Beninese Americans
Americans of Beninese descent
Beninese American are Americans of Beninese descent. According to the census of 2000, in the United States there are only 605 Americans of Beninese origin. However, because since the first half of the eighteenth century to nineteenth many slaves were exported from Benin to the present United States, the number of African Americans with one or more Beninese ancestors could be much higher.
History
The first people from present-day Benin to come to the modern United States were slaves and arrived in the colonial period. Most of the slaves from Benin were imported to South Carolina (36%), Virginia (23%), the Gulf Coast (28%) and Florida (9,8%).
The Clotilda slave ship took from 110 to 160 slaves from Dahomey to Mobile in 1859, including Cudjo Lewis (ca. 1840–1935) and Redoshi (c. 1848–1937), considered to be the last persons born in Africa to have been legally enslaved in the United States), in the Gulf Coast. Between 1719 and 1731, most of the slaves who came to Louisiana came directly from Benin, on ships including the Duc du Maine. Many slaves were from the Fon ethnic group, and others were Nago (Yoruba subgroup, who were enslaved mainly by Spanish settlers, when Louisiana was ruled by Spain) – Ewe, and Gen.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Beninese Americans” is americans of Beninese descent. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Beninese, Americans and descent, not as a finished interpretation.
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The phrase “americans of Beninese descent” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q16152229. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2000, 1859, 1840 and 1935.
Overview language is designed for orientation and should not be treated as a substitute for the evidence cited beneath it. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Beninese Americans” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.