The Economic Development of the World: Part 6

Jamaican Flag

The British African Caribbean Connection

British African Caribbean (or Afro-Caribbean) people are residents of the United Kingdom who are of West Indian background and whose ancestors were primarily indigenous to Africa. As immigration to the United Kingdom from Africa increased in the 1990s, the term has sometimes been used to include UK residents solely of African origin, or as a term to define all Black British residents, though the phrase "African andCaribbean" has more often been used to cover such a broader grouping. The most common and traditional use of the term African-Caribbean community is in reference to groups of residents' continuing aspects ofCaribbean culture, customs and traditions in the United Kingdom.

A majority of the African-Caribbean population in the UK is of Jamaican origin; other notable representation is from Trinidad and Tobago, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Barbados, Grenada, Antigua and Barbuda, Saint Lucia,Dominica, Montserrat, Anguilla, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Guyana (which although located on theSouth American mainland is culturally similar to the Caribbean and was historically considered to be part of the British West Indies), and Belize.

African-Caribbean people are present throughout the United Kingdom with by far the largest concentrations inLondon and Birmingham. Significant communities also exist in other population centers, notably Manchester,Bradford, Nottingham, Coventry, Luton, High Wycombe, Leicester, Bristol, Gloucester, Leeds, Huddersfield,Sheffield, Liverpool and Cardiff. In these cities, the community is traditionally associated with a particular area, such as Brixton, Harlesden, Stonebridge, Dalston, Sutton, Lewisham, Tottenham, Peckham in London, West Bowling and Heaton in Bradford, Chapeltown in Leeds, St. Paul’s in Bristol, or Handsworth and Aston in Birmingham or Moss Side in Manchester. According to the 2011 census, the largest number of African-Caribbeans are found in Croydon, south London.

British African-Caribbeans have an extremely high rate of mixed-race relationships, and could in effect become the first UK ethnic group to "disappear". Half of all British African-Caribbean men in a relationship have partners of a different ethnic background, as do one-third of all British African-Caribbean women. As of the 2011 census, over 1 million people are of African-Caribbean origin in total.

From the 16th century to the 19th century, enslaved Africans were shipped by European slave traders toBritish colonies in the Caribbean and British North America, as well as French, Dutch, Danish, Spanish, andPortuguese colonies. New World slavery was originally focused on the extraction of gold and other precious raw materials. Africans were then later set to work on the vast cotton, tobacco and sugar plantations in the Americas for the economic benefit of these colonial powers and their plantocracy. One impact of theAmerican Revolution was the differing historical development of African-American and African-Caribbean people. There are records of small communities in the ports of Cardiff, Liverpool, London and South Shieldsdating back to the mid-18th century. These communities were formed by freed slaves following the abolition of slavery. Typical occupations of the early migrants were footmen or coachmen.

The growing Caribbean presence in the British military led to approximately 15,000 migrants arriving in the North-West of England around the time of the First World War to work in munitions factories.

The Jamaican poet and communist activist, Claude McKay came to England following the First World War and became the first Black British journalist, writing for the Workers' Dreadnought.

Building the  Panama Canal

The decade-long American effort to construct the Panama Canal, tens of thousands of laborers were Blacks from the United States, Central and South America as well as the islands of the Caribbean.

Panama Canal Museum

Canal laborers head to work

worked, sacrificed, and died while building the largest canal the world had seen to date. Combating harsh terrain, disease, and deplorable living conditions, workers from around the world held a variety of different jobs in the canal zone, their pay and quality of life often directly related to their ethnicity.

Long before the U.S. attempt at building the Panama Canal began in 1904, workers from around the world had been coming to the isthmus. In the early 1850s, the Panama Railroad Company imported thousands of African and Chinese workers to lay the tracks for the railway lines that would make the construction of the Panama Canal possible. Most would die from malaria or suicide.

Throughout both the building of the Panama Railroad in the 1850s and the French excavation 30 years later, workers from Jamaica were recruited heavily. In 1881, French recruiter Charles Gadpaille ran advertisements throughout Jamaica, offering wages much higher than average on the Caribbean island. The campaign showed the "Colón Man," a Jamaican who had gone to work in Panama, returning to his home country a rich and prosperous man. This ideal caught on quickly in the largely working-class country, and drove a huge migration of Jamaicans to Panama in the latter half of the 19th century. But the promise of riches was an empty one: in reality, West Indians earned $0.10 an hour and the work was treacherous. During the eight-year French excavation period, of the more than 20,000 workers who died, most were West Indians. Strikes proved fruitless, as there were always more men eager to take the jobs. Despite the heavy recruitment of laborers from the West Indies, Colombia, and Cuba, only one in five workers stayed on the job longer than a year.

The U.S. Gathers a Workforce
When the United States announced its plan to build in Panama, promises of grandeur breathed fresh life into workers recruited to the area. "You here who are doing your work well in bringing to completion this great enterprise are standing exactly as a soldier of the few great wars of the world's history," Teddy Roosevelt announced to workers during his trip to Panama in 1906. "This is one of the great works of the world."

In December of that year, two years into the project, there were already more than 24,000 men working on the Panama Canal. Within five years, the number had swelled to 45,000. These workers were not all from the United States, but from Panama, the West Indies, Europe, and Asia.

The base of the workforce, however, once again came from the West Indies. After experiencing the empty promises of the French in the 1880s, most Jamaican workers were unwilling to try their luck on the American canal project, and so in 1905 recruiters turned their attention to the island of Barbados. West Indian labor was cheaper than American or European labor, and a West Indian worker was eager to believe a rags-to-riches tale spun by a recruiter. The "Colón Man" was reborn as representatives from Panama boasted of a rewarding work contract, including free passage to Panama and a repatriation option after 500 working days. By the end of the year, 20 percent of the 17,000 canal workers were Barbadian.

