African-Americans are primarily descended from slaves sold to British North America (which later became Canada and the United States) during the Atlantic slave trade. By 1860, there were 3.5 million enslaved Africans in the Southern United States, and another 500,000 free living across the country. African slaves were intentionally kept in a state of illiteracy, and their status was justified on the grounds of their supposed racial inferiority. Families were often broken up as slave-owners sold children away from parents, husbands away from wives, etc. Although there were efforts to abolish the institution, slavery was crucial to the American southern plantation economy and continued to exist until the end of the American Civil War.

In 1863, during the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. The proclamation declared all slaves those states that were still in a state of rebellion, that had seceded from the Union to be free. Advancing Union troops enforced the proclamation, with Texas being the last state to be emancipated in 1865. While the post-war Reconstruction era was initially a time of progress for African-Americans, with some becoming sharecroppers in the agricultural south. By the late 1890s, Southern states had enacted Jim Crow laws to enforce racial segregation and disenfranchisement. Most African-Americans followed the Jim Crow laws and assumed a posture of humility and servility to prevent becoming victims of racially motivated violence. Meanwhile, the emerging middle-class African-Americans were creating their own schools, churches, banks, social clubs, and other businesses.

In the last decade of the nineteenth century in the United States, racially discriminatory laws and racial violence aimed at African-Americans began to increase . Laws requiring racial segregation were upheld by the United States Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. Other forms of discrimination included voter suppression or disenfranchisement in the southern states, denial of economic opportunity or resources nationwide, laws prohibiting interracial marriage, private acts of violence, and mass racial violence aimed at African-Americans unhindered by government authorities.

The desperate conditions of African-Americans in the South that sparked the Great Migration of the early twentieth century, combined with a growing African-American intellectual and cultural elite in the Northern United States, led to a movement to fight violence and discrimination against African Americans. Like abolitionism before it, the Civil Rights Movement crossed racial lines. Between 1954 and 1968, it aimed at abolishing public and private acts of racial discrimination against African-Americans, particularly in the southern United States, but also in northern cities with regard to discrimination in housing, employment, labor unions, and de facto discrimination in public schools. The August 28, 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom—and the conditions which brought it into being—is credited with putting pressure on President John F. Kennedy and later Lyndon B. Johnson and culminated in the passage the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that banned discrimination in public accommodations, employment, and labor unions.

By 1966, the emergence of the Black Power Movement, which lasted from 1966 to 1975, expanded upon the aims of the Civil Rights Movement to include racial dignity, economic and political self-sufficiency, and freedom from White authority.

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