African American history in (very) brief !!

Slavery

• slavery was the base of the economic system of the South = free labour force for slaveholders = farmers who grew cotton, tobacco, and sugar. White owners enriched themselves thanks to slavery.

• Slaves were denied rights, access to education and free movement (needed a written pass when leaving the plantation.) Whites thought slaves should be kept ignorant as reading could lead them to think and realize their fates were unfair.

The slave codes

• Since the early 1800s, many laws in both North and South discriminated systematically against free blacks that is of sorts of restrictions. A major purpose of these laws was maintenance of the system of white supremacy that made slavery possible.

A South Carolina judge from 1832:• Free negroes belong to a degraded caste of

society; they are in no respect on an equality with a white man. According to their condition they ought by law to be compelled to demean themselves as inferiors, from whom submission and respect to the whites, in all their intercourse in society, is demanded; I have always thought and while on the circuit ruled that words of impertinence and insolence addressed by a free negro to a white man, would justify an assault and battery."

• In the North number of abolitionists denounced it

as sinful, and a large number of anti-slavery forces rejected it as detrimental to the rights of free men. The Union in 1862 made abolition of all slavery a war goal, which was achieved in 1865. All the slaves were freed and the owners received no compensation.

• The American Civil War (1861–1865) = slavery was one of the causes of the American Civil War. Northern states wanted to end it whereas Southern states wanted to preserve and institutionalize it. The war broke out when some southern states seceded from the Union.

The Emancipation Declaration

• The Emancipation Proclamation was an executive order issued by President Abraham Lincoln on January 1st, 1863, as a war measure during the American Civil War.

• It proclaimed the freedom of slaves in the ten states that were still in rebellion, thus applying to 3.1 million of the 4 million slaves in the U.S. at the time.

Amendment to the constitution

• The Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution abolished slavery and involuntary servitude. It was December 6, 1865.

• The Fourteenth Amendment was adopted on July 9, 1868, and addresses citizenship rights and equal protection of the laws.

• The Fifteenth Amendment prohibits the federal and state governments from denying a citizen the right to vote based on that citizen's race, color or previous condition of servitude". It was ratified on February 3, 1870.

Black codes

• With legal prohibitions of slavery ordered by the Emancipation Proclamation and eventually the 13th Amendment, Southern states adopted new laws. The defining feature of the Black Codes was vagrancy law which allowed local authorities to arrest the freed people and commit them to involuntary labor.

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAUXdd-DAh0• https://sites.google.com/a/email.cpcc.edu/black-

codes-and-jim-crow/black-code-and-jim-crow-law-examples

The Jim Crow laws

• were state and local laws in the United States enacted between 1876 and 1965.

• They mandated de jure racial segregation in all public facilities in Southern states of the former confederacy,

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ij6DWZ-W-KA

Separate but equal status

• Separate but equal was a legal doctrine in United States constitutional law that justified systems of segregation. Under this doctrine, services, facilities and public accommodations were allowed to be separated by race, on the condition that the quality of each group's public facilities was to remain equal.

Brown v Board of Education 1954

• was a case in which the Court declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students unconstitutional.

• As a result racial segregation was ruled a violation of the 14th Amendment. This ruling paved the way for integration and was a major victory of the civil rights movements,

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTGHLdr-iak• https://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=D2XHob_nVbw

• . . . well. like I say, we lived in an integrated neighborhood and I had all of these playmates of different nationalities. And so when I found out that day that I might be able to go to their school, I was just thrilled, you know. And I remember walking over to Sumner school with my dad that day and going up the steps of the school and the school looked so big to a smaller child. And I remember going inside and my dad spoke with someone and then he went into the inner office with the principal and they left me out . . . to sit outside with the secretary. And while he was in the inner office, I could hear voices and hear his voice raised, you know, as the conversation went on. And then he immediately came out of the office, took me by the hand and we walked home from the school. I just couldn't understand what was happening because I was so sure that I was going to go to school with Mona and Guinevere, Wanda, and all of my playmates

Black like me

• is a nonfiction book by journalist John Howard Griffin published in 1961 . Griffin was a white native of Dallas, and the book describes his six-week experience travelling on buses throughout the racially segregated states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia passing as a black man.

• Griffin's aim was to explain the difficulties facing black people in certain areas. Under the care of a doctor, Griffin artificially darkened his skin to pass as a black man.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTJDWPIy2eohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaX07WFcOzc