African American History: Voter Registration

Beginning in 1961 SNCC and CORE organizers undertook a dangerous campaign in Mississippi, attempting to register black voters despite intense white resistance. By 1962 Robert Moses, a black Harvard-educated schoolteacher, had assembled a staff of organizers to work with local residents. To bring attention, and perhaps some protection, to their efforts, the workers organized the Mississippi Summer Project, also known as the Freedom Summer project. They recruited and trained over 1000 Northern volunteers—including African American and white students. These volunteers helped people to register to vote and ran freedom schools providing basic education and African American history. Within the first two weeks, two whites, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, and one black, James Chaney, were murdered. Fear and danger followed the remaining volunteers that summer.

The Summer Project increased the number of black voters in Mississippi. It also led to the creation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), a political party open to all races. The MFDP unsuccessfully challenged the seating of an all-white Mississippi delegation at the Democratic national convention. However, voting registration efforts were helped by a series of marches to demand black voting rights in Selma, Alabama, in 1965. The protests and the violence that accompanied them prompted President Lyndon B. Johnson to introduce new voting-rights legislation. Passed that summer, its impact was dramatic: in Mississippi, the percentage of blacks registered to vote increased from 7 percent in 1964 to 59 percent in 1968.

 

Related articles

• African American History: Differing Racial Perceptions (egrejeen.wordpress.com)
• African American History: The Reagan Years (egrejeen.wordpress.com)
• African American History: Erosion of Black Rights (egrejeen.wordpress.com)
• African American History: American Revolution (The Concentration of Slavery in the South) (egrejeen.wordpress.com)
• African American History: Conservative Backlash (egrejeen.wordpress.com)

African American History: The Struggle for Economic Equality

During the late 1960s and 1970s, civil rights activists began to concentrate on eliminating the remaining barriers to black freedom and opportunity. Although segregation by law (de jure segregation) in the South had been defeated, segregation by custom (de facto segregation) still remained. In the South, legal segregation had been supplemented by customary racial segregation, but even in the North where there generally were no segregation laws, custom enforced racial segregation.

African Americans had been barred from many restaurants, movie theaters, nightclubs, and other public accommodations by customary practice. Generally, landlords in white neighborhoods would not rent to black tenants, forcing them to pay higher rents in the only housing available to them in black neighborhoods. Banks denied financing, and real estate agents refused to show houses in traditionally white areas to blacks even if they could afford them.

Discriminatory hiring practices confined most black workers to the least secure, lowest paying jobs regardless of their qualifications. Those few opportunities open to black professionals like doctors, lawyers, and teachers were in positions and institutions serving the black community. As a result of limited opportunities, by the beginning of the 1960s, more than half of African Americans had incomes below the poverty line.

 

Related articles

• African American History: The Reagan Years (egrejeen.wordpress.com)
• African American History: Differing Racial Perceptions (egrejeen.wordpress.com)
• African American History: Erosion of Black Rights (egrejeen.wordpress.com)
• African American History: Black Culture in the Early 20th Century (egrejeen.wordpress.com)
• African American History: Conservative Backlash (egrejeen.wordpress.com)
• African American History: Early Abolitionist Efforts (egrejeen.wordpress.com)

African American History: Nonviolent Protests

Throughout the South, various types of nonviolent protests took place. Activists boycotted stores that refused to hire blacks, marched in protests against discrimination, and worked to change laws that enforced segregation. In 1963 more than a million demonstrators were involved in massive protests, and many demonstrators were attacked by whites determined to maintain racial dominance.

In the spring of 1963 SCLC began a campaign in Birmingham, Alabama to try to end segregation. The local police force responded with violence, turning fire hoses on demonstrators and attacking them with dogs. Federal troops were sent to quell the violence. In reaction to the attacks on the demonstrators, President John F. Kennedy introduced civil rights legislation designed to end segregation in public facilities.

The growing power of the civil rights movement was demonstrated on August 28, 1963 when more than 200,000 peaceful demonstrators marched on Washington, D.C. Protest leaders called for congressional action in civil rights and employment legislation, and Martin Luther King, Jr., electrified listeners with his ‘I Have A Dream’ speech. In November, President Kennedy was assassinated, and in the aftermath of this tragedy, the civil rights bill that had languished in Congress was passed in June 1964. Six months later, Martin Luther King, Jr., became the youngest person ever to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

 

African American History: Slaves in Colonial America (Occupation of Slaves)

The vast majority of Africans brought to the 13 British colonies worked as agricultural laborers; many were brought to the colonies specifically for their experience in rice growing, cattle herding, or river navigation. For example, South Carolina planters drew upon the knowledge of slaves from Senegambia in West Africa to begin cultivating rice, their first major export crop. In the South, slaves grew tobacco in Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina, and rice and indigo in South Carolina and Georgia. In the North, slaves also worked on farms.

