American Black Upper Class - Historical Background

Historical Background

Not long after Africans were brought to the Americas in the 17th and 18th centuries and sold into slavery, nonconsensual sexual relations (i.e. rape) and consensual sexual relations took place between slave owners and enslaved Africans. The biracial offspring, sometimes referred to as mulattoes, were sometimes not enslaved by their white slave-holding fathers and comprised a large part of the free black population in the American South. In addition to this group, numbers of Africans escaped to freedom during the instability of the American Revolution. Others were manumitted by their enslavers. The free black community in the U.S. had therefore increased considerably by 1800, and although most of these free people were very poor, some were able to acquire farmland or to learn mechanical or artistic trades.

Some runaway slaves served in the Civil War for the Union and at the conclusion of the war, some of those African-American soldiers received 40 acres (160,000 m2) and a mule which contributed to land ownership among African Americans following the Emancipation of slaves.

Other former slaves, often light-skinned former house slaves who shared ancestry with their onetime owners and who had acquired marketable skills such as cooking and tailoring, worked in domestic fields or were able to open small businesses such as restaurants and catering firms. Some free blacks in the North also founded small businesses and even newspapers. The members of these families were able to get a head-start on those blacks who were essentially still enslaved by their lack of access to wealth accumulation, particularly when it came to owning their own land.

As a result of Jim Crow laws that prohibited certain rights if a person was of African heritage, many African-Americans were forced to be enterprising by establishing businesses that served their own people. Some of those businesses included black-owned hotels, insurance agencies, funeral homes and various retail stores. A "Black Wall Street" once existed in Tulsa, Oklahoma; and the Georgetown area of Washington D.C. was known for its affluent African American professionals during segregation. In fact, the level of business ownership among African-Americans was the highest during the era of legal segregation. Owing to integration following the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, many black-owned businesses suffered because of their inability to compete with white-owned establishments that had better access to financing.