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C Ch ha ap pt te er r 3 3 Black American Geographies: The Historical and Contemporary Distributions of African Americans EUGENE TETTEY-FIO INTRODUCTION Until recently, blacks constituted the largest minority population in America. The U.S. Census 2000 reported about 34 million blacks and approximately 35 million Latinos. Even though Latinos have surpassed blacks as the largest minority group, the token minority status of blacks remains in social focus. This is partly the result of the better assimilation of other ethnic minority groups and the persistence of Dubois’ “color line” in the United States. Highly segregated, inner city black American neighborhoods have become symptomatic of all the negative perceptions of life in the U.S. Pervasive poverty, persistent low income jobs, infrastructure deficient neighborhoods , and above average crime rates are a few of the characteristics of neighborhoods that many blacks inhabit . Black spatial clusters are often islands of social isolation and physical and “moral” decay. These clusters were formed in response to historical, social, economic and political processes. This chapter examines the processes that have controlled and channeled black settlements in America from a historical perspective, as well as in terms of more recent trends and geographic patterns emerging on urban and regional bases. HISTORY OF BLACK SETTLEMENT AND MOVEMENT Africans were among the first non-indigenous permanent settlers of what is now the U.S. They were among the settlers who came to America, 1607–1700. They came initially as indentured servants and as refugees from Spanish colonies. However, the need for hard physical labor to work in subtropical and tropical conditions resulted in slavery, Virginia’s slave code of the mid-1600s ushered blacks into slavery in colonial America. Soon after, Maryland, the Carolinas, Georgia, the Middle colonies and New England replicated Virginia’s code. The first African slaves shipped across the Atlantic Ocean arrived in North America in the early 17th century. By 1650 there were 1,600 blacks in America, about three percent of the estimated population of the colonies. Over all, an estimated 10 million slaves were brought to the Americas (Farley and Allen, 1987). Forced black migration to America resulted in 757,208 (19.2 percent) people of African descent by 1776 of which 697,624 (92.1 percent) were slaves. By 1776, the population of free blacks had reached 25,000 and 60,000 by 1790. After 1790, natural increase accounted more for black population growth than importation and the percentage of foreign-born blacks was minimal by the end of the 18th century. Regional patterns of black distribution had been established by 1900 but would undergo fundamental changes in the decades to follow. 32 Eugene Tettey-Fio Pre-1910 Distribution of Blacks Before the beginning of the 19th century, most blacks resided in the Chesapeake Bay area. Virginia and Maryland were the primary black concentrations and the Carolinas were secondary centers. Between 1790 and 1860 the number of blacks increased dramatically from about 700,000 to four million (Rose, 2000). This demographic development was associated with the establishment of the cotton plantation economy of the south. Plantation agriculture was the major determinant of the distribution of blacks until the beginning of the 20th century. The increasing demand for black labor in the expanding cotton growing economies of the south initiated regional and interregional distributions of the black population from the upper south to the lower south. Black migration at this time was from east to west. Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas, all primary cottonproducing areas, experienced major influxes of black labor. At the onset of the Civil War a black cultural hearth had formed with clear boundaries overlapping the states of the Confederacy. The black cultural hearth included all counties with at least 33 percent black in 1910 and included states from Texas to North Carolina (Hart, 1960; Lewis, 1969). At that time, Mississippi and Georgia each had more than a million blacks. Most of other southern states from Virginia to Texas had over one-half million blacks (Rose, 2000). It is within this spatial and social context of restricted movement and bondage in the American south that Africans of diverse ethnic backgrounds became integrated, or “Americanized” into a single cultural unit. Blacks in bondage had little control over their movements in America. Their settlement was confined to places designated by plantation owners. Demands for forced labor dictated where and how blacks could reside. Post-Civil War emancipation of blacks did little to alter their settlement patterns and interregional movement...

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