Constructing African Americans as minorities

Long before American blacks became viewed as racial minorities, many white Americans viewed them as the embodiment of danger. Through the Civil War, some whites feared slave uprisings and other acts of resistance, while others knew that in some places blacks constituted numerical majorities (the antithesis of minorities), Moreover, blackness marked African Americans as slaves and thus of a subordinate status, As long as these perceptions existed, excluding Reconstruction, few whites considered blacks worthy of basic civil rights. It was not until the 1950s, in fact, that scores of Americans accepted the argument advanced by many African Americans that they were injured citizens. Once constructed as such, it became possible to be perceived as racial minorities with legitimate social, political, and economic claims on the nation. Thus as this essay traces, African Americans were socially constructed as minorities within the context of their protracted fight for full citizenship rights.