In August 1619 more people arrived on the Dutch Man-of-War ship at Jamestown colony. This is the earliest record of Black people in colonial America. These colonists were freemen and indentured servants. At this time the slave trade between Africa and the English colonies had not yet been established.
Records from 1623 and 1624 listed the African inhabitants of the colony as servants, not slaves. In the case of William Tucker, the first Black person born in the colonies, freedom was his bright right. He was son of "Antony and Isabell", a married couple from Angola who worked as indentured servants for Captain William Tucker whom he was named after. Yet, court records show that at least one African had been declared a slave by 1640; John Punch. He was an indentured servant who ran away along with two White indentured servants and he was sentenced by the governing council to lifelong servitude. This action is what officially marked the institution of slavery in Jamestown and the future United States.
In what is known as The Great Migration, large numbers of African Americans moved from the rural south to northern cities, beginning in the early twentieth century. What motivated this large-scale movement? job openings due to industrial growth in northern cities
Supreme Court decision that upheld the separate but equal doctrine, the case stemmed from an 1892 incident in which African American train passengers Homer Plessy refused to sit in a car for blacks.
