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Black Americans About twenty-seven million people, or a little more than one-tenth of all United States citizens, are descended from people brought across the Atlantic from Africa between 150 and 300 years ago as slave. The consequences of this ancient trade have brought trouble and embarrassment to the American Republic from the time of its foundation. From the beginning the colonists in Pennsylvania, New York, and New England stayed out of the slave trade, but they could not stop the plantation owners of the South from buying slaves from Africa a trade shared by the West Indies and the southern continent. Towards 1800 the southern states stopped the trade, and from then onwards no more slave ships came in, except for a few which came illegally. But by then there were nearly a million slaves in plantation of the South, and the U. S. Constitution had not changed their status. Southern slavery was ended only with the victory of the northern states in the civil war of 1861-1865. The U. S. constitution was amended so as to outlaw slavery, and to grant automatic citizenship and the equal protection of the laws to any person born in the United States. But long after 1865 the dominant whites in most of the South were still finding ways of excluding black citizens from real equality. Several of these devices, particularly those affecting voting rights, were found at various dates to be unconstitutional after argument before the Supreme Court of the United States. But even in the 1950s there were cases of southern black people being intimidated when they came to register as voters; and in the South there were still separate school, separate seats in local buses, even separate hospital car parks and whites-only facilities of many kinds. Black opposition to discrimination was led by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, with strong support from liberally-minded whites. The 1950s brought the beginning of major change. | 
