Past_and_Present

Running Head: African American Struggle 1 African American Struggle Demetria Landry HIS204 American History Since 1865 Kathryn Johnson June 11, 2012 African American Struggles 2 Today class I am going to discuss how African Americans worked to end segregation, discrimination, and isolation to attain equality and civil rights. African Americans did this by taking a standing against discrimination while they served in the military, going through the legal system, women sitting on buses, ministers from southern black churches, militants from black power organizations, and youth from colleges who would shaped the successful struggle toward black equality in America. Some of the people that influenced the ending of segregation, discrimination, and isolation were Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, and Thurgood Marshall. During this time there were different periods that helped to end segregation, discrimination, and isolation. The first period was the Reconstruction Period from 1865 to 1877 where President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 which took the steps toward freeing the slaves, but it was the Thirteenth Amendment that actually freed the slaves which gave them the right to vote and citizenship. During the Reconstruction Period a black code was formed where African Americans could get married. With the increase of the black codes the Fourteenth amendment was formed where it granted African Americans citizenship where ex-slaves were allowed to become citizens in the state that they lived in. Secondly was the pivotal period from 1900 to 1920. In this period Booker T. Washington was one of the people that influenced African Americans to advocate their career paths which lead African Americans to agricultural and industrial trades. He also encouraged African Americans to use white middle class standards to overcome racism. African American Struggle 3 He also formed his own institution which was called the Tuskegee Institute which was located in Alabama. Gaining national attention for his Atlanta Compromise speech in 1895 and his autobiography Up from Slavery Booker T. Washington became one of the most important civil right leaders of his day (Washington, 1900). African Americans choose to gain literacy, build black churches and remain working for the white land owners. With this method and the establishment of black churches being controlled by freed slaves they were trained to be teachers and make agreements between white landowners and African Americans. African Americans decided to protest against isolation and segregation. In 1879 the 15th amendment was extended to give black males the right to vote (Franklin 2001). In 1910 ended with racial hatred inscribed across movies screens for African Americans. In 1920 where the Nineteenth Amendment was passed gave women the right to vote and the March of Equality that was the beginning of feminism. Third period was the freedom from fear period from 1920 to 1945. In this period African Americans were allowed to sing in the Cotton Club, Apollo Theater, and Speakeasies. The Harlem Renaissance was formed where Harlem artists demanded the respect from people that continued to have racist ideas. Fourth period was The Grand Expectation from 1945 to 1974. In this period lawyers from the NAACP, women sitting on buses, ministers from southern black churches, militants from black power organizations, and youth from colleges shaped the successful struggle toward black equality in America. The first was the African American lawyers who decided the best way to defeat the injustice were to go through the courts. One of the men was Charles Houston, a dean of law from Howard University. Charles Houston involved the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People because they were essential to his plan, and he called it the “crystallizing force” (Hine, 2003). One of the students that Houston searched for was Thurgood Marshall. African American Struggle 4 After law school Thurgood Marshall went to work for the NAACP where he committed to American values and the ideas of the justice system. Thurgood Marshall wrote; oh, we are going to have setback, we are bound to have them, but it will work. You will never find a better constitution than this one” (Tushnet, 1994). Through the course of two decades (1930-1940), Marshall had several gains in the court system, mostly Smith vs. All Wright case in 1944, which ended segregation in Texas. The next step Marshall wanted to take was ending segregation in the school system. Marshall took on cases in Virginia, Delaware, South Carolina, Washington DC, and Topeka, Kansas. The Supreme Court heard all the cases at one time under the name Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. The person who took the stand was Oliver Brown who said that it was not right for his daughter to have to walk several miles to go to an all black school when she could have gone to and all white school a couple of blocks from their home. He said that if the schools were equal as Plessy required then the school system was making it hard for his daughter to go to school there. The Justices took months to come to the conclusion; in the end, Chief Justice Earl Warren presented the unanimous ruling: “We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal” (Russo, 2008). In 1954 the warren Court banned school segregation. The next incident was the Rosa Park’s bus ride where she refused to give up her seat to a white man and was arrested for it. Martin Luther King Jr. formed the Montgomery bus boycott where he told people instead of taking the bus they should began to walk, ride their bikes, or catch a ride with someone to get to work. The boycott lasted until the Browder vs. Gayle federal case in December of 1956 that was upheld by the Supreme Court, that Alabama was unconstitutional in their bus segregation. