Movements and Debates

Négritude, a movement led by French-speaking Caribbean and African writers like Aimé Césaire of Martinique from the 1930s to the 1950s, and Negrismo, its counterpart in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, celebrated African heritage and rejected the claim that colonialism 'civilized' anyone. Both were shaped by the New Negro movement and shared its pride and push for liberation, though they didn't always picture Blackness or Africa the same way, and artists like Loïs Mailou Jones and Wifredo Lam carried these ideas into painting.

The Black Freedom movement (mid-1940s to 1970s) included both the Civil Rights movement and Black Power, and it reached far beyond the United States. Leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Maya Angelou and W.E.B. Du Bois visited newly independent Ghana, many embraced pan-Africanism, and solidarity between African Americans and Africans, as 17 African nations won independence in 1960's 'Year of Africa,' drew global attention to both struggles.

More than a million African Americans served in a still-segregated military in World War II, including the Tuskegee Airmen, the first Black pilots in the US military, and the all-Black, all-women 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion. The Pittsburgh Courier's Double V campaign (1942) called for victory over fascism abroad and over racism at home. The G.I. Bill (1944) promised all veterans help with college, homes and businesses, but local Jim Crow practices kept many Black veterans from its full benefits.

Into the mid-1900s, Black Americans in both the North and the South faced segregation and discrimination in schools, housing, transportation and voting, which gave rise to the Civil Rights movement. In Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Supreme Court ruled school segregation unconstitutional, citing Kenneth and Mamie Clark's doll tests, but resistance and de facto segregation continued, as the Little Rock Nine found when they integrated Central High School in 1957.

For much of the twentieth century, the federal government and banks practiced redlining: they refused mortgages in Black neighborhoods and other neighborhoods of color, which maps like those of the Home Owners' Loan Corporation marked 'hazardous' in red. Shut out of home ownership, African Americans lost a key way to build and pass on wealth, and families who moved into white neighborhoods faced hostility and sometimes mob violence, the situation behind Lorraine Hansberry's play A Raisin in the Sun (1959). The Fair Housing Act of 1968 outlawed housing discrimination, but the wealth and health gaps that redlining created remain.

The 'Big Four' civil rights organizations, the NAACP, SCLC, CORE and SNCC, used nonviolent direct action such as sit-ins, marches, boycotts and lawsuits, which were often met with violence. Major campaigns included the 1963 Birmingham Children's Crusade, the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and 1964's Mississippi Freedom Summer, and they helped win the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Black women were central leaders of the Civil Rights movement, even when they faced sexism inside it. Ella Baker championed grassroots, group-centered leadership and encouraged the students who formed SNCC, Fannie Lou Hamer fought for voting rights in Mississippi, and Dorothy Height led the National Council of Negro Women for 40 years. Local campaigns mattered too: in the 1964 New York City school boycott, about 460,000 students stayed home in one day to protest segregated schools.

Artists carried the freedom struggle to audiences around the world: the Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén wrote about the 1957 Little Rock crisis, and jazz bassist Charles Mingus mocked Arkansas governor Orval Faubus in his music. Freedom songs adapted from spirituals, hymns, gospel and labor songs, like 'We Shall Overcome,' gave marchers courage and unity, and Black churches were where many of them were sung and shaped.

The Nation of Islam, founded in Detroit in 1930 and led from 1934 by Elijah Muhammad, blended Islamic practice with Black nationalist ideas, and many members replaced their surnames with 'X' to reject names that came from enslavers. By the mid-1960s many African Americans turned to Black Power, which stressed self-determination, self-defense and racial pride; Malcolm X, who later left the Nation of Islam for Sunni Islam, urged Black people to build their own institutions, vote and defend themselves.

The Black Arts movement (1965–1975) brought together poets, playwrights, musicians and visual artists who saw art as a tool for Black liberation, though they didn't agree on one style. Like the Harlem Renaissance before it, it connected new artists to earlier Black traditions, and it launched Black magazines, publishers, theaters and some of the first African American Studies programs; Elizabeth Catlett's Negro es Bello II (1969) is the required source.

Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in Oakland in 1966, drawing on Malcolm X's ideas. Its Ten-Point Program demanded freedom, housing, health care, education and jobs. The Panthers cited the Second Amendment to carry guns for self-defense, which led to armed clashes and an FBI campaign (COINTELPRO) against them. Women made up about half the members and often led local offices, and the party ran 'survival programs' like free breakfast for schoolchildren and free health clinics.

