Harriet Tubman , an African- American fugitive slave, abolitionist , and conductor of the Underground Railroad . In the first 200 years that black people were in the United States , they commonly referred to themselves as Africans. In Africa, people primarily identified themselves by ethnic group (closely allied to language) and not by skin color. Individuals identified themselves, for example, as Ashanti, Igbo , Bakongo , or Wolof, and others. But when Africans were brought to the Americas , they were often combined with other groups from Africa, and individual ethnic affiliations were not generally acknowledged by English colonists. In areas of the Upper South, different ethnic groups were brought together. This is significant as Africans came from a vast geographic region: the West African coastline stretching from Senegal to Angola and in some cases from the south-east coast such as Mozambique. A new identity and culture was born that incorporated elements of the various ethnic groups and of European cultural heritage, resulting in fusions such as the Black church and Black English. This new identity was based on African ancestry and slave status rather than membership in any one ethnic group. By contrast, slave records from Louisiana show that the French and Spanish colonists recorded more complete identities of Africans, including ethnicities and given tribal names. The US racial or ethnic classification black refers to people with all possible kinds of skin pigmentation, from the darkest through to the very lightest skin colors, including albinos, if they are believed by others to have African ancestry (in any discernible percentage), or to exhibit cultural traits associated with being African American. As a result, in the United States the term black people is not an indicator of skin color but of socially based racial classification. Relatively dark-skinned people can be classified as white if they fulfill other social criteria of whiteness, and relatively light-skinned people can be classified as black if they fulfill the social criteria for blackness in a particular setting. In March 1807, Great Britain , which largely controlled the Atlantic, declared the transatlantic slave trade illegal , as did the United States. (The latter prohibition took effect 1 January 1808, the earliest date on which Congress had the power to do so after protecting the slave trade under Article I, Section 9 of the United States Constitution.) By that time, the majority of black people in the United States were native-born, so the use of the term African became problematic. Though initially a source of pride, many blacks feared the use of African as an identity would be a hindrance to their fight for full citizenship in the US. They also felt that it would give ammunition to those who were advocating repatriating black people back to Africa. In 1835, black leaders called upon black Americans to remove the title of African from their institutions and replace it with Negro or Colored American. A few institutions chose to keep their historic names, such as the African Methodist Episcopal Church. African Americans popularly used the terms Negro or colored for themselves until the late 1960s. The term black was used throughout but not frequently since it carried a certain stigma. In his 1963 I Have a Dream speech, Martin Luther King, Jr. uses the terms negro fifteen times and black four times. Each time he uses black it is in parallel construction with white, for example, black men and white men. With the successes of the civil rights movement, a new term was needed to break from the past and help shed the reminders of legalized discrimination. In place of Negro , activists promoted the use of black as standing for racial pride, militancy, and power. Some of the turning points included the use of the term Black Power by Kwame Toure ( Stokely Carmichael ) and the popular singer James Browns song Say It Loud - Im Black and Im Proud.
Posted on: Wed, 26 Feb 2014 16:32:21 +0000
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