Civics question 75 of 128
What group of people was taken and sold as slaves?
2 accepted answers
- Africans
- People from Africa
You only need to give one of these. The officer accepts any of them.
Source: official USCIS question list for the 2025 version of the civics test. This site is independent and not affiliated with USCIS.
Background
Africans, or people from Africa, were taken and sold as slaves. The transatlantic trade carried roughly twelve and a half million people from West and Central Africa between the sixteenth century and the nineteenth, of whom about ten and a half million survived the crossing. Most were delivered to Brazil and the Caribbean; a few hundred thousand arrived in the colonies and states that became the United States, where the enslaved population then grew mainly through birth. Congress banned the importation of slaves effective 1808, the earliest date the Constitution permitted, but slavery itself continued and expanded with cotton for another half century. It ended with the Civil War and the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, a chain the test asks about in several nearby questions.
This background section is written by US Citizenship Test Practice to explain the civics fact. It is not part of the USCIS question list, and the official answer above is the one to give at the interview.
Where this question sits
It is part of Colonial Period and Independence, inside the American History section of the test.
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