Black migration to the united states

Du Bois opened his series of visualizations with a map of the Transatlantic slave trade and the proclamation: “The problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line.” This two-part visualization considers the historical and current population growth shaping the Black diaspora within the US. It suggests that the legacies of African enslavement in America continue to mark Black lives in the 21st century, even as other types of migration extend the African diaspora.

According to Eleanor C. Isbell in the Statistics of Population Growth and Composition in An American Dilemma, after the prohibition of importation of slaves in 1808, the growth of the Black population was almost entirely dependent on natural increase. When foreign-born migrants to the US began to be enumerated in the Census in 1850, the immigration of Black people began as a slow trickle and it wasn’t until the immigration reforms of 1965 that this number increased significantly. In 2020, immigrants and their children make up a fifth of the Black population in the US (Pew research study).