African Americans in Georgia

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African Americans in Georgia
Afroamerica.svgFlag of Georgia (U.S. state).svg
Two African American children with a dog in Georgia LCCN99472252.jpg
African American children in Georgia
Total population
3,495,258 [1] (2017)
Regions with significant populations
Atlanta, Stonecrest, Lithonia, Atlanta metropolitan area, Albany, Columbus, Augusta, Savannah, Macon, Valdosta, Hancock County, Dougherty County, Clayton County, Fulton County, DeKalb County, [2] many rural counties throughout the southwest part of the state
Languages
Southern American English, African American Vernacular English, African-American English, Gullah, African languages
Religion
Historically Black Protestant [3]
Related ethnic groups
White Americans in Georgia
Oldest African American church located in Georgia Augusta Georgia Springfield Baptist Church.jpg
Oldest African American church located in Georgia
African Americans picking cotton in Georgia, 1907 African Americans picking cotton, Georgia, 1907.jpg
African Americans picking cotton in Georgia, 1907

African-American Georgians are residents of the U.S. state of Georgia who are of African American ancestry. As of the 2010 U.S. Census, African Americans were 31.2% of the state's population. [4] Georgia has the second largest African American population in the United States following Texas. [5] Georgia also has a gullah community. [6] African slaves were brought to Georgia during the slave trade. [7]

Contents

History

African American slaves in 1850 Family of slaves in Georgia, circa 1850.jpg
African American slaves in 1850

Spanish colonists brought African slaves to Georgia in 1526. [8] African slaves imported to Georgia primarily came from Angola, Sierra Leone, and the Gambia. [9] Slaves were also imported from South Carolina and the West Indies. [10] Slaves mostly worked on cotton and rice plantations. [11] [12] By the mid-19th century the majority of white people in Georgia, like most White Southerners, had come to view slavery as economically indispensable to their society. Georgia, with the largest number plantations of any state in the Southern United States, had in many respects come to epitomize plantation culture. When the American Civil War started in 1861, most white people in the South joined in the defense of the Confederate States of America (Confederacy), which the state Georgia had helped to create. [13]

Between the years 1751 and 1773, the black population in Georgia grew from around 500 to around 15,000. Slaves from Georgia were also brought to Georgia by South Carolinian and Caribbean owners and those purchased in South Carolina, around 44% black slaves in Georgia were shipped to the colony from West Africa (57%), from or via the Caribbean (37%), and from the other mainland colonies in the United States (6%) in the years between 175s and 1771. [14]

In 1912, White people drove out every black resident in Forsyth County. [15]

Beginning in the 1890s, Georgia passed a wide variety of Jim Crow laws that mandated racial segregation and racial separation for white people in public facilities and effectively codified the region's tradition of white supremacy. [16] Lynching African Americans was also common in Georgia. White mobs would lynch black men. [17]

Georgia became a slave state in 1751. [18] Initially, Georgia was the only British colony in the United States to try to ban slavery. [19]

White slaveholders would frequently beat and sometimes had killed slaves. [20]

Civil War

The Civil War happened in Georgia. [21] African American soldiers fought the Civil War in Georgia. [22]

Lynching

Many black men were lynched by white mobs in Georgia. [17] Notably, Robert Mallard and Isaiah Nixon, who were both lynched by the Ku Klux Klan for voting in the 1948 Georgia gubernatorial special election. [23]

Historically black colleges and universities

Georgia is the home of ten historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs): Albany State University, Clark Atlanta University, Fort Valley State University, Interdenominational Theological Center, Morehouse College, Morehouse School of Medicine, Morris Brown College, Paine College, Savannah State University, and Spelman College. [24]

Politics

The historically Republican state of Georgia flipped blue in the 2020 Presidential Election and the 2021 U.S. Senate runoffs, in part, due to high Black voter turnout. Joe Biden won the Black vote in Georgia in a 2020 exit poll with 88% of Black Georgians voting for Biden. [25] [26] [27]

This shift from red to purple is in part, due to young, college-educated Black Americans, who largely vote for Democrats, moving from Northern and Western regions of the country to the South, in a phenomenon often referred to as the New Great Migration. [28]


Civil Rights

Politics

Music

Sport

Religious

Film and television

Writing

Various

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gullah language</span> Creole language of southern US

Gullah is a creole language spoken by the Gullah people, an African-American population living in coastal regions of South Carolina and Georgia as well as extreme northeastern Florida and the extreme southeast of North Carolina.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hoodoo (spirituality)</span> Spiritual practices, traditions and beliefs

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Morehouse College</span> Private college in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.

