Black Southerners
Black Southerners are African Americans living in the Southern United States, the United States region with the largest black population.
Despite a total of 6 million Black people migrating from the South to cities in the North and West from 1916 to 1970, the majority of the Black population remains concentrated in the Southern states. In addition, since the 1970s, numerous Black Americans have migrated to the South from other U.S. regions in a reverse New Great Migration, but they tend to be educated and to settle in urban areas. Black Southerners strongly contributed to the cultural blend of Christianity, foods, art, music that characterize Southern culture today.
African slaves were sent to the South during the slave trade. Slavery in the United States was primarily located in the American South. By 1850, about 3.2 million African slaves labored in the United States, 1.8 million of whom worked in the cotton fields. Black slaves in the South faced arbitrary power abuses from white people. Before the Civil War, more than 4 million black slaves worked in the South. Virginia had the largest slave population, followed by Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama and South Carolina. There are large black communities in urban cities in the South such as Houston, Memphis, New Orleans, Dallas and Atlanta.
Black Southerners are more likely to identify as a Southerner and claim Southern identity than their counterpart White Southerners.
History
White European colonists turned to Africans as a cheaper, more plentiful labor source than Native Americans and poor white indentured servants. Native Americans in the region also died from diseases due to the Spanish.Origins
The history of Africans in the South dates to 1619, when a ship headed toward San Juan, Mexico was intercepted by two pirate ships. The pirates expected to steal precious metals like gold and silver, but they found that the ship held 350 black Africans from the Kingdom of Ndongo on the Kwanza River in north central Angola. The pirates took 60 of the best and healthiest slaves to the English colony of Jamestown with the hopes of selling them to the manpower-deprived city. The settlers of Jamestown purchased 32 slaves, with the hopes that slave labor would help expand the colony. These slaves and their descendants worked wherever they were needed up until 1705. Between 1619 and the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War in 1775, hundreds of thousands of black Africans were sold into slavery and imported into the Thirteen Colonies.Revolutionary War
African Americans played an important role in America's independence war against Great Britain. After suffering from ongoing oppression, they saw independence as an opportunity to break free from slavery and end unfair treatment. During the war, Black people fought for whichever side they thought would have the best chance of granting them their freedom. It is estimated that 20,000 African Americans joined the British cause, which promised freedom to enslaved people, as Black Loyalists. Around 9,000 African Americans became Black Patriots.In state navies, some African Americans served as captains: South Carolina had significant numbers of Black captains.
The British regular army had some fears that, if armed, Black men would start slave rebellions. Trying to placate southern planters, the British used African Americans as laborers, skilled workers, foragers and spies. Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia, was determined to maintain British rule in the southern colonies and promised to free those enslaved men of rebel owners who fought for him. On November 7, 1775, he issued a proclamation: "I do hereby further declare all indented servants, Negroes, or others, free, that are able and willing to bear arms, they joining His Majesty's Troops." By December 1775, the British army had 300 enslaved men wearing a military uniform. Sewn on the breast of the uniform was the inscription "Liberty to Slaves". These enslaved men were designated as "Lord Dunmore's Ethiopian Regiment." Except for those Black men who joined the Ethiopian Regiment, only a few Black men, such as Seymour Burr, served in the British army while the fighting was concentrated in the North. It was not until the final months of the war, when manpower was low, that loyalists used Black men to fight for Britain in the South. In Savannah, Georgia, Augusta, Georgia, and Charleston, South Carolina, when threatened by Patriot forces, the British filled gaps in their troops with African Americans. In October 1779, about 200 Black Loyalist soldiers assisted the British in successfully defending Savannah against a joint French and rebel American attack.
Dunmore's Black soldiers aroused fear among some Patriots. The Ethiopian unit was used most frequently in the South, where the Black population was oppressed to the breaking point. As a response to expressions of fear posed by armed Black men, in December 1775, George Washington wrote a letter to Colonel Henry Lee III, stating that success in the war would come to whatever side could arm Black men the fastest; therefore, he suggested a policy to execute any of the slaves who would attempt to gain freedom by joining the British effort. Washington issued orders to the recruiters to reenlist the free Black men who had already served in the army; he worried that some of these soldiers might cross over to the British side.
Revolutionary War to Civil War
The Black Patriots who served the Continental Army found that the postwar military held few rewards for them, as it was much reduced in size, and the Southern states had banned all enslaved men from their militias. North Carolina was among the states that allowed free people of color to serve in their militias and bear arms until the 1830s. In 1792, the United States Congress formally excluded African Americans from military service, allowing only "free able-bodied white male citizens" to serve.At the time of the ratification of the Constitution in 1789, free Black men could vote in five of the thirteen states, including North Carolina. That demonstrated that they were considered citizens not only of their states but of the United States.
