Oldest African American church located in GeorgiaAfrican Americans picking cotton in Georgia, 1907
African-American Georgians are residents of the U.S. state of Georgia who are of African American ancestry. As of the 2010 U.S. Census, African Americans were 31.2% of the state's population.[4] Georgia has the second largest African American population in the United States following Texas.[5] Georgia also has a gullah community.[6] African slaves were brought to Georgia during the slave trade.[7]
Spanish colonists brought African slaves to Georgia in 1526.[8] African slaves imported to Georgia primarily came from Angola, Sierra Leone, and the Gambia.[9] Slaves were also imported from South Carolina and the West Indies.[10] Slaves mostly worked on cotton and rice plantations.[11][12] By the mid-19th century the majority of white people in Georgia, like most White Southerners, had come to view slavery as economically indispensable to their society. Georgia, with the largest number plantations of any state in the Southern United States, had in many respects come to epitomize plantation culture. When the American Civil War started in 1861, most white people in the South joined in the defense of the Confederate States of America (Confederacy), which the state Georgia had helped to create.[13]
Between the years 1751 and 1773, the black population in Georgia grew from around 500 to around 15,000. Slaves from Georgia were also brought to Georgia by South Carolinian and Caribbean owners and those purchased in South Carolina, around 44% black slaves in Georgia were shipped to the colony from West Africa (57%), from or via the Caribbean (37%), and from the other mainland colonies in the United States (6%) in the years between 175s and
1771.[14]
Beginning in the 1890s, Georgia passed a wide variety of Jim Crow laws that mandated racial segregation and racial separation for white people in public facilities and effectively codified the region's tradition of white supremacy.[16] Lynching African Americans was also common in Georgia. White mobs would lynch black men.[17]
Georgia became a slave state in 1751.[18] Initially, Georgia was the only British colony in the United States to try to ban slavery.[19]
White slaveholders would frequently beat and sometimes had killed slaves.[20]
Civil War
The Civil War happened in Georgia.[21] African American soldiers fought the Civil War in Georgia.[22]
Many black men were lynched by white mobs in Georgia.[17]
Historically black colleges and universities
Georgia is the home of ten historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs): Albany State University, Clark Atlanta University, Fort Valley State University, Interdenominational Theological Center, Morehouse College, Morehouse School of Medicine, Morris Brown College, Paine College, Savannah State University, and Spelman College.[23]
Politics
The historically Republican state of Georgia flipped blue in the 2020 Presidential Election and the 2021 U.S. Senate runoffs, in part, due to high Black voter turnout. Joe Biden won the Black vote in Georgia in a 2020 exit poll with 88% of Black Georgians voting for Biden.[24][25][26]
This shift from red to purple is in part, due to young, college-educated Black Americans, who largely vote for Democrats, moving from Northern and Western regions of the country to the South, in a phenomenon often referred to as the New Great Migration. [27]
Raphael Warnock (born 1969), came to prominence for his activism as a pastor in Atlanta. Warnock is the first African American to represent Georgia in the Senate and the first Black Democrat to be elected to the Senate by a former state of the Confederacy.[31]
Kanye West (born 1977), born in Atlanta, moved to Chicago with his mother after his parents' divorce at age 3.[33]
Kelly Rowland (born 1981), born in Atlanta, moved with family to Houston as a child, where she would go on to form a relationship with a young Beyoncé.
Donald Glover (born 1983), comedian, actor, rapper, writer, director, and producer who created the acclaimed comedy-drama Atlanta along with his brother Stephen.
^"Enslavement in Georgia". Race and Reckoning in Forsyth County - Stories of Life in Georgia - Digital Library of Georgia. February 8, 2021. Retrieved December 27, 2023.
Bacote, Clarence A. "Some aspects of negro life in Georgia, 1880-1908." Journal of Negro History 43.3 (1958): 186–213. online
Bacote, Clarence A. "Negro proscriptions, protests, and proposed solutions in Georgia, 1880-1908." Journal of Southern History 25.4 (1959): 471–498. online
Bernd, Joseph L. "White supremacy and the disfranchisement of Blacks in Georgia, 1946." Georgia Historical Quarterly 66.4 (1982): 492–513. online
Blassingame, John W. "Before the Ghetto: The Making of the Black Community in Savannah, Georgia, 1865-1880." Journal of Social History 6#4 (1973), pp. 463–88. ]online
Dittmer, John. Black Georgia in the Progressive Era, 1900-1920 (University of Illinois Press, 1980).
Drago, Edmund L. Black politicians and reconstruction in Georgia: A splendid failure (University of Georgia Press, 1992) online.
Fischer, David Hackett. African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals (Simon & Schuster, 2022), ch 5. before 1860.
Flynn Jr, Charles L. White land, Black labor: Caste and class in late nineteenth-century Georgia (LSU Press, 1999).
Grant, Donald Lee. The way it was in the South: The Black experience in Georgia (University of Georgia Press, 2001).
Grantham, Dewey W. "Georgia Politics and the Disfranchisement of the Negro." Georgia Historical Quarterly 32.1 (1948): 1-21. online
Hornsby, Alton. "Black Public Education in Atlanta, Georgia, 1954-1973: From Segregation to Segregation." Journal of Negro History 76#1 (1991), pp. 21–47. online
Inscoe, John C., ed. Georgia in Black and White: Explorations in Race Relations of a Southern State, 1865-1950 (University of Georgia Press, 2009).
Jones, Jacqueline. Soldiers of light and love: Northern teachers and Georgia Blacks, 1865-1873 (University of Georgia Press, 1992) online.
Meier, August, and David Lewis. "History of the Negro upper class in Atlanta, Georgia, 1890-1958." Journal of Negro Education 28.2 (1959): 128–139. online
Matthews, John M. "Black Newspapermen and the Black Community in Georgia, 1890-1930." Georgia Historical Quarterly 68#3 (1984), pp. 356–81. online
Range, Willard. The rise and progress of Negro colleges in Georgia, 1865-1949 (University of Georgia Press, 2009).
Wood, Betty. Slavery In Colonial Georgia, 1730–1775 (2007) online
Wood, Betty. Women's Work, Men's Work: The Informal Slave Economies of Lowcountry Georgia, 1750-1830 (1995) excerpt.
Further reading
WRIGHT, C. T. "THE DEVELOPMENT OF EDUCATION FOR BLACKS IN GEORGIA, 1865-1900" (PhD dissertation, Boston University Graduate School; ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 1977. 7711433).
