One of the earliest groups of immigrants to colonial North America was the Africans, the majority of whom had no choice but to immigrate. Forcibly taken from their homelands and loaded into slave ships that crossed the Atlantic, the African captives were deprived of the most basic human rights. While willing immigrants came to the United States with hopes of new opportunities and increased freedom, these forced immigrants could only look forward to hard labor for someone else's profit.

The stories of the hundreds of thousands of people brought as slaves from the Old World (the areas of the world that were known to Europeans before they knew of the Americas) to the New World (the part of the world that includes North and South America) are varied. Their experiences depended on when they came and which part of the country they came...