African Americans or Black Americans, also formerly called Afro-Americans, are an American racial and ethnic group. As defined by the United States census, they are Americans who have ancestry from "a
Slaves processing tobacco in 17th-century Virginia, illustration from 1670
The first slave auction at New Amsterdam in 1655; illustration from 1895 by Howard Pyle
Reproduction of a handbill advertising a slave auction in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1769
Crispus Attucks, the first "martyr" of the American Revolution. He was of Native American and African American descent.
The civil rights movement was a social movement in the United States from 1954 to 1968 which aimed to abolish legalized racial segregation, discrimination, and disenfranchisement in the country, which
The 1963 March on Washington participants and leaders marching from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial
13th Amendment in the National Archives, bearing the signature of Abraham Lincoln
The mob-style lynching of Will James, Cairo, Illinois, 1909
Lynching victim Will Brown, who was mutilated and burned during the Omaha, Nebraska race riot of 1919. Postcards and photographs of lynchings were popular souvenirs in the U.S.