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was opposed to the Vietnam War which linked racism at home to militarism and imperialism. He advocated unionization, planned the Poor People’s Campaign and was assassinated in 1968 while supporting the sanitation workers’ strike. African American Struggle 5 In 1970 the name Negro was replaced by black and African American. Another thing that happen that earned African Americans their right to equality is sit- ins where if an owner would not wait on them they would just sit at the bar until he or she did. Eventually the police were called in and some were beaten and arrested. When one group was arrested then another group would take their place. A number of them were kicked out of school but the sit- ins continued to go on. The freedom rides where black and white students who road buses all over the southern states. These actions were so that the integration of buses that was already passed into law could be enforced. With this an organization was formed called the Southern Christian Leadership Conference under the leadership of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In June Kennedy gave a speech that stated that “we are confronted with a moral issue”. “It is as old as the Scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution. The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be offered equal rights and equal opportunities, One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice. They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression. And this nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts will not be free until all its citizens are free…A great change is at hand, and our task, our obligation is to make that revolution, that change, peaceful and constructive for all.” He followed his speech by asking Congress to enact a bill that would remove race from consideration “in American life or law” (Dalleck, 2007). In 1964 the civil rights bill was passed where it was illegal to discriminate against an employee because of their race, creed, color, national origin, and sex. Another leader that helped with discrimination, segregation, and isolation was Malcolm X. Malcolm X argued that racism destroyed the self-respect of African Americans (Terrill, 2004). African American Struggle 6 As a result, it was Malcolm X who pushed for the name “African American” to define the African in America. Malcolm X wanted to African American under the control of America’s domestic jurisdiction; he wanted to transform the black issues in the United States into a geopolitical concern. The notion that the black struggle in the United States constituted a human rights matter was not a new one in the 1960s, nor did Malcolm X invented it; rather, he helped to promote its connection to ant colonialism, a trend begun by other African American intellectuals in earlier years. Human rights for Malcolm X were not utopian but a strategy to a means to an end, a precondition for civil rights. His rationale was simple: on the world stage, he reasoned, non whites were in the majority; and presenting the troubles of blacks in the United States as a human rights issue would be an embarrassment to the American government. As he put it in a speech in November 1964, “America….is not qualified to handle the solving of her race problem…It has to be made into a world problem or a problem for humanity not a negro problem or an American problem or one only she has the say-so over. In 1966 to 1975, the emergence of the Black Power Movement aimed at the Civil Rights Movement to include racial dignity, economic and political self-sufficiency, and freedom from oppression by white Americans. The final period is the restless giant from 1974 to 2009 which talks about the movie Roots and the rights of women. Roots depict the story where it tells the realistic history of African Americans in the United States from slavery into freedom. It told the story of Kunta Kinte growing up in an African village, his capture by white slave traders, and his transfer to America in 1767. Recounting the trials of slavery through Kinte’s eyes, and the succeeding generations of his family, Roots depicted in brutal terms the dehumanizing institution of slavery. African American Struggle 7 Kunta Kinte’s public whipping over his refusal to use the slave name “Toby” was not only tragic by itself, but it was also important because it “fostered a dialogue” into the true meanings of the African American experience in the United States (Haley & Dyson, 2007). It put the previous decades of violence over the civil rights movement in view and it helped move the nation toward a healthier racial environment. In 1989 F.W. Deklerk ended the policy that African Americans were not allowed to vote in parliamentary elections. Women were allowed to take on certain jobs and in 1980 they accounted for more than half of all undergraduate students and four years later they were the majority. In 2001, women accounted for 14.8 percent of the military; this number is growing as women take on active combat roles, such as pilots (Woloch, 2006). In politics women were also expressing their voices. As of 2009, in the United States congress there were 18 women senators and 55 members of the House of Representatives (Manning et al., 2009). In conclusion, African Americans have come a long ways from slavery. They are now able to hold political offices and manage large corporations. African Americans were able to get the respect that they deserved and laws were passed to help with the segregation and discrimination that African Americans faced. African Americans that were involved were Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X that helped with the segregation of buses and schools. African American Struggle 8 References M.D.Bowles, (2011). End of Isolation. American History 1865-present.Retrieved from http://content.ashford.edu/books/4. Dallek, R. (2007).Slow Road to Civil Rights.Time, 169(27), 52. Quindlen, A. (2001).Some Struggles Never Seem to End. New York Times, 24 The Historical Progression of African Americans. AntiEssays Retrieved May 24, 2012, from the Worldwide Web: http://www.antiessays.com/free essays/165704.html. The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall. The Journal of American History, Vol.91, No.4 (Mar, 2005, pp1233-1263.Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/3660172. From Black revolution to “Radical Humanism”: Malcolm X between Biography and International History.Moshik Tenkin. Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development, Vol.3,No.2,Summer 2012 pp 267-288.Retrieved from http://www.projectmuse.jhu.edu/results. The Civil Rights Movement.Retrieved from http://www.socialalternative.org/literature/malcolmx/ch3.html