advanced to give descendants of American slaves, and other American Blacks who lived through the slavery era, a heritage and a cultural base.[365] The term was popularized in Black communities around the country via word of mouth and ultimately received mainstream use after Jesse Jackson\'s use in 1988. Subsequently, major media outlets adopted it.[365]
Surveys in the 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century showed that the majority of Black Americans had no preference for African American versus Black American,[367] although they had a slight preference for the latter in personal settings and the former in more formal settings.[368] By 2021, according to polling from Gallup, 58% of Black Americans expressed no preference for what their group should be called, with 17% each preferring Black and African-American. Among those with no preference, Gallup found a slight majority favored Black \"if [they] had to choose.\"[369]
In 2020, the Associated Press updated its AP Stylebook to direct its writers to capitalize the first letter of Black when it is used \"in a racial, ethnic or cultural sense, conveying an essential and shared sense of history, identity and community among people who identify as Black, including those in the African diaspora and within Africa.\"[370] The New York Times and other outlets made similar changes at the same time.[371]
In 2023, the government released a new more detailed breakdown due to the rise in racially Black immigration into the US, listing African American as a compound termed ethnicity, distinguished from other racially Black ethnicities such as Nigerian, Jamaican etc.[372]
The term African American embraces pan-Africanism as earlier enunciated by prominent African thinkers such as Marcus Garvey, W. E. B. Du Bois, and George Padmore. The term Afro-Usonian, and variations of such, are more rarely used.[373][374]
Official identity
Racially segregated Negro section of keypunch operators at the US Census BureauSince 1977, in an attempt to keep up with changing social opinion, the United States government has officially classified Black people (revised to Black or African American in 1997) as \"having origins in any of the Black racial groups of Africa.\"[375] Other federal offices, such as the US Census Bureau, adhere to the Office of Management and Budget standards on race in their data collection and tabulation efforts.[376] In preparation for the 2010 US census, a marketing and outreach plan called 2010 Census Integrated Communications Campaign Plan (ICC) recognized and defined African Americans as Black people born in the United States. From the ICC perspective, African Americans are one of three groups of Black people in the United States.[377]
The ICC plan was to reach the three groups by acknowledging that each group has its own sense of community that is based on geography and ethnicity.[378] The best way to market the census process toward any of the three groups is to reach them through their own unique communication channels and not treat the entire Black population of the US as though they are all African Americans with a single ethnic and geographical background. The Federal Bureau of Investigation of the US Department of Justice categorizes Black or African American people as \"[a] person having origins in any of the Black racial groups of Africa\" through racial categories used in the UCR Program adopted from the Statistical Policy Handbook (1978) and published by the Office of Federal Statistical Policy and Standards, US Department of Commerce, derived from the 1977 Office of Management and Budget classification.[379]
AdmixtureSee also: Interracial marriage in the United States, Miscegenation § United States, Multiracial American, One-drop rule, and hypodescentHistorically, \"race mixing\" between Black and White people was taboo in the United States. So-called anti-miscegenation laws, barring Blacks and Whites from marrying or having sex, were established in colonial America as early as 1691,[380] and endured in many Southern states until the Supreme Court ruled them unconstitutional in Loving v. Virginia (1967). The taboo among American Whites surrounding White-Black relations is a historical consequence of the oppression and racial segregation of African Americans.[381] Historian David Brion Davis notes the racial mixing that occurred during slavery was frequently attributed by the planter class to the \"lower-class white males\" but Davis concludes that \"there is abundant evidence that many slaveowners, sons of slaveowners, and overseers took Black mistresses or in effect raped the wives and daughters of slave families.\"[382] A famous example was Thomas Jefferson\'s mistress, Sally Hemings.[383] Although publicly opposed to race mixing, Jefferson, in his Notes on the State of Virginia published in 1785, wrote: \"The improvement of the Blacks in body and mind, in the first instance of their mixture with the whites, has been observed by every one, and proves that their inferiority is not the effect merely of their condition of life\".[384]
Harvard University historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote in 2009 that \"African Americans...are a racially mixed or mulatto people?deeply and overwhelmingly so\". After the Emancipation Proclamation, Chinese American men married African American women in high proportions to their total marriage numbers due to few Chinese American women being in the United States.[385] African slaves and their descendants have also had a history of cultural exchange and intermarriage with Native Americans,[386] although they did not necessarily retain social, cultural or linguistic ties to Native peoples.[387] There are also increasing intermarriages and offspring between non-Hispanic Blacks and Hispanics of any race, especially between Puerto Ricans and African Americans.[388]