Panama Canal Museum

Laborers from Barbados arrive on the isthmus

West Indians recruited with promises of wealth and success confronted a very different reality upon arrival at the Isthmus. The dense and untamed jungle that covered the 50 miles between coasts was filled with deadly snakes. The venom of the coral snake attacked the nervous system, and a bite from the ten-foot mapana snake caused internal bleeding and organ degeneration. The rainy season, which lasted from May to November, kept workers perpetually wet and coated in mud.

Initially, accommodations for canal employees provided little protection against the wet weather or jungle life. The Isthmian Canal Commission (ICC) housed most workers in dilapidated barracks built two decades earlier by the French. Some employees opted instead to pay for rent in one of the two coastal cities, although options there were not much better. Others who could not find housing near their work site pitched tents or lived in old boxcars or barns.

Library of Congress

Spanish workers shovel by hand

The living conditions exacerbated the poor hygiene in the area, and newcomers quickly learned about the serious threat of disease on what was dubbed "Fever Coast." Smallpox, pneumonia, typhoid, dysentry, hookworm, cutaneous infections, and even the bubonic plague infected workers throughout the American excavation period, but yellow fever was the most treacherous ailment, both physically and mentally. Just the mention of an outbreak caused such panic that defection rates were higher than mortality from the disease itself. 

Experts predicted that yellow fever would kill hundreds of workers each year. Malaria, while less lethal, was more common. A strain of the disease called "Chagres Fever" led to jaundice, coma, and severe internal hemorrhaging. Even more damaging was its ability to recur after a patient had recovered. Statistics on illness among workers were staggering: in 1906 alone 80% of the total workforce was hospitalized for malaria.

As work on the canal entered its second year, the death toll for laborers was four percent and 22,000 were hospitalized. Every evening, a train traveled to Mount Hope Cemetery by the city of Colón, its cars brimming with coffins, forcing the men to confront the great odds against their survival.

U.S. citizens were used sparingly in Panama because they were both disease-prone and demanded higher wages. In North America, however, the transcontinental railroad had been completed in 1869 and produced many U.S. workers adept at rail jobs: switchmen, signalmen, locomotive drivers, mechanics, electrical engineers, and foremen. Skilled U.S. laborers came to the canal with the promise of a generous pay package that included free benefits and services, 42 paid vacation days and 30 days paid sick leave -- much more than the majority of West Indian canal workers could expect.

The local Panamanian citizens were initially tapped as a logical and cheap source of unskilled labor. Though more resistant to yellow fever than the foreign workers, locals proved to be equally susceptible to malaria and pneumonia. Worse, local laborers suspicious of Americans' power-grabbing ambitions did not prove to be the most enthusiastic workers, earning them a reputation as lazy and irresponsible. Open hostility between workers ultimately added to Panamanians' dissatisfaction, and they did not make up a large percentage of the work force.

Unequal Treatment

The apartheid system governed every aspect of a worker's life. The distinction began as a division between "skilled" and "unskilled" laborers, but as time passed it evolved into a purely racial divide. Skilled employees went on the Gold Roll and were paid in gold coins. These workers earned paid sick and vacation time and were housed in better accommodations than their unskilled counterparts. Those on the Silver Roll, the unskilled workers, were paid in balboas, or local Panamanian silver. West Indian workers, plentiful in numbers and eager to work, could be paid 10 cents an hour -- half of the salary of a European or white U.S. worker. 

Over time, the Gold Roll became comprised of white U.S. citizens exclusively, while the workers on the Silver Roll, by far the majority of the workforce by the end of the construction period, were largely non-white.

Discrimination extended to living quarters!

National Archives

Living quarters for West Indians in Cristobal

made available to each group of workers. Barracks were distinctly worse for West Indians than for whites; as many as 72 West Indian men lived in a 50- by 30-foot hut. Mess halls for black workers had no tables or chairs and fed up to 8,000 men a day with unappealing, simple food. Inadequate housing and malnutrition made West Indian workers more vulnerable to injury and disease. Hospitals on the isthmus routinely located their black wards in the worst parts of the buildings. While the average death rate in 1906 was around 4% of the whole labor force, the rate for West Indian workers was closer to 5%.

In stark contrast, white workers had a luxurious life in the canal zone. The dismal quality of life in the first years of construction on the Panama Canal had sent American workers away in droves. When the turnover rate of skilled U.S. laborers reached 75% in the summer of 1905, the ICC realized they needed to create incentives for Americans to stay on the isthmus. One of the first projects was building a new cold-storage unit to keep fresh, perishable foods. Then, the ICC set to work improving the living conditions. In 1906, 2,500 structures were either renovated or built new, including two-story family homes that featured screened-in verandas, modern plumbing, and electricity.

Panama Canal Commission

The ICC Band

A year later, American workers celebrated Independence Day on July 4, 1906 with games, athletic competitions, and dancing. This was the beginning of recreation in the canal zone. Baseball leagues, social clubs, and fraternal organizations sprang up to fill lazy Sundays. By that winter, the canal zone had paved roads, warehouses, dormitories, and dining halls.

Attractive enticements to keep white workers on the isthmus became the norm. New cottage homes, public schools, churches and bakeries opened in towns and camps along the route of the canal. Bachelor "hotels," built to house single workers, turned into social gathering places filled with noise and smoke.

