African diaspora in the United States

African Americans
Proportion of African Americans, as of the 2024 U.S. census
Total population
52,775,575
Languages
American English, African-American Vernacular English, Gullah, Louisiana Creole.

The African Diaspora in the United States typically refers to both the population of the United States descended from enslaved Africans alongside voluntary African immigrants and are typically referred to as "African Americans" or "Black people". The exploitation and oppression historically and presently visited upon Black people in the U.S. such as the Atlantic slave trade and plantation slavery in the primitive accumulation of capital, through the Civil War and the destruction of chattel slavery, to the mass migration into industrial labor places them as a central place in the great class struggles of the twentieth century and the present.

History

African presence in the United States began in 1619 with the arrival of enslaved Africans at Jamestown. Slavery in the Americas arose as an economic system linked to the emergence of a world market and the accumulation of capital. Primitive accumulation, colonial plunder, the slave trade, and the plantation system were the means by which the cotton produced by African slaves in the American South fed the textile mills of Lancashire and New England and fueled the industrialisation of Britain.

Racial ideology was the ideological justification of this system, the classification of human beings into races, and the ideas of Black inferiority, were developed to justify the enslavement of Africans and to divide the working class. Race as a concept itself was developed in Spain as a result of a justification for the end of the Reconquista.

The Statesian Revolution of 1776 established the independence of the United States but left slavery intact, the slaveholding planters were a force within the newly independent republic. The blow against slavery came in the Statesian Civil War which was a conflict between the slave-based plantation economy of the South and the industrial capitalism of the North.  The victory of the North and the destruction of slavery completed the bourgeois-democratic revolution in the United States, removing the last obstacle to the development of industrial capitalism.

The Reconstruction, born after the end of slavery, established a temporary government of freed slaves and poor whites for a brief period but its refusal to confiscate the plantations and redistribute the land to the freed slaves doomed the Reconstruction and allowed for the restoration of the old slaveowner class in new form. The alliance of Black and white peasants and workers such as the Populist movement of the 1890s threatened the ruling class and as a response, they responded with the systematic promotion of racial prejudice and the legal codification of Jim Crow segregation.

Jim Crow was a deliberate ruling-class strategy to divide the working class of the South, and the same dynamic occurred in the North, where employers brought Black workers from the South to serve as strikebreakers and created racial antagonism within the factories e.g. Henry Ford attempted to use African American workers as scabs in the 1941 UAW strike, which failed.

The Great Migration, in which millions of African Americans moved from the rural South to the industrial cities of the North, transformed the Black population into a proletariat. By the mid-twentieth century, the majority of African Americans were wage workers, working in the industries of auto, steel, meatpacking, and transportation. The civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s arose from this proletarianization. Its mass base was the Black working class of the southern cities and northern industrial centers, the movement achieved destroying legal segregation, but it happened within the framework of the existing social order.

The civil rights movement after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 fell apart and co-opted as the ruling class responded to the movement by cultivating a layer of the Black labor aristocracy and integrating them into power through the Democratic Party and the result was the emergence of a Black bourgeoisie represented as a president, vice president, and secretary of defense while the conditions of the majority of Black workers worsens.