African American. African Americans are an ethnic group consisting of Americans with partial or total ancestry from any of the Black racial groups of Africa. The term African American generally denotes descendants of enslaved Africans who are from the United States, while some Black immigrants or their children may also come to identify as African-American. African Americans constitute the second largest racial group in the US, after White Americans, and the third largest ethnic group after Hispanic and Latino Americans. Most African Americans are descendants of enslaved people within the boundaries of the present United States. On average, African Americans are of West / Central African and European descent, and some also have Native American ancestry. According to U.S. Census Bureau data, African immigrants generally do not self-identify as African American. The overwhelming majority of African immigrants identify instead with their own respective ethnicities. Immigrants from some Caribbean, Central American, and South American nations and their descendants may or may not also self-identify with the term. African-American history began in the 16th century, with Africans from West Africa being sold to European slave traders and transported across the Atlantic to the Thirteen Colonies. After arriving in the Americas, they were sold as slaves to European colonists and put to work on plantations, particularly in the southern colonies. A few were able to achieve freedom through manumission or escape and founded independent communities before and during the American Revolution. After the United States was founded in 1783, most Black people continued to be enslaved, being most concentrated in the American South, with four million enslaved only liberated during and at the end of the Civil War in 1865. During Reconstruction, they gained citizenship and the right to vote, but due to White supremacy, they were largely treated as second-class citizens and found themselves soon disenfranchised in the South. These circumstances changed due to further development of the Black community, participation in the military conflicts of the United States, substantial migration out of the South, the elimination of legal racial segregation, and the civil rights movement which sought political and social freedom. In 2008, Barack Obama became the first African American to be elected President of the United States. Main article: African-American history Main articles: Slavery in the colonial United States and Atlantic slave trade The vast majority of those who were enslaved and transported in the transatlantic slave trade were people from Central and West Africa, who had been captured directly by the slave traders in coastal raids, or sold by other West Africans, or by half-European merchant princes to European slave traders, who brought them to the Americas. The first African slaves arrived via Santo Domingo to the San Miguel de Gualdape colony, founded by Spanish explorer Lucas Vazquez de Ayllon in 1526. The ill-fated colony was almost immediately disrupted by a fight over leadership, during which the slaves revolted and fled the colony to seek refuge among local Native Americans. De Ayllon and many of the colonists died shortly afterward of an epidemic and the colony was abandoned. The settlers and the slaves who had not escaped returned to Haiti, whence they had come. The marriage between Luisa de Abrego, a free Black domestic servant from Seville, and Miguel Rodr�guez, a White Segovian conquistador in 1565 in St. Augustine, is the first known and recorded Christian marriage anywhere in what is now the continental United States. The first recorded Africans in English America were 20 and odd negroes who came to Jamestown, Virginia via Cape Comfort in August 1619 as indentured servants. As many Virginian settlers began to die from harsh conditions, more and more Africans were brought to work as laborers. An indentured servant would work for several years without wages. The status of indentured servants in early Virginia and Maryland was similar to slavery. Servants could be bought, sold, or leased and they could be physically beaten for disobedience or running away.