African Americans, slave and free, also worked in a wide variety of occupations. They were household workers, sailors, preachers, accountants, music teachers, medical assistants, blacksmiths, bricklayers, and carpenters, doing virtually any work American society required.

 

Related articles

• African American History: American Revolution (The Concentration of Slavery in the South) (egrejeen.wordpress.com)
• African American History: American Revolution (The Ideals of the Revolution) (egrejeen.wordpress.com)
• African American History: Early Abolitionist Efforts (egrejeen.wordpress.com)
• African American History: Erosion of Black Rights (egrejeen.wordpress.com)
• African American History: Black Culture in the Early 20th Century (egrejeen.wordpress.com)
• African American History: Conservative Backlash (egrejeen.wordpress.com)

African American History: Jim Crow Laws

The 1880s witnessed a profusion of segregationist legislation, separating blacks and whites. The system of Southern segregation was often called the Jim Crow system, after an 1830s minstrel show character. This character, a black slave, embodied negative stereotypes of blacks. One after another, Southern states passed laws segregating blacks and restricting African American rights in almost every conceivable way. For example, Tennessee initiated segregated seating on railroad cars in 1881. Florida (1887), Mississippi (1888), and Texas (1889) followed. In Alabama, laws prohibited blacks and whites from playing checkers together; in Louisiana, statutes ordered that there be separate entrances for blacks and whites at circuses. All Southern states prohibited interracial marriages.

Conditions for blacks in the South deteriorated further when the Supreme Court ruled against federal guarantees of African American rights. In 1883 the Court declared the Civil Rights Law of 1875 unconstitutional. In a series of cases, the Court also drastically undermined the 14th Amendment‘s protection of black citizenship rights and narrowed federal protection of the right to vote guaranteed by the 15th Amendment. Finally in 1896 the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that segregation was legal.

 

Related articles

• African American History: Erosion of Black Rights (egrejeen.wordpress.com)
• African American History: Conservative Backlash (egrejeen.wordpress.com)

African American History: Race and Class

Developments in the last decades of the 20th century seemed to justify the title of one of the era’s most influential books, The Declining Significance of Race (1978), by William Julius Wilson. It argued that economic class was beginning to replace race as the determinant of individual opportunity for African Americans. Falling incomes for many blacks accompanied rising financial and professional opportunities for others. At the same time that inner city residents were facing growing insecurity on the streets and in their homes, blacks were becoming more visible and influential in city halls, state houses, and the halls of Congress.

Yet, public racial intolerance and shocking acts of racial violence offered disturbing signs that race was still very significant. A young black man was killed in 1986 in Howard Beach, a white residential section of New York City. He was attempting to escape a mob that challenged his right to be there. In a similar incident three years later, a black teenager was killed by a white gang in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn. Another divisive issue in the 1980s was white opposition to legislation making the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr., a national holiday. Then in 1991, video pictures of Los Angeles police beating Rodney King, a black motorist stopped for a traffic violation, were broadcast on national TV. For many, this was visual proof that police brutality continued against African Americans. The acquittal of the white officers involved by an all-white jury sparked national outrage and a race riot in Los Angeles.

 

Related articles

• African American History: Differing Racial Perceptions (egrejeen.wordpress.com)
• African American History: Early Abolitionist Efforts (egrejeen.wordpress.com)
• African American History: Erosion of Black Rights (egrejeen.wordpress.com)
• African American History: Conservative Backlash (egrejeen.wordpress.com)
• African American History: Black Culture in the Early 20th Century (egrejeen.wordpress.com)
• African American History: American Revolution (The Ideals of the Revolution) (egrejeen.wordpress.com)
• African American Responses and Rise of Populism (egrejeen.wordpress.com)
• African American History: American Revolution (The Concentration of Slavery in the South) (egrejeen.wordpress.com)

