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Total population | |
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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 |
Part of a series on |
African Americans |
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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]
History of the State of Georgia |
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Georgia (U.S. state)portal |
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]
The Civil War happened in Georgia. [21] African American soldiers fought the Civil War in Georgia. [22]
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]
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]
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]
Soul food is the ethnic cuisine of African Americans. It originated in the American South from the cuisines of enslaved Africans trafficked to the North American colonies through the Atlantic slave trade during the Antebellum period and is closely associated the cuisine of the American South. The expression "soul food" originated in the mid-1960s when "soul" was a common word used to describe African-American culture. Soul food uses cooking techniques and ingredients from West African, Central African, Western European, and Indigenous cuisine of the Americas.
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.
Hoodoo is an ethnoreligion that, in a broader context, functions as a set of spiritual observances, traditions, and beliefs—including magical and other ritual practices—developed by enslaved African Americans in the Southern United States from various traditional African spiritualities and elements of indigenous American botanical knowledge. Practitioners of Hoodoo are called rootworkers, conjure doctors, conjure men or conjure women, and root doctors. Regional synonyms for Hoodoo include rootwork and conjure. As an autonomous spiritual system it has often been syncretized with beliefs from Islam brought over by enslaved West African Muslims, and Spiritualism. Scholars define Hoodoo as a folk religion.
Morehouse College is a private historically Black, men's, liberal arts college in Atlanta, Georgia. Anchored by its main campus of 61 acres (25 ha) near Downtown Atlanta, the college has a variety of residential dorms and academic buildings east of Ashview Heights. Along with Spelman College, Clark Atlanta University, and the Morehouse School of Medicine, the college is a member of the Atlanta University Center consortium.
An African American is a citizen or resident of the United States who has origins in any of the black populations of Africa. African American-related topics include:
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.
The Gullah are a subgroup of the 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.
This is a timeline of African-American history, the part of history that deals with African Americans.
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.
John Wesley Dobbs was an African-American civic and political leader in Atlanta, Georgia. He was often referred to as the unofficial "mayor" of Sweet Auburn, the spine of the black community in the city.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Black South Carolinians are residents of the state of South Carolina who are of African American ancestry. This article examines South Carolina's history with an emphasis on the lives, status, and contributions of African Americans. Enslaved Africans first arrived in the region in 1526, and the institution of slavery remained until the end of the Civil War in 1865. Until slavery's abolition, the free black population of South Carolina never exceeded 2%. Beginning during the Reconstruction Era, African Americans were elected to political offices in large numbers, leading to South Carolina's first majority-black government. Toward the end of the 1870s however, the Democratic Party regained power and passed laws aimed at disenfranchising African Americans, including the denial of the right to vote. Between the 1870s and 1960s, African Americans and whites lived segregated lives; people of color and whites were not allowed to attend the same schools or share public facilities. African Americans were treated as second-class citizens leading to the civil rights movement in the 1960s. In modern America, African Americans constitute 22% of the state's legislature, and in 2014, the state's first African American U.S. Senator since Reconstruction, Tim Scott, was elected. In 2015, the Confederate flag was removed from the South Carolina Statehouse after the Charleston church shooting.
As of the 2010 U.S. Census, African Americans were 16.6% of the population of Florida. 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.
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.
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.