Library of Congress

The ICC Hotel Tivoli at Ancon

YMCA clubhouses charged Gold Roll employees $10 a year for access to bowling lanes, billiards tables, chess boards, and a host of organized social events. In 1911, workers published a yearbook titled The Makers of the Panama Canal that contained biographies of selected employees and pictures of clubs and brotherhoods on the isthmus. By 1913, there were dances and band concerts every Sunday, and nine women's clubs.

White workers were encouraged to bring their wives and families to the isthmus with increasingly extravagant incentives. Housing for married workers was provided rent-free, and homes increased in luxury according to a worker's place on the pay scale. In 1908, over 1,000 families were living on the isthmus and the ICC was spending $2.5 million a year for entertainment and games for white workers.

The ICC provided nothing, on the other hand, for the accommodation, provisions, or entertainment of Silver Roll employees.

Working in Great Britain

In February 1941 345 West Indian workers were brought to work in and around Liverpool. They were generally better skilled than the local Black British. There was also some tension between them and West Africans who had settled in the area.

Since World War II many African-Caribbean people migrated to North America and Europe, especially to theUnited States, Canada, the UK, France, and the Netherlands. As a result of the losses during the war, theBritish government began to encourage mass immigration from the countries of the British Empire andCommonwealth to fill shortages in the labor market. The 1948 British Nationality Act gave British citizenshipto all people living in Commonwealth countries, and full rights of entry and settlement in Britain. Many West Indians were attracted by better prospects in what was often referred to as the mother country.

There was plenty of work in post-war Britain and industries such as British Rail, the National Health Serviceand public transport recruited almost exclusively from Jamaica and Barbados. 

Though Afro-Caribbeans were encouraged to journey to Britain via immigration campaigns created by successive British governments, many new arrivals were to endure prejudice, intolerance and extreme racism from sectors of indigenous British society. This experience was to mark African-Caribbeans' relations with the wider community over a long period. Early African-Caribbean immigrants found private employment and housing denied to them on the basis of race. Trade unions would often not help African-Caribbean workers and some pubs, clubs, dance halls and churches would bar black people from entering. Housing was in short supply following the wartime bombing, and the shortage led to some of the first clashes with the established white community. Clashes continued and worsened into the 1950s, and riots erupted in cities including London, Birmingham andNottingham. In 1958, attacks in the London area of Notting Hill by white youths marred relations with West Indian residents, leading to the creation of the annual Notting Hill Carnival, which was initiated in 1959 as a positive response by the Caribbean community. Some of the racism and intolerance was stoked by explicitly fascist or anti-immigration movements including Oswald Mosley's Union Movement, the League of Empire Loyalists, the White Defense League, the National Labor Party and others. 

Influenced by this kind of propaganda, gangs of Teddy Boys would often attack blacks in London.

In 1962, Britain passed the Commonwealth Immigrants Act restricting the entry of immigrants, and by 1972 only holders of work permits, or people with parents or grandparents born in the UK, could gain entry - effectively stemming most Caribbean immigration. Despite the restrictive measures, an entire generation of Britons with African-Caribbean heritage now existed, contributing to British society in virtually every field. The number of British persons born in the West Indies had increased from 15,000 in 1951 to 172,000 in 1961 to 304,000 in 1981. The total population of persons of West Indian heritage by 1981 was between 500,000 and 550,000, depending upon the official source used.

The 1970s and 1980s were decades of comparative turbulence in wider British society; industrial disputes preceded a period of deep recession and widespread unemployment which seriously affected the economically less prosperous African-Caribbean community. Societal racism, discrimination, poverty, powerlessness and oppressive policing sparked a series of riots in areas with substantial African-Caribbean populations. These "uprisings" (as they were described by some in the community) took place in St Paul’s in 1980, Brixton, Toxteth and Moss Side in 1981, St Paul’s again in 1982, Notting Hill Gate in 1982, Toxteth in 1982, and Handsworth, Brixton and Tottenham in 1985.

The riots had a profoundly unsettling effect on local residents, and led the then Home Secretary William Whitelaw to commission the Scarman report to address the root causes of the disturbances. The report identified both "racial discrimination" and a "racial disadvantage" in Britain, concluding that urgent action was needed to prevent these issues becoming an "endemic, ineradicable disease threatening the very survival of our society". The era saw an increase in attacks on Black people by white people. The Joint Campaign Against Racism committee reported that there had been more than 20,000 attacks on non-indigenous Britons including Britons of Asian origin during 1985.

The police response to the 1993 murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence led to outcry and calls to investigate police conduct. The ensuing government inquiry, the Macpherson Report, concluded that there was institutional racism in the London Metropolitan Police Service.

Afro-Caribbeans have exhibited an increasing association with gun-crime, heightened by high profile murders, such as that of two young black women shot by black assailants outside a Birmingham hair salon in 2003. Several media outlets blamed a “gangster rap culture”, though Assistant Chief Constable Nick Tofiluk of theWest Midlands Police believed that the use of firearms is not an Afro-Caribbean issue alone, and has been on the rise throughout British society. Tensions between African-Caribbean residents and British Asians in a number of regions have led to confrontations, notably violent disturbances in Birmingham in 2005 where groups fought and rioted over two nights. There is also evidence of tensions between African-Caribbeans and African immigrants.

In 2009, 1.2% of British children under 16 were Black Caribbean and 1.1% were mixed white and black Caribbean. Among those children who were living with at least one Caribbean parent, only one in five were living with two Caribbean parents.