The Black Is Beautiful movement of the 1960s celebrated natural hair like the Afro, African-inspired fashion like dashikis, African and Islamic names and new holidays like Kwanzaa (1966), rejecting the idea that Black people should conform to white beauty standards. Afrocentricity, an approach developed by scholar Molefi Kete Asante, places Africa and people of African descent at the center of history; critics argue it can blur differences among diaspora peoples and mirror Eurocentrism instead of challenging it.

Drawing on earlier activists like Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman, the Black feminist movement of the 1970s argued that Black women face racism, sexism and class oppression at the same time. The Combahee River Collective, a Boston group of Black feminists and lesbians named for Tubman's raid, argued in its 1977 Statement that freeing Black women would require ending every system of oppression. Alice Walker later coined 'womanist,' and Kimberlé Crenshaw coined 'intersectionality' in 1989 and developed it in the early 1990s.

'Interlocking systems of oppression' is a concept developed by sociologist Patricia Hill Collins, building on earlier Black feminist thinkers. It describes how race, gender, class, sexuality and ability work together, not separately, to shape people's chances in education, health, housing and work. Writers such as Gwendolyn Brooks and Audre Lorde show this in their work: in Brooks's novel Maud Martha (1953), a young Black woman deals with race, gender and class in everyday life.

Desegregation, education and city jobs helped the Black middle class grow, but a large racial wealth gap remains because of past discrimination in housing and jobs: in 2016 the typical white family had about ten times the wealth of the typical Black family. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 boosted Black political power, and the number of Black elected officials rose from about 1,500 in 1970 to about 9,000 by 2006. Shirley Chisholm became the first Black woman elected to Congress (1968) and helped found the Congressional Black Caucus, and Barack Obama (2008) and Kamala Harris (2020) were elected the first Black president and vice president.

Black America is growing more diverse: the Black population reached about 47 million by 2019, the number of Black immigrants (mostly from Africa and the Caribbean) has nearly doubled since 2000, and more people identify as both Black and Hispanic or as multiracial. 'Black' is a shared term for people of many ancestries, and while about two-thirds of Black adults are Protestant and the Black church remains a center of community and activism, younger Black adults are less likely to be Protestant than their elders.

African American music, from spirituals, blues and jazz to gospel, R&B and hip-hop, builds on African elements like improvisation, call and response and syncopation, and it has reshaped music around the world. Rock and roll grew from the work of Black performers such as Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Bo Diddley and Little Richard. Hip-hop began among Black and Latino young people in the Bronx in the 1970s, with DJs like Kool Herc and Grandmaster Flash, MCs, breakdancing and graffiti, and it carries on the political voice of the Black Freedom and Black Arts movements.

Filmmakers like Oscar Micheaux, who made dozens of films from the 1920s to the 1940s, cast Black actors in complex roles to challenge Hollywood's racist stereotypes. Black theater grew in cities reshaped by the Great Migration, producing plays like August Wilson's Fences (1987), and TV shows from Soul Train (1971) to The Jeffersons, Good Times, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and Black-ish showed a wider range of Black life.

Black athletes broke barriers despite segregation. Black jockeys won many early Kentucky Derbies, starting with Oliver Lewis in 1875; Black players built the Negro leagues until Jackie Robinson integrated Major League Baseball in 1947; and Jesse Owens took four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Many athletes used their fame to protest, from Muhammad Ali refusing to serve in the Vietnam War (1967) and Tommie Smith and John Carlos raising their fists at the 1968 Olympics to Colin Kaepernick kneeling during the national anthem in 2016 to protest police brutality.

African Americans have shaped science and medicine, from Onesimus, an enslaved man who taught colonial Boston about smallpox inoculation, to botanist George Washington Carver, NASA's Katherine Johnson and Mary Jackson, and Mae Jemison, the first African American woman in space (1992). Barred from white institutions, Black doctors built their own hospitals, medical schools and the National Medical Association, while eugenics and the use of Henrietta Lacks's cells without her consent show how racism and disability bias harmed Black people in medicine.

African American Studies keeps growing as a field that studies Black history, culture and inequality around the world from many angles. Afrofuturism reimagines Black pasts (for example, a past without oppression) and pictures Black futures shaped by science and technology. Early hints appear in the work of Phillis Wheatley and Benjamin Banneker; later examples include Sun Ra's music, Nichelle Nichols's role as Uhura on Star Trek and the film Black Panther (2018).