The Deliberate Destruction of the Black Community in America

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DNA study shows many African-Americans have Nigerian ancestry

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During the period of the transatlantic slave trade, more than 12.5 million enslaved persons were shipped from Africa to the Americas with about 3.5 million of them from Nigeria.

Today there are communities of people with Nigerian ancestry mostly in Brazil, Cuba, and Jamaica who have retained some of their ancestral beliefs and traditions.

In the largest DNA study of people of African ancestry in the Americas, researchers found an overrepresentation of Nigerian genetic ancestry in the United States and Latin America compared to the proportion of enslaved people shipped to these places from regions within modern day Nigeria.

While the finds from the genetic study are largely supported by established narratives and historic records of the transatlantic slave trade, there were also inconsistencies.

The researchers put forward a new narrative explaining the variations in African ancestry in the Americas and how these variations were shaped by the transatlantic and a later intra-America slave trade whose impact was only recently understood.

The study which involved the DNA of 50,281 people of African descent in the United States, Latin America and western Europe was carried out by the consumer genetics company, 23andMe.

The genetic data was analyzed against historical records of over 36,000 transatlantic slave trade voyages that happened between 1492 and the early 19th century.

The overrepresentation of Nigeria ancestry is said to be a result of intra-American slave trade between the British Caribbean and mainland Americas.

Previous genetic studies have shown that African Americans in the US have more African ancestry from populations that lived near present-day Nigeria than from populations that lived elsewhere in Atlantic Africa (Western and west central Africa). In agreement, it was shown in this study Nigerian as the most common ancestry within the US, the French Caribbean, and the British Caribbean.

This is despite, nearly half of the slaves who landed in the United States coming from Senegambia (Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Senegal) and West-Central Africa (Democratic Republic of Congo and Angola), a considerable number of the remaining half had their origins in Ghana as well as Ivory Coast.

The overrepresentation of Nigeria ancestry reported was found to be a result of the later intra-American slave trade between the British Caribbean and the mainland Americas.

The intra-American trade which was an inter-colonial trade involving over 11,000 slave voyages within the Americas stretched as far as Boston to Buenos Aires and also Atlantic and the Pacific littorals.

Intra-American trade records show that while the transatlantic voyages were going on, slave traders transferred nearly 500,000 slaves throughout the Americas with most intra-American voyages originating in the Caribbean.

Though the British outlawed the slave trade in 1807 and started intercepting slave ships, the intra-American slave trade continued.

The intra-American slave trade voyages on record sailed until the 1840s as there the slave trade continued in the US and between Spanish Caribbean colonies.

The researchers also reported Senegambia underrepresentation in the Americas such as in northern South America and Central America despite being the source of nearly half of the enslaved persons who landed at ports in the areas.

This underrepresentation was linked to the fact that Senegambia is one of the first African regions from which large numbers of people were enslaved in the Americas.

It was presumed to have resulted in reduced African ancestry in the population. A presumed high mortality rate in the Americas amongst enslaved persons from Senegambia was also given a possible reason.

Also in the study, the United States and the British Caribbean were found to have the highest African ancestry in the Americas. Previous genetic studies have also reported a lower proportion of Latin Americans with African roots compared to the proportion of African Americans in the United States.

This is despite historical records shows that over two-third of enslaved people who arrived in the Americas landed in Latin America with less than 5% landing in mainland North America.

This low representation was presumed to also be due to high mortality among enslaved people in Latin America and a high rate of intermarriage between them and native Americans resulting in reduced African ancestry in the population.

*This article was first published in Quartz Africa

African-Americans Who Served in WWII Faced Segregation Abroad and at Home

Photograph by David E. Scherman / The LIFE Picture Collection / Getty

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Some 1.2 million African-American men served in the U.S. military during the war, but they were often treated as second-class citizens. 

When the Selective Training and Service Act became the nation’s first peacetime draft law in September 1940, civil rights leaders pressured President Franklin D. Roosevelt to allow Black men the opportunity to register and serve in integrated regiments. 

Although African-Americans had participated in every conflict since the Revolutionary War, they had done so segregated, and FDR appointee Henry Stimson, the Secretary of War, was not interested in changing the status quo. With a need to shore up the U.S. Armed Forces as war intensified in Europe, FDR decided that Black men could register for the draft, but they would remain segregated and the military would determine the proportion of Blacks inducted into the service.

The compromise represented the paradoxical experience that befell the 1.2 million African- American men who served in World War II: They fought for democracy overseas while being treated like second-class citizens by their own country.