The Economic Development of the World: Part 5

Fried chicken and watermelon is the stuff that I grew up on. I am Black. According to my father, his male side were descendant from the Oklahoma Cherokee Nation. My mother's uncle told me that at least her mother's people where also Cherokees. Four generations from me, Eliza Thorne was a slave in Culpeper, Va. She was said to be half Cherokee. Despite what professors and others say about my ancestry, I prefer to believe what my ancestors say about themselves.

The African American community has the economic power of Canada. It is made up of many ethnic groups with origins in many cultures around the world. It is a melting pot of people and they have influence many cultures on this planet.   

African American Culture

Black Corporate Slavery was slaves 

owned or insured by American 

Corporations in the North as well as 

the South.

Since Slavery days, African American were taught not to trust each other. This was for the protection of the slave owner. For if they were to organize, they could rebel against the slave master and their families. Some plantations were owned by Corporations and it would not be good for investor relations to have slave uprisings affecting the bottom line of the balance sheet. No matter how much the slave owners tried, slaves created their own culture. That culture influenced all sectors of American life as well as cultures around the world.

African-American culture, also known as black culture, in the United States refers to the cultural contributions of African Americans to the culture of the United States, either as part of or distinct from American culture. The distinct identity of African-American culture is rooted in the historical experience of the African-American people, including the Middle Passage. The culture is both distinct and enormously influential to American culture as a whole.

The Middle Passage was the stage of the triangular trade in which millions of people from Africa were shipped to the New World as part of the Atlantic slave trade. Ships departed Europe for African markets with manufactured goods, which were traded for purchased or kidnapped Africans, who were transported across the Atlantic as slaves; the slaves were then sold or traded for raw materials, which would be transported back to Europe to complete the voyage. Voyages on the Middle Passage were a large financial undertaking, and they were generally organized by companies, corporations, or groups of investors rather than individuals.

The "Middle Passage" was considered a time of in-betweenness for those being traded from Africa to America. The close quarters and intentional division of pre-established African communities by the ship crew motivated captive Africans to forge bonds of kinship which then created forced transatlantic communities. 

These newly established bonds greatly impacted and altered African identity and culture within each community It was a significant contributing aspect to the slaves survival of the "Middle Passage" and carried into their life in America.

Traders from the Americas and Caribbean received the enslaved Africans. European powers such as Portugal,England, Spain, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, and Brandenburg, as well as traders from Brazil and North America, took part in this trade. The enslaved Africans came mostly from eight regions: Senegambia, Upper Guinea, Windward Coast, Gold Coast, Bight of Benin, Bight of Biafra, West Central Africa and Southeastern Africa.

An estimated 15% of the Africans died at sea, with mortality rates considerably higher in Africa itself in the process of capturing and transporting indigenous peoples to the ships. The total number of African deaths directly attributable to the Middle Passage voyage is estimated at up to two million; a broader look at African deaths directly attributable to the institution of slavery from 1500 to 1900 suggests up to four million African deaths.

For two hundred years, 1440–1640, Portuguese slavers had a near monopoly on the export of slaves from Africa. During the eighteenth century, when the slave trade transported about 6 million Africans, British slavers carried almost 2.5 million.

In the deep south slaves were cheap enough to where a slave owner could work a slave to death then purchase another and do the same. In places like Virginia, African slaves were not as cheap so slavers had to breed Africans with Native Americans to produce a slave with no national origin. This would mean that these slave would get little help from natives living in the area and would cut down on “run aways.” The value of African slaves made some states pass laws protecting African slaves from harm. In most cases Indian could be killed because they had no rights while Africans had some protection.   

African-American culture is rooted in Africa. It is a blend of chiefly sub-Saharan African and Sahelean cultures. Although slavery greatly restricted the ability of Americans of African descent to practice their cultural traditions, many practices, values, and beliefs survived and over time have modified or blended with white culture and other cultures such as that of Native Americans. There are some facets of African-American culture that were accentuated by the slavery period. The result is a unique and dynamic culture that has had and continues to have a profound impact on mainstream American culture, as well as the culture of the broader world.

Elaborate rituals and ceremonies were a significant part of African Culture. West Africans believed that spirits dwelled in their surrounding nature. From this disposition, they treated their surroundings with mindful care. Africans also believed spiritual life source existed after death. They believed that ancestors in this spiritual realm could then mediate between the supreme creator and the living. Honor and prayer was displayed to these " ancient ones", the spirit of those past. West Africans also believed in spiritual possession.

In the beginning of the eighteenth century Islam began to spread across North Africa; this shift in religion began displacing traditional African spiritual practices. The enslaved Africans brought this complex religious dynamic within their culture to America. This fusion of traditional African beliefs with Christianity provided a common place for those practicing religion in Africa and America.

After emancipation, unique African-American traditions continued to flourish, as distinctive traditions or radical innovations in music, art, literature, religion, cuisine, and other fields. 20th-century sociologists, such as Gunnar Myrdal, believed that African Americans had lost most cultural ties with Africa. 

But, anthropological field research by Melville Herskovits and others demonstrated that there has been a continuum of African traditions among Africans of the Diaspora. The greatest influence of African cultural practices on European culture is found below the Mason-Dixon line in the American South.

For many years African-American culture developed separately from European-American culture, both because of slavery and the persistence of racial discrimination in America, as well as African-American slave descendants' desire to create and maintain their own traditions. Today, African-American culture has become a significant part of American culture and yet, at the same time, remains a distinct cultural body.

