UNIT 4: African American
History
How was the African American experience different from
other groups in American history?
SLAVERY: Myth v. Fact
 http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtID=11
&psid=3807
ORIGINS OF SLAVERY
 http://www.history.com/topics/blackhistory/slavery/videos/origins-of-slavery#
 Identify:





Indentured Servants
1641
Chattel
Black Gold
Internal slave trade
A NATION DIVIDED
 North: Industrial
 South: Agricultural
 COMPROMISE OF 1820:
 COMPROMISE OF 1850:
 KANSAS/NEBRASKA ACT:
ABOLITION OF SLAVERY
 http://www.history.com/topics/blackhistory/slavery/videos/abolition-and-the-underground-railroad
How and why did slavery come to
an end?
Primary Source Activity:
 http://www.history.com/topics/black-history/frederick-douglass
 http://video.pbs.org/video/2295592489/
 http://www.lcweb.loc.gov/exhibits/treasures/images/235clip.jpg
 http://www.civilwar.org/education/history/emancipation150/10-facts.html
LT2: The Immediate and Long
Term Influences of Reconstruction
on African Americans and the U.S.
POLITICAL RIGHTS:
13th Amendment
14th Amendment
15th Amendment
http://www.history.com/topics/a
merican-civil-war/reconstruction
13th: Abolishes slavery
14th: Defines Citizenship, Equal
Protection and Due Process (legal
rights)
Extremely important for many
pivotal cases for the next 150
years.
15th: The citizen's right to vote
cannot be denied by state/federal
gov't
Who can now vote? Who might
have a problem with this?
Political Reality: How states get
around the 15th Amendment
 Black Codes
 Explain specific things that are outlined by these codes.
 Voting “Requirements”
 Literacy tests
 http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2013/06/28/voting
_rights_and_the_supreme_court_the_impossible_litera
cy_test_louisiana.html
 Poll Taxes
 Grandfather Clause
 Therefore….many blacks never registered to vote.
SOCIAL/ECONOMIC REALITY:
Sharecropping
 After reading document:
1. What in this contract seems to benefit the
sharecropper?
2. What does not seem beneficial to the
sharecropper?
Segregation
Violent Organizations
 The story of Reconstruction in the American South
echoes that broader concern with labor control.
Immediately following the war, all-white state
legislatures passed "black codes" designed to force
freed blacks to work on plantations, where they would
be put to work in gangs. These codes denied blacks the
right to purchase or even rent land. Vagrancy laws
allowed authorities to arrest blacks "in idleness" and
assign them to a chain gang or auction them off to a
planter for as long as a year. Other statutes required
blacks to have written proof of employment and barred
blacks from leaving plantations. The Freedmen's
Bureau, ostensibly designed to aid former slaves,
helped to enforce laws against vagrancy and loitering
and refused to allow ex-slaves to keep land that they
had occupied during the war. One black army veteran
asked rhetorically: "If you call this Freedom, what did
you call Slavery?"
Jim Crow Era
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzL2Brhg9aQ
RECONSTRUCTION:
success or failure?
Make a t-chart and cite evidence
in this reading:
http://www.ushistory.org/us/35d.a
sp
Emerging African American
leaders
 Booker T. Washington
 W.E.B. DuBois
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGLm7VUbIWE