African Americans and Africans

By the 1760s, one out of every five people in British America was African or of African descent, almost all of whom were enslaved. The highest concentration lived in the southern colonies, where slavery was the dominant labor system and 40 percent of the entire population was enslaved. The first generations forcibly transplanted in the seventeenth century developed into creolized African American communities. In the middle decades of the eighteenth century, these creolized enslaved groups were joined by massive infusions of Igbo, Akan, Bambara, Mande, and other Africans, creating a society of Africans and African Americans more divided by their various ethnicities than united by any common experience.