Racially mixed marriages have become increasingly accepted in the United States since the civil rights movement.[389] Approval in national opinion polls has risen from 36% in 1978, to 48% in 1991, 65% in 2002, 77% in 2007.[390] A Gallup poll conducted in 2013 found that 84% of Whites and 96% of Blacks approved of interracial marriage, and 87% overall.[391] Black men are more than twice as likely to date and marry interracially than Black women.[392]
At the end of World War II, some African American military men stationed in Japan and Germany impregnated local non-Black women, resulting in the birth of thousands of mixed-race children. Many of these families later immigrated to the United States.[393][394]
Terminology disputeAuthor Debra Dickerson has argued that the term Black should refer strictly to the descendants of Africans who were brought to America as slaves, and not to the sons and daughters of Black immigrants who lack that ancestry. Thus, under her definition, President Barack Obama, who is the son of a Kenyan, is not Black.[395][396] She makes the argument that grouping all people of African descent together regardless of their unique ancestral circumstances would inevitably deny the lingering effects of slavery within the American community of slave descendants, in addition to denying Black immigrants recognition of their own unique ancestral backgrounds. \"Lumping us all together\", Dickerson wrote, \"erases the significance of slavery and continuing racism while giving the appearance of progress.\"[395] Similar comments have been made concerning Kamala Harris, the daughter of a Caribbean immigrant, who was elected vice president in 2020.[397][398][399]
Similar viewpoints to Dickerson\'s have been expressed by author Stanley Crouch in a New York Daily News piece, Charles Steele Jr. of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference[400] and African American columnist David Ehrenstein of the Los Angeles Times, who accused White liberals of flocking to Blacks who were Magic Negros, a term that refers to a Black person with no past who simply appears to assist the mainstream White (as cultural protagonists/drivers) agenda.[401] Ehrenstein went on to say \"He\'s there to assuage white \'guilt\' they feel over the role of slavery and racial segregation in American history.\"[401]
The American Descendants of Slavery (ADOS) movement coalesces around this view, arguing that Black descendants of American slavery deserve a separate ethnic category that distinguishes them from other Black groups in the United States.[402] Their terminology has gained popularity in some circles, but others have criticized the movement for a perceived bias against (especially poor and Black) immigrants, and for its often inflammatory rhetoric.[397][403][404] Politicians such as Obama and Harris have received especially pointed criticism from the movement, as neither are ADOS and have spoken out at times against policies specific to them.[398][399]
Many Pan-African movements and organizations that are ideologically Black nationalist, anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist, and Scientific socialist like The All-African People\'s Revolutionary Party (A-APRP), have argued that African (relating to the diaspora) or New Afrikan should be used instead of African American.[405] Most notably, Malcolm X and Kwame Ture expressed similar views that African Americans are Africans who \"happen to be in America\", and should not claim or identify as being American if they are fighting for Black (New Afrikan) liberation. Historically, this is due to the enslavement of Africans during the transatlantic slave trade, ongoing anti-Black violence, and structural racism in countries like the United States.[406][407]
Terms no longer in common useBefore the independence of the Thirteen Colonies until the abolition of slavery in 1865, an African American slave was commonly known as a negro. Free negro was the legal status in the territory of an African American person who was not enslaved.[408] In response to the project of the American Colonization Society to transport free Blacks to the future Liberia, a project most Blacks strongly rejected, the Blacks at the time said they were no more African than White Americans were European, and referred to themselves with what they considered a more acceptable term, \"colored Americans\". The term was used until the second quarter of the 20th century, when it was considered outmoded ? although it was retained in the name of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) ? and generally gave way again to the exclusive use of negro,. By the 1940s, the term was commonly capitalized (Negro); but by the mid-1960s, it was considered disparaging. By the end of the 20th century, negro had come to be considered inappropriate and was rarely used and perceived as a pejorative.[409][410] The term is rarely used by younger Black people, but remained in use by many older African Americans who had grown up with the term, particularly in the Southern US.[411] The term remains in use in some contexts, such as the United Negro College Fund, an American philanthropic organization.
There are many other deliberately insulting terms, many of which were in common use (e.g., nigger), but had become unacceptable in normal discourse before the end of the 20th century. One exception is the use, among the Black community, of the slur nigger rendered as nigga, representing the pronunciation of the word in African American English. This usage has been popularized by American rap and hip-hop music cultures and is used as part of an in-group lexicon and speech. It is not necessarily derogatory and, when used among Black people, the word is often used to mean \"homie\" or \"friend\".[412] Acceptance of intra-group usage of the word nigga is still debated, although it has established a foothold among younger generations. The NAACP denounces the use of both nigga and nigger.[413]
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