From the earliest days of American slavery in the 17th century, slave owners sought to exercise control over their slaves by attempting to strip them of their African culture. The physical isolation and societal marginalization of African slaves and, later, of their free progeny, however, facilitated the retention of significant elements of traditional culture among Africans in the New World generally, and in the U.S. in particular. Slave owners deliberately tried to repress independent political or cultural organization in order to deal with the many slave rebellions or acts of resistance that took place in the United States, Brazil, Haiti, and the Dutch Guyanas.

African cultures, slavery, slave rebellions, and the civil rights movements have shaped African-American religious, familial, political, and economic behaviors. The imprint of Africa is evident in a myriad of ways: in politics, economics, language, music, hairstyles, fashion, dance, religion, cuisine, and worldview.

In turn, African-American culture has had a pervasive, transformative impact on many elements of mainstream American culture. This process of mutual creative exchange is called creolization. Over time, the culture of African slaves and their descendants has been ubiquitous in its impact on not only the dominant American culture, but on world culture as well.

African American Education

The Geechee people of South Carolina

who still exist today

Generations of hardships imposed on the African-American community created distinctive language patterns. Slave owners often intentionally mixed people who spoke different African languages so as to discourage communication in any language other than English. This, combined with prohibitions against education, led to the development of pidgins, simplified mixtures of two or more languages that speakers of different languages could use to communicate. Examples of pidgins that became fully developed languages include Creole, common to Louisiana, and Gullah, common to the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia.

African American Vernacular English (AAVE) is a variety (dialect, ethnolect, and sociolect) of the American English language closely associated with the speech of, but not exclusive to, African Americans. While AAVE is academically considered a legitimate dialect because of its logical structure, some of both whites and African Americans consider it slang or the result of a poor command of Standard American English. Many African Americans who were born outside the American South still speak with hints of AAVE or southern dialect. Inner-city African-American children who are isolated by speaking only AAVE sometimes have more difficulty with standardized testing and, after school, moving to the mainstream world for work. It is common for many speakers of AAVE to code switch between AAVE and Standard American English depending on the setting.

Slaveholders limited or prohibited education of enslaved African Americans because they feared it might empower their chattel and inspire or enable emancipatory ambitions. In the United States, the legislation that denied slaves formal education likely contributed to their maintaining a strong oral tradition, a common feature of indigenous African cultures. African-based oral traditions became the primary means of preserving history, mores, and other cultural information among the people. This was consistent with the griot practices of oral history in many African and other cultures that did not rely on the written word. Many of these cultural elements have been passed from generation to generation through storytelling. The folktales provided African Americans the opportunity to inspire and educate one another.

Examples of African-American folktales include trickster tales of Br'er Rabbit and heroic tales such as that ofJohn Henry. The Uncle Remus stories by Joel Chandler Harris helped to bring African-American folk tales into mainstream adoption. Harris did not appreciate the complexity of the stories nor their potential for a lasting impact on society. Other narratives that appear as important, recurring motifs in African-American culture are the "Signifying Monkey", "The Ballad of Shine", and the legend of Stagger Lee.

The legacy of the African-American oral tradition manifests in diverse forms. African-American preachers tend to perform rather than simply speak. The emotion of the subject is carried through the speaker's tone, volume, and cadence, which tend to mirror the rising action, climax, and descending action of the sermon. Often song, dance, verse, and structured pauses are placed throughout the sermon.

Call and response is another pervasive element of the African-American oral tradition. It manifests in worship in what is commonly referred to as the "amen corner." In direct contrast to recent tradition in other American and Western cultures, it is an acceptable and common audience reaction to interrupt and affirm the speaker. This pattern of interaction is also in evidence in music, particularly in blues and jazz forms. Hyperbolic and provocative, even incendiary, rhetoric is another aspect of African-American oral tradition often evident in the pulpit in a tradition sometimes referred to as "prophetic speech."

Other aspects of African-American oral tradition include the dozens, signifying, trash talk, rhyming, semantic inversion and word play, many of which have found their way into mainstream American popular culture and become international phenomena.

Spoken word artistry is another example of how the African-American oral tradition has influenced modern popular culture. Spoken word artists employ the same techniques as African-American preachers including movement, rhythm, and audience participation. Rap music from the 1980s and beyond has been seen as an extension of oral culture.

Picture of Langston Hughes

The first major public recognition of African-American culture occurred during the Harlem Renaissance. In the 1920s and 1930s, African-American music, literature, and art gained wide notice. Authors such as Zora Neale Hurston and Nella Larsen and poets such as Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Countee Cullen wrote works describing the African-American experience. Jazz, swing, blues and other musical forms entered American popular music. African-American artists such as William H. Johnson and Palmer Hayden created unique works of art featuring African Americans.

The Harlem Renaissance was also a time of increased political involvement for African Americans. Among the notable African-American political movements founded in the early 20th century are the United Negro Improvement Association and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The Nation of Islam, a notable quasi-Islamic religious movement, also began in the early 1930s.

The Black Political Movement

The Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s followed in the wake of the non-violent American Civil Rights Movement. The movement promoted racial pride and ethnic cohesion in contrast to the focus on integration of the Civil Rights Movement, and adopted a more militant posture in the face of racism. It also inspired a new renaissance in African-American literary and artistic expression generally referred to as the African-American or "Black Arts Movement."