Despite African-American soldiers' eagerness to fight in World War II, the same Jim Crow discrimination in society was practiced in every branch of the armed forces. Many of the bases and training facilities were located in the South, in addition to the largest military installation for Black soldiers, Fort Huachuca, located in Arizona. Regardless of the region, at all the bases there were separate blood banks, hospitals or wards, medical staff, barracks and recreational facilities for Black soldiers. And white soldiers and local white residents routinely slurred and harassed them.

“The experience was very dispiriting for a lot of Black soldiers,” says Matthew Delmont, a history professor at Dartmouth College and author of Black Quotidian: Everyday History in African-American Newspapers. “The kind of treatment they received by white officers in army bases in the United States was horrendous. They described being in slave-like conditions and being treated like animals. They were called racial epithets quite regularly and just not afforded respect either as soldiers or human beings.”

Because the military didn’t think African-Americans were fit for combat or leadership positions, they were mostly relegated to labor and service units. Working as cooks and mechanics, building roads and ditches, and unloading supplies from trucks and airplanes were common tasks for Black soldiers. And for the few who did make officer rank, they could only lead other Black men.

As Christopher Paul Moore wrote in his book, Fighting for America: Black Soldiers—The Unsung Heroes of World War II, “Black Americans carrying weapons, either as infantry, tank corps, or as pilots, was simply an unthinkable notion…More acceptable to southern politicians and much of the military command was the use of black soldiers in support positions, as noncombatants or laborers.”

African-American soldiers regularly reported their mistreatment to the Black press and to the NAACP, pleading for the right to fight on the front lines alongside white soldiers.

“The Black press was quite successful in terms of advocating for Blacks soldiers in World War II,” says Delmont. “They point out the hypocrisy of fighting a war that was theoretically about democracy, at the same time having a racially segregated army.”

In 1942, the Black newspaper, the Pittsburgh Courier—in response to a letter to the editor by James G. Thompson, a 26-year-old Black soldier, in which he wrote, “Should I sacrifice my life to live half American?"—launched the Double V Campaign. The slogan, which stood for a victory for democracy overseas and a victory against racism in America, was touted by Black journalists and activists to rally support for equality for African-Americans. The campaign highlighted the contributions the soldiers made in the war effort and exposed the discrimination that Black soldiers endured while fighting for liberties that African Americans themselves didn’t have.

As casualties mounted among white soldiers toward the final year of the war, the military had to utilize African-Americans as infantrymen, officers, tankers and pilots, in addition to remaining invaluable in supply divisions. 

From August 1944 to November 1944, the Red Ball Express, a unit of mostly Black drivers delivered gasoline, ammunition, food, mechanical parts and medical supplies to General George Patton’s Third Army in France, driving up to 400 miles on narrow roads in the dead of night without headlights to avoid detection by the Germans.

The 761 Tank Battalion, became the first Black division to see ground combat in Europe, joining Patton’s Third Army in France in November 1944. The men helped liberate 30 towns under Nazi control and spent 183 days in combat, including in the Battle of the Bulge. The Tuskegee Airmen, the all-Black fighter pilot group trained at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, escorted bombers over Italy and Sicily, flying 1600 combat missions and destroying 237 German aircraft on ground and 37 in air.

“Without these crucial roles that Blacks soldiers were playing, the American military wouldn’t have been the same fighting force it was,” says Delmont. “That was a perspective you didn’t see much in the white press.”

After World War II officially ended on September 2, 1945, Black soldiers returned home to the United States facing violent white mobs of those who resented African Americans in uniform and perceived them as a threat to the social order of Jim Crow.

In addition to racial violence, Black soldiers were often denied benefits guaranteed under the G.I. Bill, the sweeping legislation that provided tuition assistance, job placement, and home and business loans to veterans. 

As civil rights activists continued to emphasize America’s hypocrisy as a democratic nation with a Jim Crow army, and Southern politicians stood firmly against full racial equality for Blacks, President Harry Truman signed Executive Order 9981 that desegregated the U.S. Armed Forces in July 1948. Full integration, however, would not occur until the Korean War.

BY

 ALEXIS CLARK

Alexis Clark is the author of Enemies in Love: A German POW, A Black Nurse, and an Unlikely Romance, and an adjunct professor at Columbia Journalism School. Previously an editor at Town & Country, she has written for The New York Times, Smithsonian, NBC News Digital, and other publications.  as second-class citizens.Some 1.2 million Blathewar, but they were often treated as second-class citizens.

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