United States

From colonial times, African Americans arrived in large numbers as slaves and lived primarily on plantations in the South. In 1790 slave and free blacks together comprised about one-fifth of the U.S. population. As the nation split between Southern slave and Northern free states prior to the American Civil War, the Underground Railroad spirited thousands of escaped slaves from the South to the North. In the century following abolition, this migration pattern became more pronounced as some six million blacks moved from rural areas of the South to northern and western cities between 1916 and 1970 during the so-called Great Migration. On the heels of this massive internal shift came new immigrants from Western Africa and the West Indies, principally Haiti, Jamaica, and the Dominican Republic.

The American civil rights movement in the 1950s and ’60s awakened the country’s conscience to the plight of African Americans, who had long been denied first-class citizenship. The movement used nonviolence and passive resistance to change discriminatory laws and practices, primarily in the South. As a result, increases in median income and college enrollment among the black population were dramatic in the late 20th century. Widening access to professional and business opportunities included noteworthy political victories. By the early 1980s black mayors in Chicago, Los Angeles, Cleveland, Baltimore, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C., had gained election with white support. In 1984 and 1988 Jesse Jackson ran for U.S. president; he was the first African American to contend seriously for a major party nomination. In 2008 Barack Obama became the first African American elected to the country’s highest office. However, despite an expanding black middle-class and equal-opportunity laws in education, housing, and employment, African Americans continue to face staunch social and political challenges, especially those living in the inner cities, where some of American society’s most difficult problems (such as crime and drug trafficking) are acute.

Hispanics

Hispanics (Latinos) make up between one-sixth and one-fifth of the U.S. population. They constitute the country’s largest ethnic minority. More than half of the increase in the country’s total population from 2000 to 2010 was due to growth in the Hispanic population alone. The growth rate of the Hispanic population during this period was 43 percent—four times the growth rate of the general population. Hispanics live in all regions of the United States, but more than three-fourths live in the West or the South. They make up the largest share of the overall population in the West, where nearly three-tenths of the region’s residents are Hispanic. Almost half of the country’s total Hispanic population resides in the states of California and Texas, where they make up more than one-third of the population in each state.

Although they generally share Spanish as a second (and sometimes first) language, Hispanics are hardly a monolithic group. The majority, more than three-fifths, are of Mexican origin—some descended from settlers in portions of the United States that were once part of Mexico (Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California), others legal and illegal migrants from across the Mexico–U.S. border. The greater opportunities and higher living standards in the United States have long attracted immigrants from Mexico and Central America.

Puerto Ricans are the second largest group of Hispanics in the country. Their experience in the United States is markedly different from that of Mexican Americans. Most importantly, Puerto Ricans are American citizens by virtue of the island commonwealth’s association with the United States. As a result, migration between Puerto Rico and the United States has been fairly fluid, mirroring the continuous process by which Americans have always moved to where chances seem best. While most of that migration traditionally has been toward the mainland, by the end of the 20th century in- and out-migration between the island and the United States equalized. Puerto Ricans now make up nearly one-tenth of the U.S. Latino population.

Quite different, though also Spanish-speaking, are the Cubans who fled Fidel Castro’s communist revolution of 1959 and their descendants. While representatives of every social group are among them, the initial wave of Cubans was distinctive because of the large number of professional and middle-class people who migrated. Their social and political attitudes differ significantly from those of Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans, though this distinction was lessened by an influx of 120,000 Cuban refugees in the 1980s, known as the Mariel immigrants.

The United States’ three largest Hispanic groups are concentrated in different parts of the country. Most Mexicans live in western states; most Puerto Ricans live in northeastern states; and most Cubans live in southern states (primarily Florida).