This animated map shows the dramatic expansion of African Americans in the nineteenth-century United States. Enslaved men and women had little choice in the direction or timing of this movement, and northern blacks congregated in towns when possible before the Civil War. Emancipation created great freedom of movement, asmany blacks fled the southeastern states for the greater fortune possible in the west. Through the simple act of moving westward, blacks participated in the American manifest destiny and denied the racial lens through which whites perceived their nation's expansion.