Black History Facts

Slavery and freedom

1. In late August 1619, about twenty captive Africans from the Ndongo kingdom, in present-day Angola, were brought ashore at Point Comfort in the Virginia colony aboard the English ship White Lion (National Park Service).
2. Nearly half of all enslaved Africans brought to the United States came through Charleston, South Carolina (NPR).
3. In 1860, the Clotilda illegally brought 110 people from Benin to Mobile, Alabama. Survivors later founded Africatown (Alabama Historical Commission).
4. Frederick Douglass did not know his own birth date. He wrote in 1845 that he had "no accurate knowledge" of his age (Douglass, Narrative).
5. The Emancipation Proclamation took effect January 1, 1863. It freed enslaved people only in Confederate areas, not in loyal border states (National Archives).
6. Nearly 200,000 Black soldiers and sailors served the Union by the end of the Civil War (National Archives).
7. The Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery, was ratified December 6, 1865 (National Archives).

Reconstruction

8. The Freedmen's Bureau operated from 1865 to 1872 and recorded marriages that slavery had never recognized (National Archives).
9. The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified July 9, 1868, granted citizenship to formerly enslaved people (National Archives).
10. The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified February 3, 1870, barred denying the vote because of race (National Archives).
11. Hiram Revels of Mississippi became the first Black American U.S. senator on February 25, 1870 (U.S. Senate).

Building institutions

12. Boston's African Meeting House, built in 1806, is the oldest existing Black church building in the United States (National Park Service).
13. In 1903, Maggie Lena Walker became the first Black American woman to charter a bank in the United States (National Park Service).
14. The NAACP, founded in 1909, is the nation's oldest civil rights organization. Its records at the Library of Congress hold about five million items (Library of Congress).
15. Carter G. Woodson launched Negro History Week in February 1926. It became Black History Month in 1976 (Library of Congress).
16. In 1920, Black farmers operated 925,710 farms, about 14 percent of all U.S. farms (USDA).
17. About six million Black Americans left the South between 1910 and 1970 in the Great Migration (Census Bureau).
18. In 1921, a white mob destroyed thirty-five city blocks of Tulsa's Greenwood District (Justice Department).
19. More than 16,000 people served in the Tuskegee Airmen program during World War II, and its fighter groups destroyed 262 German aircraft (National Park Service).

The civil rights era

20. The Supreme Court ruled school segregation unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education on May 17, 1954 (National Archives).
21. The Montgomery bus boycott lasted 381 days, ending December 20, 1956 (King Institute).
22. More than 250,000 people attended the March on Washington on August 28, 1963 (National Archives).
23. About 600 marchers were attacked at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma on March 7, 1965, known as Bloody Sunday (National Park Service).
24. Thurgood Marshall became the first Black American Supreme Court justice on October 2, 1967 (Library of Congress).
25. Coretta Scott King, born in Perry County, Alabama, in 1927, founded the King Center in Atlanta in 1968 and chaired the federal commission that organized the first Martin Luther King Jr. Day, observed in 1986 (Encyclopedia of Alabama).

Today

26. Juneteenth became a federal holiday on June 17, 2021 (Public Law 117-17).
27. The Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture opened September 24, 2016, and holds nearly 45,000 artifacts (Smithsonian).
28. About 50.1 million people identified as Black alone or in combination in 2022 (Census Bureau).
29. About 201,000 Black-owned employer businesses earned $249.0 billion in receipts in 2023 (Census Bureau).
30. In 2022, there were 46,738 Black farm producers, 1.4 percent of the national total (USDA).
31. In 2006, the U.S. Postal Service issued ten stamps featuring quilts made in Gee's Bend, Alabama, a community largely descended from people enslaved on a local cotton plantation (USPS; Encyclopedia of Alabama).
32. Hank Aaron, born in Mobile, Alabama, broke Babe Ruth's home run record on April 8, 1974, despite racist threats during the chase (Encyclopedia of Alabama).