African Americans in Georgia


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. Georgia has the second largest African American population in the United States following Texas. Georgia also has a gullah community. African slaves were brought to Georgia during the slave trade.
In the 2020 Census, 3,320,513 Georgia residents were identified as African American. In 19 of the state's 159 counties, African Americans make up more than 50% of the population: Dougherty, Clayton, Hancock, Calhoun, Terrell, Randolph, Macon, Warren, Rockdale, Clay, and 9 other counties. African Americans in the ten counties of Fulton, DeKalb, Gwinnett, Clayton, Cobb, Henry, Richmond, Chatham, Muscogee, Bibb make up more than 61% of all African Americans in the state.

History

were initially enslaved in the region but their population was decimated because of diseases brought by the Spanish. Europeans then later turned to Africans for slavery because they deemed the black race inferior and suitable for slavery. Native American tribes such as the Cherokee, Creek, Guale, Timucuan, Apalachee, Westo and Choctaw populated the Georgia region before European invasion and the Atlantic slave trade.
Spanish colonists brought African slaves to Georgia in 1526. African slaves imported to Georgia primarily came from Angola, Sierra Leone, and the Gambia. Slaves were also imported from South Carolina and the West Indies. Slaves mostly worked on cotton and rice plantations. 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, which the state Georgia had helped to create.
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, from or via the Caribbean, and from the other mainland colonies in the United States in the years between 175s and
1771.
In 1912, White people drove out every black resident in Forsyth County.
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. Lynching African Americans was also common in Georgia. White mobs would lynch black men.
Georgia became a slave state in 1751. Initially, Georgia was the only British colony in the United States to try to ban slavery.
White slaveholders would frequently beat and sometimes had killed slaves.
Spanish explorer Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón brought African slaves to Georgia.

Civil War

happened in Georgia. African American soldiers fought the Civil War in Georgia.

Lynching

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

Historically black colleges and universities

Georgia is the home of ten historically Black colleges and universities : 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.

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.
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.

Civil Rights

Politics

Music

Sport

Religious

Film and television

  • Chris Tucker
  • Donald Glover, comedian, actor, rapper, writer, director, and producer who created the acclaimed comedy-drama Atlanta along with his brother Stephen.
  • Raven-Symoné
  • Spike Lee born 1957), born in Atlanta, moved with his family to Brooklyn during childhood. Returned to Atlanta to attend Morehouse College.

Writing

Various