For the special school in the United Kingdom see More House School, Frensham

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The history of Georgia in the United States of America spans pre-Columbian time to the present-day U.S. state of Georgia. The area was inhabited by Native American tribes for thousands of years. A modest Spanish presence was established in the late 16th century, mostly centered on Catholic missions. The Spanish had largely withdrawn from the territory by the early 18th century, although they had settlements in nearby Florida. They had little influence historically in what would become Georgia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gullah</span> African American ethnic group in south United States

The Gullah are an African American ethnic group who predominantly live in the Lowcountry region of the U.S. states of South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida within the coastal plain and the Sea Islands. Their language and culture have preserved a significant influence of Africanisms as a result of their historical geographic isolation and the community's relation to their shared history and identity.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">African-American history</span>

African American history started with the arrival of Africans to North America in the 16th and 17th centuries. Former Spanish slaves who had been freed by Francis Drake arrived aboard the Golden Hind at New Albion in California in 1579. The European colonization of the Americas, and the resulting Atlantic slave trade, led to a large-scale transportation of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic; of the roughly 10–12 million Africans who were sold by the Barbary slave trade, either to European slavery or to servitude in the Americas, approximately 388,000 landed in North America. After arriving in various European colonies in North America, the enslaved Africans were sold to white colonists, primarily to work on cash crop plantations. A group of enslaved Africans arrived in the English Virginia Colony in 1619, marking the beginning of slavery in the colonial history of the United States; by 1776, roughly 20% of the British North American population was of African descent, both free and enslaved.

This is a timeline of African-American history, the part of history that deals with African Americans.

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The Black Seminoles, or Afro-Seminoles, are an ethnic group of mixed Native American and African origin associated with the Seminole people in Florida and Oklahoma. They are mostly blood descendants of the Seminole people, free Africans, and escaped former slaves, who allied with Seminole groups in Spanish Florida. Many have Seminole lineage, but due to the stigma of having mixed origin, they have all been categorized as slaves or freedmen in the past.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Georgia in the American Civil War</span> Overview of the role of the Confederate state of Georgia during the American Civil War

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lugenia Burns Hope</span> American activist (1871–1947)

Lugenia Burns Hope, was a social reformer whose Neighborhood Union and other community service organizations improved the quality of life for African Americans in Atlanta, Georgia, and served as a model for the future Civil Rights Movement.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of slavery in Georgia</span>

Slavery in Georgia is known to have been practiced by European colonists. During the colonial era, the practice of slavery in Georgia soon became surpassed by industrial-scale plantation slavery.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gwendolyn Midlo Hall</span> American historian (1929–2022)

Gwendolyn Midlo Hall was an American historian who focused on the history of slavery in the Caribbean, Latin America, Louisiana, Africa, and the African Diaspora in the Americas. Discovering extensive French and Spanish colonial documents related to the slave trade in Louisiana, she wrote Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (1992), studied the ethnic origins of enslaved Africans brought to Louisiana, as well as the process of creolization, which created new cultures. She changed the way in which several related disciplines are researched and taught, adding to scholarly understanding of the diverse origins of cultures throughout the Americas.

The civil rights movement (1865–1896) aimed to eliminate racial discrimination against African Americans, improve their educational and employment opportunities, and establish their electoral power, just after the abolition of slavery in the United States. The period from 1865 to 1895 saw a tremendous change in the fortunes of the Black community following the elimination of slavery in the South.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Politics of Georgia (U.S. state)</span> Politics in the U.S. state of Georgia

The politics of Georgia change frequently and often follow the rest of the United States in major historical landmarks. The state has a long history, starting in the 18th century as a British colony. The cultural makeup of the early colony led to a ban on slavery being overturned soon after its implementation, setting the stage for the many plantations in the state. Rival governments were formed during the Revolutionary War, with the Patriot government surviving and forming a unified state government after the war. Georgian politics then followed the Democratic-Republican Party before the American Civil War and the Democrats afterward. In fact, the state never voted Republican until 1964, making it the last continental state to do so. Since then, Democrats have won the state just four times, for native son Jimmy Carter in 1976 and 1980, Southerner Bill Clinton in 1992, and for Joe Biden in 2020.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">African Americans in Atlanta</span> African Americans living in Atlanta, USA

Black Atlantans form a major population group in the Atlanta metropolitan area, encompassing both those of African-American ancestry as well as those of recent Caribbean or African origin. Atlanta has long been known as a center of black entrepreneurship, higher education, political power and culture; a cradle of the Civil Rights Movement.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">African Americans in South Carolina</span> Largest racial and ethnic minority in South Carolina, United States

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">African Americans in Florida</span> Ethnic group in Florida

African Americans in Florida or Black Floridians are residents of the state of Florida who are of African ancestry. As of the 2010 U.S. Census, African Americans were 16.6% of the state's population. The African-American presence in the peninsula extends as far back as the early 18th century, when African-American slaves escaped from slavery in Georgia into the swamps of the peninsula. Black slaves were brought to Florida by Spanish conquistadors.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">African Americans in North Carolina</span> Largest minority in North Carolina

African-American North Carolinians or Black North Carolinians are residents of the state of North Carolina who are of African ancestry. As of the 2010 U.S. Census, African Americans were 22% of the state's population. African enslaved people were brought to North Carolina during the slave trade.

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Raphael Gamaliel Warnock is an American Baptist pastor and politician serving as the junior United States senator from Georgia since 2021. A member of the Democratic Party, Warnock has been the senior pastor of Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church since 2005.

References

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Further reading

Further reading