African American History: Sharecropping

Reconstruction failed to eliminate black economic dependency largely because it did not provide African Americans with the land they needed to be independent. During the war, former slaves believed that they had earned the right to abandoned or confiscated Confederate lands through generations of uncompensated labor. Holding land might bring economic independence, and initially, it seemed as if the government might support their claim.
In January 1865 Union General William T. Sherman had issued Special Field Order No. 15, setting aside abandoned lands on the sea islands and the coastal region of South Carolina and Georgia for exclusive use of the region’s freed population. Former slaves were given temporary titles to 40-acre plots of land with the promise that the titles would be made permanent by appropriate legislation. However, President Johnson reversed Sherman’s order and ordered the abandoned plantations to be returned to their former owners.
By the 1880s a majority of former slaves had become sharecroppers, often working land that belonged to their former masters for a share of the profits. As Republicans in the South were driven from office or killed by terrorists, sharecroppers were left without protection and were frequently cheated by white landowners. Laws forced debtors to work the land until debts were paid, and landowners often manipulated credit to insure that sharecroppers ended each year in debt. Those who questioned the landowner’s accounting might be arrested for bad debt. Those convicted were often leased out to work on the same plantation, but without wages. Landowners in need of laborers might have local police invoke vagrancy laws against blacks who refused low-paying jobs.

Related articles

• African American History: American Revolution (The Ideals of the Revolution) (egrejeen.wordpress.com)
• African American History: Erosion of Black Rights (egrejeen.wordpress.com)
• African American History: American Revolution (The Concentration of Slavery in the South) (egrejeen.wordpress.com)
• African American History: Early Abolitionist Efforts (egrejeen.wordpress.com)
• African American History: Conservative Backlash (egrejeen.wordpress.com)

African American History: The Poor People’s Campaign

SCLC leaders focused on the issues of poverty and discrimination, continuing the Poor People’s Campaign that Martin Luther King, Jr., had begun. The Poor People’s Campaign sought the passage of federal legislation that would provide full employment, establish a guaranteed income, and promote the construction of low-income housing.

In May 1968 Ralph Abernathy, who had been King’s lieutenant, established an encampment called Resurrection City on the Mall in Washington, D.C. It drew 2,500 mostly black and Native American temporary residents, nearly twice the number that organizers had planned on. Within a month, mud and unsanitary conditions produced by heavy rains reduced the encampment to fewer than 300 people. In June 1968 an interracial group of 50,000 marched in Washington, D.C., to demonstrate their support for the Poor People’s Campaign. They were ultimately unable to gain the sympathetic attention of Congress and the country. At the end of the month, the demonstrators were ordered to evacuate, and on June 24th the police evicted the 100 who refused to leave amid clouds of teargas.

 

Related articles

• African American History: Conservative Backlash (egrejeen.wordpress.com)
• African American History: Black Culture in the Early 20th Century (egrejeen.wordpress.com)

African American History: The Critical Decade of the 1850s

Growing conflict between Southern slaveholding interests and Northern antislavery activists prompted Congress to negotiate the Compromise of 1850. The act satisfied the antislavery factions on some points such as admitting California as a free state and abolishing slave trading in the nation’s capital. However, it appeased the proslavery factions by including a new law to protect slaveholders’ recovery of escaped slaves.

 

Related articles

• African American History: Early Abolitionist Efforts (egrejeen.wordpress.com)
• African American History: American Revolution (The Concentration of Slavery in the South) (egrejeen.wordpress.com)
• African American History: American Revolution (The Ideals of the Revolution) (egrejeen.wordpress.com)
• African American History: Erosion of Black Rights (egrejeen.wordpress.com)

African American History: African Heritage

African American History: African Heritage

Africans and their descendants have been a part of the story of the Americas at least since the late 1400s. As scouts, interpreters, navigators, and military men, blacks were among those who first encountered Native Americans. Beginning in the colonial period, African Americans provided most of the labor on which European settlement, development, and wealth depended, especially after European wars and diseases decimated Native Americans.

African workers had extensive experience in cultivating rice, cotton, and sugar, all crops grown in West and North Africa. These skills became the basis of a flourishing plantation economy. Africans were also skilled at ironworking, music and musical instruments, the decorative arts, and architecture. Their work, which still marks the landscape today, helped shape American cultural styles. They brought with them African words, religious beliefs, styles of worship, aesthetic values, musical forms and rhythms. All of these were important from the beginning in shaping a hybrid American culture.