Civil_Rights_and_the_First_African_American_President

Civil Rights and the First African American President On November the 4th 2008 history was made as Senator Barack Obama was elected the 44th president of the United States of America and the first ever African American to become, arguably, the most powerful man in the world. Even his nomination was seen as a massive breakthrough by the civil rights movement, the closest an African American ever getting to be nominated as a presidential candidate being when Jesse Jackson Sr. was a candidate for the democratic presidential nomination in 1988. In this essay I plan to trace the history of the American civil rights movement and state why I do not believe that President Elect Obama’s inauguration on the 20th of January 2009 will be the end of the civil rights struggle in America. The single greatest advance in the civil rights movement was the Emancipation Proclamation consisting of two executive orders issued by President Lincoln in 1862 and 1863 freed the slaves and gave them the right to vote. “That on the first day of January in the year of our Lord, one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any state, or designated part of a state, the people whereof thenceforward, and forever free; and the executive government of the United States [including the military and naval authority thereof] will, during the continuance in office of the present incumbents, recognize [and maintain the freedom of] such persons, as being free.” For about a century one of the main aims of the civil rights movement was to ensure the rights African American were given became reality. The president, referred to by many as ‘Honest Abe’, did however use some underhand tactics when issuing the proclamation. Firstly he didn’t originally state in exactly which states the slaves were to be freed and secondly the states that the slaves were to be freed in consisted entirely of confederate states that he had no control over at the time. However this quietly convicted the ‘Union’ states to abolish slavery without causing too much upset and possibly several years before they would have had President Lincoln been more upfront about abolishing slavery. African Americans were starting to be viewed more equally however police in many southern states stopped African Americans registering to vote well into the 20th century. The American civil rights movement owes a lot to Rosa Parks, the “Mother of the Modern-Day Civil Rights Movement”. “People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.” On December the 1st 1955 Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus for a white passenger, an act considered a civil disobedience and a social taboo at the time. While she was not the first African American to do this, with Irene Morgan and Sarah Louise Keys performing almost identical acts of defiance in 1944 and earlier in 1955 retrospectively. Rosa Parks sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott which in turn led to the end of segregation in the USA. Segregation in school had already been found unconstitutional a year previously. Although officially African Americans had the same rights as their white counterparts no law can change people’s prejudices. One of the more famous events in the civil rights movement occurred on the 28th of August 1963 when two hundred and fifty thousand people gathered around the Lincoln memorial and heard Martin Luther King Jr. Deliver his ‘I have a dream’ speech. “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” This demonstration and speech proved critical for the civil rights movement, the diaries of Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. that were posthumously published even suggesting that President Kennedy was concerned that if less people attended the march on Washington it would undermine his efforts to improve civil rights. The election of Barack Obama to the Whitehouse has proven that an African American can now be judged on the content of their character as he won in a landslide and 349 electoral college votes, well past the winning post of 270 and the votes of African Americans simply could not account for all or even the majority of those votes. The most recent event to highlight the deep inequalities between different races in the USA was an event that started as a natural disaster and quickly changed into a humanitarian one, Hurricane Katrina. A former mayor of New Orleans, Marc Morial saying that: "[most of the people who remain in New Orleans] are people who are African-American mostly...people who were of little or limited economic means..." A far higher percentage of African Americans live in abject poverty than white Americans, many of these African Americans have little to no education, with a staggering 40% of youths from ethnic minorities in America being illiterate. In times of disaster these people, who need the most help, are always the people to be hit the hardest. When issuing housing to the survivors of the flood it was found that there was a definite bias towards white applicants leaving many of the African American applicants homeless. I believe that, considering the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the effect it had on the African American community it will take a lot more than an African American President to finally achieve equality. In the eyes of the law the last two centuries have seen African Americans go from the subhuman property of white slave owners to equal citizens. However the struggle is not over. In America many African Americans are trapped in a vicious cycle of poverty, lack of education and a higher likelihood of turning to crime. Approximately 4.4% of white american males will go to prison at least once in their lifetime for African American males the rate is 28%. It is lack of opportunities, lack of education and prejudice that have made so many young African Americans turn to crime. This does not bode well for the ending of the civil rights struggle next year when President Elect Obama is inaugurated. The statistics also highlight what an amazing step forward for the civil rights the election of Barack Obama represents. This may not be the end of the struggle for racial equality in America but hopefully January the 20th 2009 will mark the beginning of the end. Sources: www.en.wikipedia.org www.infoplease.com www.runet.edu www.racerelations.about.com Emancipation Proclamation-Abraham Licoln