Music, Literature, and Art

The works of popular recording artists such as Nina Simone ("Young, Gifted and Black") and The Impressions("Keep On Pushing"), as well as the poetry, fine arts, and literature of the time, shaped and reflected the growing racial and political consciousness. Among the most prominent writers of the African-American Arts Movement were poet Nikki Giovanni; poet and publisher Don L. Lee, who later became known as Haki Madhubuti; poet and playwright Leroi Jones, later known as Amiri Baraka; and Sonia Sanchez. Other influential writers were Ed Bullins, Dudley Randall, Mari Evans, June Jordan, Larry Neal, and Ahmos Zu-Bolton.

Another major aspect of the African-American Arts Movement was the infusion of the African aesthetic, a return to a collective cultural sensibility and ethnic pride that was much in evidence during the Harlem Renaissance and in the celebration of Négritude among the artistic and literary circles in the U.S., Caribbean, and the African continent nearly four decades earlier: the idea that "black is beautiful." During this time, there was a resurgence of interest in, and an embrace of, elements of African culture within African-American culture that had been suppressed or devalued to conform to Eurocentric America. Natural hairstyles, such as the afro, and African clothing, such as the dashiki, gained popularity. More importantly, the African-American aesthetic encouraged personal pride and political awareness among African Americans.

After the American Civil War, museums and galleries began more frequently to display the work of African-American artists. Cultural expression in mainstream venues was still limited by the dominant European aesthetic and by racial prejudice. To increase the visibility of their work, many African-American artists traveled to Europe where they had greater freedom. 

It was not until the Harlem Renaissance that more European Americans began to pay attention to African-American art in America.

During the 1920s, artists such as Raymond Barthé, Aaron Douglas,  Augusta Savage,  and photographer James Van Der Zee  became well known for their work. During the Great Depression, new opportunities arose for these and other African-American artists under the WPA. In later years, other programs and institutions, such as the New York City-based Harmon Foundation, helped to foster African-American artistic talent.Augusta Savage, Elizabeth Catlett, Lois Mailou Jones, Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, and others exhibited in museums and juried art shows, and built reputations and followings for themselves.

In the 1950s and 1960s, there were very few widely accepted African-American artists. Despite this, The Highwaymen, a loose association of 27 African-American artists from Ft. Pierce, Florida, created idyllic, quickly realized images of the Florida landscape and peddled some 50,000 of them from the trunks of their cars. They sold their art directly to the public rather than through galleries and art agents, thus receiving the name "The Highwaymen". Rediscovered in the mid-1990s, today they are recognized as an important part of American folk history. Their artwork is widely collected by enthusiasts and original pieces can easily fetch thousands of dollars in auctions and sales.

The Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s was another period of resurgent interest in African-American art. During this period, several African-American artists gained national prominence, among them Lou Stovall, Ed Love, Charles White, and Jeff Donaldson. Donaldson and a group of African-American artists formed the Afrocentric collective AfriCOBRA, which remains in existence today.

The sculptor Martin Puryear, whose work has been acclaimed for years, was being honored with a 30-year retrospective of his work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in November 2007. Notable contemporary African-American artists include Willie Cole, David Hammons, Eugene J. Martin, Mose Tolliver, the late William Tolliver, and Kara Walker.

African-American literature has its roots in the oral traditions of African slaves in America. The slaves used stories and fables in much the same way as they used music. These stories influenced the earliest African-American writers and poets in the 18th century such as Phillis Wheatley and Olaudah Equiano. These authors reached early high points by telling slave narratives.

During the early 20th century Harlem Renaissance, numerous authors and poets, such as Langston Hughes,W. E. B. Du Bois, and Booker T. Washington, grappled with how to respond to discrimination in America. Authors during the Civil Rights era, such as Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Gwendolyn Brooks wrote about issues of racial segregation, oppression, and other aspects of African-American life. This tradition continues today with authors who have been accepted as an integral part of American literature, with works such as Roots: The Saga of an American Family by Alex Haley, The Color Purple by Alice Walker, Beloved by Nobel Prize-winning Toni Morrison, and fiction works by Octavia Butler and Walter Mosley. Such works have achieved both best-selling and/or award-winning status.

African American Fashion

The Black Arts Movement, a cultural explosion of the 1960s, saw the incorporation of surviving cultural dress with elements from modern fashion and West African traditional clothing to create a uniquely African-American traditional style. 

Kente cloth is the best known African textile. These festive woven patterns, which exist in numerous varieties, were originally made by the Ashanti and Ewe peoples of Ghana and Togo. Kente fabric also appears in a number of Western style fashions ranging from casual t-shirts to formal bow ties and cummerbunds. Kente strips are often sewn into liturgical and academic robes or worn as stoles. Since the Black Arts Movement, traditional African clothing has been popular amongst African Americans for both formal and informal occasions. Other manifestations of traditional African dress in common evidence in African-American culture are vibrant colors, mud cloth, trade beads and the use of Adinkra motifs in jewelry and in couture and decorator fabrics.

Another common aspect of fashion in African-American culture involves the appropriate dress for worship in the Black church. It is expected in most churches that an individual present their best appearance for worship. African-American women in particular are known for wearing vibrant dresses and suits. An interpretation of a passage from the Christian Bible, "...every woman who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered dishonors her head...", has led to the tradition of wearing elaborate Sunday hats, sometimes known as "crowns."

Hair styling in African-American culture is greatly varied. African-American hair is typically composed of tightly coiled curls. The predominant styles for women involve the straightening of the hair through the application of heat or chemical processes. These treatments form the base for the most commonly socially acceptable hairstyles in the United States. Alternatively, the predominant and most socially acceptable practice for men is to leave one's hair natural.

