Start with people and history · A Note on This Guide

This is a compact learning path built from the full African American Minnesota cultural intelligence brief. Use the evidence as a starting hypothesis, not a script. The person or household in front of you is still the authority on their own life.

• Start here when the household is African American — Black American. What follows is history, Minnesota life, and everyday practice so the work can meet them. Other Black communities have their own briefs.
• Evidence-based means dated counts, law, history, disparity. Practitioner-based means what you do Tuesday: Mr./Mrs. until invited; believe reported pain; do not harvest Black staff as the community; do not make the church the case plan unless this family asked; do not fold a Somali household into this page because both are Black.
• ADOS and FBA are terms some people in this community use for descendants of U.S. slavery. This page uses historic African American / Black American as the main name, and keeps those terms because they are culturally meaningful, not because this is a political campaign. ERGs inside DHS are a verification mechanism, not a veto on facts.
• Nothing from the consultant’s research corpus was put out of the brief. Claims in the brief should be grounded in cited evidence. The facts stayed. Minnesota and DHS gates were added. This copy is a living candidate: staff keep a stable doorway until you or an Equity Director/Specialist in the administration promote.

This brief is about African Americans — also called Black Americans. It is the cultural community whose history in this country runs through enslavement in what became the United States, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Great Migration, the Civil Rights Movement, and Black life in Minnesota today.

Who this is

Descendants of Africans enslaved here, and the community that grew from that history across four centuries. About 42.9 million people nationwide (U.S. Census, July 2024), or about 12.6 percent of the country.

Some people in this community use other names for the same historic lineage. This brief uses African American and Black American.

Who this is not

It is not a brief about every Black person in Minnesota. Somali, Nigerian, Liberian, Ethiopian, Eritrean, Ghanaian, Haitian, Cuban, and other African and Afro-Caribbean communities have their own pages. Census “Black” mixes those stories. This page does not.

How to read this

Read it as an orientation. A church mother, a physician in St. Paul, a teenager in North Minneapolis, a producer in Atlanta, and a law professor share a history. They do not live one life. There is no single Black culture. Always defer to the person in front of you.

The facts that follow are meant to help you meet people well — how family is named, what respect looks like, what a greeting carries, what a form may land on. Counts are dated. History is here so the meeting is clearer, not so you deliver a lecture.

What shaped this culture includes West and Central African inheritances; enslavement in North America (1619–1865); Reconstruction and Jim Crow; the Great Migration (1916–1970); the Civil Rights Movement and what followed; and a cultural life — music, literature, church, food, language, sport — that has shaped the United States and the world.

African Americans came into being through one of the largest forced migrations in history, and then through life in North America that no other large enslaved population in the Americas matched: the community grew here.

Across the Atlantic

Between 1525 and 1866 about 12.5 million enslaved Africans were carried across the Atlantic. About 388,000 were brought directly to British North America and the United States. By 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, about four million people lived in slavery in the United States, with about 488,000 free Black Americans, mainly in the North and in free communities in the South.

West and Central Africa

People came mainly from West and West-Central Africa: Senegambia (Wolof, Mandinka, Fulani); Sierra Leone and the Windward Coast (Mende, Temne, Vai); the Gold Coast (Akan, Asante, Fante); the Bight of Benin (Yoruba, Fon, Ewe); the Bight of Biafra (Igbo, Ibibio, Efik); and West-Central Africa (Kongo, Mbundu, Ovimbundu, Loango). Igbo, Kongo, and Akan were among the largest groups in the British colonies.

They spoke many languages. They practiced traditional African religions, and some practiced Islam. They came from agricultural societies with music, foodways, naming traditions, craft, and knowledge that survived the Middle Passage.

What they brought

That inheritance is not a museum label. It is in the music, the church, the food, the names, and the way family is held. History here is literacy for the meeting. It is not a speech you give the household.

For the first 250 years of African American history — roughly 1660 to 1910 — the vast majority of African Americans lived in the South: Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee, Kentucky, Arkansas, Texas, and Maryland — on plantations, in cities, and after 1865 as sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and small landowners. In 1910, about 90 percent of Black Americans lived in the South.

After the Great Migration

Then came the Great Migration, taken up in the next chapter. By 1970, only about 53 percent of African Americans lived in the South. By 2020 the share had stabilized at roughly 55 percent as the Reverse Migration (1970s–present) brought Black Americans from Northern cities back to Atlanta, Charlotte, Houston, Dallas, and other Southern metros of the New South.

Regions now

Pew Research Center’s Facts About the U.S. Black Population:

The South, about 55 percent — especially Atlanta, Houston, Dallas–Fort Worth, Washington, D.C., Miami, Charlotte, the Mississippi Delta, the Black Belt, the Carolinas, the historic Tidewater.

The Midwest, about 17 percent — Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis, Milwaukee, Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Minneapolis–St. Paul, Kansas City, Columbus.

The Northeast, about 17 percent — New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Boston, Newark, Pittsburgh, the Hudson Valley.

The West, about 10 percent — Los Angeles, Oakland–San Francisco, Seattle, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Denver, San Diego, Sacramento.

Largest concentrations include New York City (about 2 million), Atlanta (about 2 million), Chicago (about 1.5 million), Washington, D.C. (about 1.5 million), Miami, Dallas, Houston, Detroit, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Baltimore.