Alternative spellings

• African-American

Adjective

African American (comparative more African American, superlative most African American)

Positive African American

Comparative more African American

Superlative most African American

1. Alternative spelling of African-American.

Noun

Singular African American

Plural African Americans

African American (plural African Americans)

1. Alternative spelling of African-American.

African Americans (also referred to as Black Americans or Afro-Americans, and formerly as American Negroes) are citizens or residents of the United States who have origins in any of the black populations of Africa. In the United States, the terms are generally used for Americans with at least partial Sub-Saharan African ancestry.

Most African Americans are the direct descendants of captive Africans who survived the slavery era within the boundaries of the present United States, although some are—or are descended from—immigrants from African, Caribbean, Central American or South American nations. As an adjective, the term is usually spelled African-American.

African-American history starts in the 17th century with indentured servitude in the American colonies and progresses onto the election of an African American as the 44th and current President of the United States—Barack Obama. Between those landmarks there were other events and issues, both resolved and ongoing, that were faced by African Americans. Some of these were slavery, reconstruction, development of the African-American community, participation in the great military conflicts of the United States, racial segregation, and the Civil Rights Movement.

Black Americans make up the single largest racial minority in the United States and form the second largest racial group after whites in the United States.

An African American (also Afro-American) is a person in the United States whose ancestors, usually in predominant part, were indigenous to Sub-Saharan Africa.

Sourced

• I am America. I am the part you won't recognize. But get used to me. Black, confident, cocky; my name, not yours; my religion, not yours; my goals, my own; get used to me.
  • Muhammad Ali, The Greatest

• If we accept and acquiesce in the face of discrimination, we accept the responsibility ourselves and allow those responsible to salve their conscience by believing that they have our acceptance and concurrence. We should, therefore, protest openly everything... that smacks of discrimination or slander.
  • Mary McLeod Bethune, "Certain Unalienable Rights", What the Negro Wants, edited by Rayford W. Logan

• The workings of the human heart are the profoundest mystery of the universe. One moment they make us despair of our kind, and the next we see in them the reflection of the divine image.
  • Charles W. Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition

• It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others... One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warrings ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
  • W.E.B. Dubois, The Souls of Black Folk

The seal and the constitution, reflects the thinking of the founding fathers that this was to be a nation by white people, and for white people. Native Americans, Blacks, and all other non-white people, were to be the burden bearers for the real citizens of this nation.

• • Louis Farrakhan, "The Million Man March" (1995)

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Fri Sep 3 10:55:50 2010