Often, as men age and begin to lose their hair, the hair is either closely cropped, or the head is shaved completely free of hair. However, since the 1960s, natural hairstyles, such as the afro, braids, and dreadlocks, have been growing in popularity. Despite their association with radical political movements and their vast difference from mainstream Western hairstyles, the styles have attained considerable, but certainly limited, social acceptance.

Maintaining facial hair is more prevalent among African-American men than in other male populations in the U.S. In fact, the soul patch is so named because African-American men, particularly jazz musicians, popularized the style. The preference for facial hair among African-American men is due partly to personal taste, but also because they are more prone than other ethnic groups to develop a condition known aspseudofolliculitis barbae, commonly referred to as razor bumps, many prefer not to shave.

European-Americans have sometimes adopted different hairbrading techniques and other forms of African-American hair. There are also individuals and groups who are working towards raising the standing of the African aesthetic among African Americans and internationally as well. This includes efforts toward promoting as models those with clearly defined African features; the mainstreaming of natural hairstyles; and, in women, fuller, more voluptuous body types.

Religion

While African Americans practice a number of religions, Protestant Christianity is by far the most prevalent. Additionally, 14% of Muslims in the United States and Canada are black.

The religious institutions of African-American Christians commonly are referred to collectively as the black church. During slavery, many slaves were stripped of their African belief systems and typically denied free religious practice, forced to become Christian. Slaves managed, however, to hang on to some practices by integrating them into Christian worship in secret meetings. These practices, including dance, shouts, African rhythms, and enthusiastic singing, remain a large part of worship in the African-American church.

African-American churches taught that all people were equal in God's eyes and viewed the doctrine of obedience to one's master taught in white churches as hypocritical - yet accepted and propagated internal hierarchies and support for corporal punishment of children among other things . Instead the African-American church focused on the message of equality and hopes for a better future. Before and after emancipation, racial segregation in America prompted the development of organized African-American denominations. The first of these was the AME Church founded by Richard Allen in 1787.

After the Civil War the merger of three smaller Baptist groups formed the National Baptist Convention This organization is the largest African-American Christian Denomination and the second largest Baptist denomination in the United States. An African-American church is not necessarily a separate denomination. Several predominantly African-American churches exist as members of predominantly white denominations. African-American churches have served to provide African-American people with leadership positions and opportunities to organize that were denied in mainstream American society. Because of this, African-American pastors became the bridge between the African-American and European American communities and thus played a crucial role in the American Civil Rights Movement.

Like many Christians, African-American Christians sometimes participate in or attend a Christmas play.Black Nativity by Langston Hughes is a re-telling of the classic Nativity story with gospel music. Productions can be found in African-American theaters and churches all over the country.

Generations before the advent of the Atlantic slave trade, Islam was a thriving religion in West Africa due to its peaceful introduction via the lucrative Trans-Saharan trade between prominent tribes in the southern Sahara and the Arabs and Berbers in North Africa. In his attesting to this fact the West African scholar Cheikh Anta Diop explained: "The primary reason for the success of Islam in Black Africa...consequently stems from the fact that it was propagated peacefully at first by solitary Arabo-Berber travelers to certain Black kings and notables, who then spread it about them to those under their jurisdiction". Many first-generation slaves were often able to retain their Muslim identity, their descendants were not. Slaves were either forcibly converted to Christianity as was the case in the Catholic lands or were besieged with gross inconviences to their religious practice such as in the case of the Protestant American mainland.

In the decades after slavery and particularly during the depression era, Islam reemerged in the form of highly visible and sometimes controversial movements in the African-American community. The first of these of note was the Moorish Science Temple of America, founded by Noble Drew Ali. Ali had a profound influence onWallace Fard, who later founded the Black nationalist Nation of Islam in 1930. Elijah Muhammad became head of the organization in 1934. Much like Malcolm X, who left the Nation of Islam in 1964, many African-American Muslims now follow traditional Islam.

Many former members of the Nation of Islam converted to Sunni Islam when Warith Deen Mohammed took control of the organization after his father's death in 1975 and taught its members the traditional form of Islam based on the Qur'an. A survey by the Council on American-Islamic Relations shows that 30% of SunniMosque attendees are African Americans. In fact, most African-American Muslims are orthodox Muslims, as only 2% are of the Nation of Islam.

There are 150,000 African Americans in the United States who practice Judaism. 

Some of these are members of mainstream Jewish groups like the Reform, Conservative, or Orthodox branches of Judaism; others belong to non-mainstream Jewish groups like the Black Hebrew Israelites. The Black Hebrew Israelites are a collection of African-American religious organizations whose practices and beliefs are derived to some extent from Judaism. Their varied teachings often include that African Americans are descended from the BiblicalIsraelites.

Although there is a common misconception that African-Americans cannot be Jews and vice versa, studies have shown in the last 10 to 15 years there has been major increase in African-Americans identifying as Jewish. As such this misconception may become less common in the future. Rabbi Capers Funnye, the first cousin of Michelle Obama, says in response to skepticism by some on people being African-American and Jewish at the same time, "I am a Jew, and that breaks through all color and ethnic barriers."

Aside from Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, there are also African Americans who follow Buddhism and a number of other religions. There is a small but growing number of African Americans who participate in African traditional religions, such as West African Vodun, Santería, Ifá and diasporic traditions like the Rastafari movement. Many of them are immigrants or descendants of immigrants from the Caribbean and South America, where these are practiced. Because of religious practices, such as animal sacrifice, which are no longer common among the larger American religions, these groups may be viewed negatively and are sometimes the victims of harassment. It must be stated, however, that since the Supreme Court judgementthat was given to the Lukumi Babaluaye church of Florida in 1993, there has been no major legal challenge to their right to function as they see fit.

