Africans immigrants in America

Africa is the source of one of the principal American ethnic groups. The vast majority of the 25 million Afro-Americans in the United States are descendants of the 400,000 black Africans who were transported to North America against their will before the United States banned the slave trade in the first decade of the 19th century. (See Afro-Americans; see also Central and South Americans; Dominicans; Haitians; West Indians.) That was not the end, however, of the movement of people from Africa to the United States. Voluntary migration has brought a good many others since.

In the 19th century only a few came, on the average less than 30 per year, according to U.S. immigration records, which until the 1960s never recorded the country of origin of immigrants from the African continent. By World War I the average was closer to 1,000 a year; following the war the number dropped sharply as a result of the restrictive legislation of the 1920s and the Great Depression. The numbers began to climb again after World War II. Approximately 14,000 Africans entered the United States between 1951 and 1960; 29,000 between 1961 and 1970; and in the 1970s the total probably reached 60,000. This last figure includes Egyptians, who alone among immigrants from Africa have been separately tabulated since 1967. [See Copts; see also Arabs.)

Until very recently, however, few of the immigrants from Africa, as distinguished from the students who entered on student visas, were indigenous African blacks. In the 1910, 1930, and 1960 U.S. Censuses, 88 or 89 percent of the African-born people were recorded as white. A large number of these came from Britain's colonies. In 1930, 42 percent of the African-born whites claimed English as their mother tongue; 8 percent came from homes in which Italian was spoken; 7 percent French; 6 percent Yiddish; 4 percent Dutch; and 3 percent Armenian. Only 30 percent had spoken a non-European language as a child.

Since World War II the greatest increase in the U.S. African-born population has resulted from the collapse of colonial regimes. There are no data available about the ethnic ties or associations of these white African immigrants, but insofar as they clustered at all, it probably has been not with other Africans but with other Americans of English, Italian, French, or Jewish background. The South Africans may be an exception. (See South Africans.)

Black Africans—Nigerians, Kenyans, Ghanians, Ethiopians, and others—are identifiable on some college campuses and in a few cities, especially Washington, D.C. Most of them have not entered the United States as immigrants and do not plan to settle permanently, although their plans are occasionally affected by political unrest in their homelands. In the 1960s the number of African-born blacks in the United States increased sixfold—from 2,192 in 1960 to 13,442 in 1970. In earlier censuses they accounted for only 12 percent of the African-born immigrants; by 1970 their proportion was 22 percent. It undoubtedly rose higher in the 1970s.

For the most part, the small numbers of African blacks in the United States seem to have blended into the Afro-American community at large. They have come from a large number of independent nations and an even larger number of separate African ethnic groups, and there is no evidence that they consider themselves or will evolve into a cohesive American ethnic group.