Although southern state legislatures maintained the institution of slavery, numerous slaveholders, especially those in the Upper South, were inspired by revolutionary ideals to free the people they had enslaved. In addition, in this period, Methodist, Baptist and Quaker preachers also urged manumission. The proportion of free Black people in the Upper South increased markedly, from less than 1 percent of all Black people to more than 10 percent, even as the number of enslaved people was increasing overall. More than half of the number of free Black people in the United States were concentrated in the Upper South. In Delaware, nearly 75 percent of Black people were free by 1810. This was also a result of a changing economy, as many planters had been converting from labor-intensive tobacco to mixed commodity crops, with less need for intensive labor.
After that period, few enslaved people were granted freedom. A modern mechanical cotton gin was invented by Eli Whitney in 1793 and patented in 1794. Whitney's gin used a combination of a wire screen and small wire hooks to pull the cotton through, while brushes continuously removed the loose cotton lint to prevent jams. The invention of the cotton gin made cultivation of short-staple cotton profitable, and the Deep South was developed for this product. This drove up the demand for slave labor in that developing area, causing more than one million slaves to be transported to the Deep South in the domestic slave trade.
Image:17 09 024 jarrell.jpg|thumb|left|Cotton gin at Jarrell Plantation
Prior to the introduction of the mechanical cotton gin, cotton had required considerable labor to clean and separate the fibers from the seeds. With Eli Whitney's gin, cotton became a tremendously profitable business, creating many fortunes in the Antebellum South. Cities such as New Orleans, Louisiana; Mobile, Alabama; Charleston, South Carolina; and Galveston, Texas became major shipping ports, deriving substantial economic benefit from cotton raised throughout the South.
The invention of the cotton gin caused massive growth in the production of cotton in the United States, concentrated mostly in the South. Cotton production expanded from 750,000 bales in 1830 to 2.85 million bales in 1850. As a result, the region became even more dependent on slave plantations, with agriculture becoming the largest sector of its economy. While it took a single slave about ten hours to separate a single pound of fiber from the seeds, a team of two or three slaves using a cotton gin could produce around fifty pounds of cotton in just one day. The number of slaves rose in concert with the increase in cotton production, increasing from around 700,000 in 1790 to around 3.2 million in 1850. The invention of the cotton gin led to an increased demand for slaves in the South, reversing the economic decline that had occurred in the region during the late 18th century. The cotton gin thus "transformed cotton as a crop and the American South into the globe's first agricultural powerhouse".
Because of its inadvertent effect on American slavery, and on its ensuring that the South's economy developed in the direction of plantation-based agriculture, the invention of the cotton gin is frequently cited as one of the indirect causes of the American Civil War.
Civil War and Jim Crow era
During the Civil War, runaway slaves from the South joined the fight on the side of the Union. In the Confederacy, both free and enslaved Black people were used for manual labor, but the issue of whether to arm them, and under what terms, became a major source of debate within the Confederate Congress, the President's Cabinet, and C.S. War Department staff. In general, newspapers, politicians, and army leaders alike were hostile to any efforts to arm Black people. The war's desperate circumstances meant that the Confederacy changed its policy in the last month of the war; in March 1865, a small program attempted to recruit, train, and arm Black people, but no significant numbers were ever raised or recruited, and those that were never saw combat.The Civil War led to the passage of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery across the country; the 14th Amendment, which states that all people born in the United States are American citizens; and the 15th Amendment, which prohibits the federal government and state governments from denying a citizen the right to vote based on that citizen's "race, color, or previous condition of servitude." Reconstruction, the process of making the newly freed slaves into US citizens with civil rights ostensibly guaranteed by these three new constitutional amendments, angered many southern Whites, who were highly opposed to granting Black people citizenship and the right to vote. The 14th and 15th amendments were both nullified in 1883. White southerners, who had been forced to free their slaves, feared that Black involvement in politics would lead to "Negro supremacy" ; in reality, Black people never controlled the south politically.
For roughly 100 years after the end of the Civil War, Black Americans, especially in the South, suffered from racial oppression in the form of segregation and lynchings. Jim Crow laws, passed in the late 19th and early 20th century, required racial segregation in the states that had maintained slavery until 1865. Fully in place from 1910 onwards, Jim Crow laws reinstated white supremacy and contributed to the loss of the citizenship and voting rights that Black people had worked so hard to gain. These laws were based on "separate but equal" clauses, which legally mandated the racial separation of Black people from Whites in public places like schools, bathrooms, and transportation. Black people usually received inferior accommodations. Segregation determined which hospitals people were born in, which schools children could attend, and even dictated which graveyards people were buried in. Black people and Whites were also held to different legal standards, with two criminal justice systems in existence to maintain the separation of law and expectation. In instances of law breaking, the Ku Klux Klan, often working in tandem with law enforcement officers, would engage in racial terrorism against Black people.