In a 2008 Pew Forum survey, 12% of African Americans described themselves as atheist (<0.5%), agnostic(1%), or nothing in particular (11%).

Cuisine

The cultivation and use of many agricultural products in the United States, such as yams, peanuts, rice, okra,sorghum, grits, watermelon, indigo dyes, and cotton, can be traced to African influences. African-American foods reflect creative responses to racial and economic oppression and poverty. Under slavery, African Americans were not allowed to eat better cuts of meat, and after emancipation many often were too poor to afford them.

A traditional soul food dinner consisting of fried chicken with macaroni and cheese, collard greens, breaded fried okra and cornbread.

Soul food, a hearty cuisine commonly associated with African Americans in the South (but also common to African Americans nationwide), makes creative use of inexpensive products procured through farming and subsistence hunting and fishing. Pig intestines are boiled and sometimes battered and fried to makechitterlings, also known as "chitlins." Ham hocks and neck bones provide seasoning to soups, beans and boiled greens (turnip greens, collard greens, and mustard greens). Other common foods, such as fried chicken and fish, macaroni and cheese, cornbread, and hoppin' john (black-eyed peas and rice) are prepared simply. When the African-American population was considerably more rural than it generally is today, rabbit,possum, squirrel, and waterfowl were important additions to the diet. Many of these food traditions are especially predominant in many parts of the rural South.

Traditionally prepared soul food is often high in fat, sodium, and starch. Highly suited to the physically demanding lives of laborers, farmhands and rural lifestyles generally, it is now a contributing factor to obesity,heart disease, and diabetes in a population that has become increasingly more urban and sedentary. As a result, more health-conscious African Americans are using alternative methods of preparation, eschewingtrans fats in favor of natural vegetable oils and substituting smoked turkey for fatback and other, cured pork products; limiting the amount of refined sugar in desserts; and emphasizing the consumption of more fruits and vegetables than animal protein. There is some resistance to such changes, however, as they involve deviating from long culinary tradition.

The Family

When slavery was practiced in the United States, it was common for families to be separated through sale. Even during slavery, however, many African-American families managed to maintain strong familial bonds. Free African men and women, who managed to buy their own freedom by being hired out, who were emancipated, or who had escaped their masters, often worked long and hard to buy the members of their families who remained in bondage and send for them.

Others, separated from blood kin, formed close bonds based on fictive kin; play relations, play aunts, cousins, and the like. This practice, a holdover from African oral traditions such as sanankouya, survived Emancipation, with non-blood family friends commonly accorded the status and titles of blood relations. This broader, more African concept of what constitutes family and community, and the deeply rooted respect for elders that is part of African traditional societies may be the genesis of the common use of the terms like "aunt", "uncle", "brother", "sister", "Mother", and "Mama" when addressing other African-American people, some of whom may be complete strangers.

Immediately after slavery, African-American families struggled to reunite and rebuild what had been taken. As late as 1960, when most African Americans lived under some form of segregation, 78% of African-American families were headed by married couples. This number steadily declined during the latter half of the 20th century. A number of factors, including attitudes towards education, gender roles, and poverty have created a situation where, for the first time since slavery, a majority of African-American children live in a household with only one parent, typically the mother. These figures appear to indicate a weak African-American nuclear family structure, especially within a large patriarchal society. However, if you look at the White community, they seem to be hit with the same family social problems and causes as African Americans.

This apparent weakness is balanced by mutual-aid systems established by extended family members to provide emotional and economic support. Older family members pass on social and cultural traditions such asreligion and manners to younger family members. In turn, the older family members are cared for by younger family members when they are unable to care for themselves. These relationships exist at all economic levels in the African-American community, providing strength and support both to the African-American family and the community.

African-American population centers

African-American neighborhoods are types of ethnic enclaves found in many cities in the United States. The formation of African-American neighborhoods is closely linked to the history of segregation in the United States, either through formal laws, or as a product of social norms. Despite this, African-American neighborhoods have played an important role in the development of nearly all aspects of both African-American culture and broader American culture.

Many affluent African-American communities exist today, including the following: Baldwin Hills and Ladera Heights, California; Redan and Cascade Heights, Georgia; Mitchellville, Maryland; Southfield, Michigan;Quinby, South Carolina; Forest Park, Oklahoma; Mount Airy, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. These communities embody a support system for Blacks to survive. These communities defy stereotypes that African Americans cannot survive without white influence. Most of these neighborhoods are self-sufficient in that the schools, government, and commerce are all maintained by African Americans and are doing fairly well, if not better than, their white counterparts.

Although African-American neighborhoods may suffer from civic disinvestment, with lower-quality schools, less effective policing, and fire protection, there are institutions such as churches and museums and political organizations that help to improve the physical and social capital of African-American neighborhoods. In African-American neighborhoods the churches may be an important sources of social cohesion. For some African Americans the kind spirituality learned through these churches works as a protective factor against the corrosive forces of racism. 

Museums devoted to African-American history are also found in many African-American neighborhoods.

Although many lower class African-American neighborhoods are located in inner cities, and these are the mostly residential neighborhoods located closest to the central business district. The built environment is often row houses or brownstones, mixed with older single family homes that may be converted to multi family homes. In some areas there are larger apartment buildings. Shotgun houses are an important part of the built environment of some southern African-American neighborhoods. The houses consist of three to five rooms in a row with no hallways. This African-American house design is found in both rural and urban southern areas, mainly in African-American communities and neighborhoods.