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Pre Civil Rights Era
1865-1954
1863• In 1863 President Lincoln had issued
the Emancipation Proclamation declaring all persons held as slaves within any State, shall be forever free.
But…….
• The Emancipation Proclamation did not end slavery in the nation.
• Lincoln knew that the Emancipation Proclamation would need a constitutional amendment to guarantee the abolishment of slavery.
• There were 3 “reconstruction ammendments”
Post-Slavery (“Reconstruction”)• The Union army (north) defeated the Confederate
army (south).
The U.S. passed amendments banning slavery and saying *men* could vote regardless of their ethnicity.Many former slaves moved to cities in the North; those who couldn't often lived in conditions similar to slavery,renting parts of the former slavemaster's plantations (sharecropping).
January 31, 186513th Amendment
• Passed by Congress on January 31, 1865 abolished slavery in the United States.
1866• The Civil Rights Act of 1866
granted citizenship and the same rights enjoyed by white citizens to all male persons in the United States "without distinction of race or color, or previous condition of slavery or involuntary servitude."
Those blacks that tried to vote were intimidated by the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), who would burn houses and murder just to prevent blacks from voting.The KKK was a terrorist organization.
Ku Klux Klan 1866
The Ku Klux Klan beat, whipped, and murdered thousands, and intimidated tens of thousands of others from voting.
Blacks often tried to fight back, but they were outnumbered and out gunned.
While the main targets of Klan wrath were the political and social leadersof the black community, blacks could be murdered for almost any reason. Men, women, children, aged and crippled, were victims. A 103-year-old woman was whipped, as was a completely paralyzed man.
14th Ammendment1868
Citizenship• In 1868, the 14th Amendment to the
Constitution of the United States granted citizenship and equal civil and legal rights to African Americans and slaves who had been emancipated after the American Civil War.
15th Ammendment1870
Voting Rights• The 15th Amendment, granting African-
American men the right to vote, was formally adopted into the U.S. Constitution on March 30, 1870.
1875
• African Americans were guaranteed the right to equal treatment in public and on public transportation.
John Mercer Langston- helped draft the Act and was one of the early African Americans elected to Congress.
The Exodus of ‘79
• Thousands of African Americans migrate from
the south to Kansas led by Benjamin Pap Singleton
1881Tennessee Passes First Jim Crow Laws for trains
Railroads Railways to provide equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races.
1883• The Supreme Court decided the
Civil Rights Act was unconstitutional in 1883.
• Laws were to be decided by states, not the federal government.
• Individual states could now discriminate in any way they wanted against African Americans.
John Marshall Harlan wasthe only member of theSupreme Court who believed the Civil Rights Act should remain.
1890Mississippi Poll Tax
• Many Southern states created poll tax laws as a way to prevent eligible voters from voting.
• These laws disfranchised African-American and poor whites.
• This tax kept them from voting.
Literacy Test
Laws were passed requiring a literacy test as well. Since most freed men couldn't read or
write, blacks were prevented from voting.
Whites in the South didn't have to pay or pass the literacy test because of "Grandfather Clause.”
If their grandfather could vote in 1867 then theycould vote.However, no African Americans could vote in 1867 so they were disenfranchised.
Louisiana Grandfather Clause1898
1906Plessy vs. Ferguson
On June 7, 1892, 30-year-old Homer Plessy was jailed for sitting in the "White" car of the East Louisiana Railroad.
1909 NAACPNational Association for the
Advancement of Colored People
• Why was this organization founded
(set up)?
In 1909, the country was still stunned from a race riot the year before in Springfield, Illinois, the city in which Lincoln had once lived. Eight blacks were killed and dozens injured as mobs of whites rampaged through the black community destroying homes, property, and businesses, forcing thousands to flee. After the riot, an Englishman by the name of William English Walling described how race prejudice was rampant in the North and called for "a powerful body of citizens to come to their aid."
• The NAACP will " ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of rights of all persons and to eliminate racial hatred and racial discrimination."
1910-1920The Great Migration
• In the twentieth century, blacks started to move to the North as the train provided easy access to Chicago and other Northern cities.
• When World War I began in Europe, and foreign workers could no longer emigrate to America, factories needed a new labor source. Hundreds of thousands of blacks migrated from the South to Chicago and other cities of the North.
• The CHICAGO DEFENDER, the most influential black newspaper,encouraged blacks to leave. The paper held a vision of the North as the land of freedom, a dream that has been in the hearts of black men and women since slavery time -- many referred to the North as "The Promised Land"
Richard Wright 1908
– Young Richard Wright, who became an internationally acclaimed writer, remembered how the North kept hope alive during the dark days of his childhood in the deep South. "The North symbolized to me all that I had not felt or seen; it had no relation to what actually existed. Yet by imagining a place where everything is possible, it kept hope alive inside of me."
Jackie Robinson 1947• Jack Roosevelt Robinson was born in
Cairo, Georgia in 1919 to a family of sharecroppers. His mother, Mallie Robinson, single-handedly raised Jackie and her four other children. They were the only black family on their block, and the prejudice they encountered only strengthened their bond. From this humble beginning would grow the first baseball player to break Major League Baseball's color barrier that segregated the sport for more than 50 years.
1948 President Truman’s
Executive Order
• On July 26, 1948, President Truman issued Executive Order 9981 establishing equality of treatment and opportunity in the Armed Services.
The Civil Rights Movement1954-1968
Why was the Civil Rights Movement Necessary?
Plessy vs. Fergusson: Separate (segregation) but “equal”
1896
1954What are some things we expect to be “equal” inthis country?
Equality Injustice
Emmett Till
Peaceful Demonstrations;Violent Reactions
QuickTime™ and a decompressor
are needed to see this picture.
Eight-year old Linda Brown who crossed railroad tracks to take a bus 21 blocks to a black school when there was a white school five blocks from her home.
Name of the famous and important Supreme Court Case that made the whole
country INTEGRATE schools.
"We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal."
Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483. 495 (May 17, 1954)
Delivered August 28, 1963, at the Lincoln Memorial, Washington DC.
Washington Monument
By President Lyndon Johnson on July 2, 1964
Segregation was not allowed in:
• public places• schools• employment (“Equal Opportunity Employers”)
•Affirmative Action
