What is the African Holocaust? 

The Jewish community has adopted the word Holocaust to signify the slaughter of some 6,000,000 Jews by Nazi  Germany in the 1940s during World War II. While no words can define or describe such devastation, some African Americans have begun to use the same term to signify the more than 300 years of the African slave trade and black slavery. Although the Nazis also killed gypsies, the handicapped, Communists, and other opponents of their totalitarian state, the underlying purpose of Nazi mass murder remained genocide, the systematic extermination of an "inferior" racial or ethnic group. African Americans see a parallel in European and American racism, which defined African people as subhuman and so provided the rationalization for their inhumane and barbarous treatment. 

How many Africans and people of African descent were destroyed by slavery? The numbers are imprecise, especially since it has been in white people's interests to minimize them. But slavery was a business designed for profit, and where money is involved there are often records. The current "official" scholarly consensus is that some 15,000,000 Africans were stolen into slavery and involuntarily transported to the New World. Every time this number is re-evaluated it increases, so the only thing we can really be sure of is that all statistics are understated. The number of Africans who lost their lives is particularly hard to estimate. 

After slaves were captured, they endured long forced marches to the seacoast. The missionary David Livingston claimed that only 10% survived this ordeal. This death rate seems very high, but if it is even partly accurate then all numbers must be radically revised upward. 

The animal pens where branded and naked Africans were confined awaiting shipment were lethal, but even they were not as bad as the holds of the slave ships during the 
notorious Middle Passage across the Atlantic. Suicide, madness, malnutrition, epidemic dysentery, sexual abuse, and beatings are estimated to have caused a 15% death rate. 

Once sold, slaves endured, or died from, many of the same dangers. The European conquest of the New World was a costly enterprise. In addition to Africans, by the middle of the 16th century some 40,000,000 Native Americans, mostly in  South America, had been killed, worked to death, or died from new diseases. Whomever or whatever one counts, the sacrifice of human life in the exploitation of the New World 
defies imagination. If any word at all can be used to describe it, Holocaust must stand as a fitting name.

Until the mid-1960s legal barriers prevented blacks and other racial minorities in the United States from entering many jobs and educational institutions. While women were rarely legally barred from jobs or education, many universities would not admit them and many employers would not hire them.