The African – American

BEFORE YOU READ

Discuss

1. What do you know about the history of African-Americans in the U.S.?

2. What famous African-Americans can you name? Why are they famous?

3. Name some difficulties that a person can overcome. Name some things that a person can be overcome by.

Guess

Try to answer the questions. Then look for the answers in the reading.

1. What percentage of the American population is African-American?

Check ( ) one:

_______ 4% _________ 13% ________21%

2. When did slavery end throughout the U.S.? Check ( ) one:

________ 1820 ________ 1865 _________ 1895

The African – American

We shall overcome, we shall overcome

We shall overcome some day!

Oh deep in my heart, I do believe

We shall overcome some day!

These words are a variation of a song written in 1901. Portions of the melody go back even further. Yet, when Americans hear it, they think of the civil rights movement in the mid-twentieth century. Every year, Americans hear this beautiful song over and over on radio and TV, especially on Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday (celebrated the third Mon­day in January) and during Black History Month (February).

Most of today's black Americans are descendants of Africans brought to the U.S.A. by force and sold into slavery. After slavery was abolished, segregation in the South and discrimination in the North kept blacks second-class citizens for almost another cen­tury. Conditions have greatly improved for black Americans during the past 50 years. Among this nation's 35 million blacks are many successful, important, and famous peo­ple. However, as a group, African-Americans remain a disadvantaged minority. Their struggle for equal opportunity has been won in the courts of law, but they are still strug­gling for the respect and prosperity that most other Americans enjoy.

Check your comprehension.

What problems are African-Americans still trying to overcome?

Slavery-From Beginning to End

In the fifteenth century, Europeans began to import slaves from the African continent. The discovery of America increased the demand for cheap labor and there­fore increased the slave trade. During the next 400 years, slave traders kidnapped about 15 million Africans and sold them into slavery. When the American Civil War began in 1860, there were about 4.5 million blacks in the United States, most of them slaves.

The vast majority of slaves lived in the South, where they worked in cotton, tobacco, and sugar-cane fields. Most were deprived of a formal education, although a few were taught to read and write. Their African religious practices were discouraged, and they were forced to convert to Christianity.

The slaves suffered greatly, both physically and emotionally. They worked long hours in the fields. They lived in crowded, primitive houses. Some were abused by cruel mas­ters. Often, slave owners separated black families by selling a slave's husband, wife, or child. Uncle Tom's Cabin, a famous novel about southern slavery, emphasized all these evils. The book aroused so much antislavery feeling in the North that Abraham Lincoln said to its author, Harriet Beecher Stowe, "So you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war."

The "great war" that Lincoln was talking about was, of course, the American Civil War, also called (primarily in the South) the War between the States. Slavery was the underlying cause of this war. The agricultural South depended on slave labor to work the fields of its large plantations. The industrialized North had no use for slave labor, and slavery was against the law there. Northerners considered slavery a great evil, and, in fact, some white Northerners helped blacks escape to one of the free states. By the mid-nineteenth century, the nation was divided between slave states and free states. Whenever a new state wanted to enter the Union, the question of whether it would be slave or free was raised. Finally, the South decided to leave the Union and become a separate country-the Confederate States of America. President Lincoln would not allow this. In order to keep the U.S. united, Lincoln led his nation into a civil war. The war ended in 1865 with the North victorious, the country reunited. and slavery abolished.

In 1863, 2 years before the war ended, Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves in the Confederate states. Shortly after the war ended in 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution freed all slaves. A few years later, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments gave the former slaves full civil rights. including giving African­American men the right to vote.

Check your comprehension.

Why were there slaves in the South but not in the North?

Freedom and Its Difficulties

By 1870, black Americans had been declared citizens with all the rights guaranteed to every citizen. But they were members of a conspicuous minority within a white society. Furthermore, most black Americans were uneducated, unskilled, and unprepared to provide for their own basic needs. With freedom, they found many new problems­ - legal, social, and economic.

After the Civil War, blacks began moving to the big cities in the North, and this trend continued in the twentieth century. In the North, blacks found greater freedom, but conditions were still difficult and opportunities limited. Discrimination in the sale and rental of housing forced blacks into poor, crowded, mostly black communities.

Blacks who remained in the South endured even worse conditions. Southern blacks were forced to obey state laws (called Jim Crow laws) that kept them segregated from whites. Blacks and whites went to different schools, drank from different water foun­tains, used different public bathrooms, ate in different restaurants, and were buried in different cemeteries. Blacks were required to sit in the back of buses, even when there were plenty of seats in the front. For southern blacks, there was no justice in the courts of law. Once accused of a crime, blacks were almost certain to be found guilty by all­ - white juries.

Southern whites who wished to keep the power of the vote from the large black population of the South used the threat of violence to discourage blacks from registering to vote. When a black person did try to register, whites used many unfair ways to stop them-such as forcing blacks to pay a tax on the right to vote or to take a very difficult reading test.

Check your comprehension.

In what ways were blacks kept separate from whites in the South?