The African-American Struggle for Civil
Rights
This theme explores the struggle of African-Americans to obtain social
and political equality in the United States.
1600s
The 1600s saw the beginning of slavery in America. In 1619, the first
slaves were brought over from Africa through what is known as the Middle
Passage, which was the middle part of the triangular trade route among the
colonies, Europe and Asia. The conditions in which Africans were transported
were brutal; many died aboard.
1700s
The 1700s saw the beginnings of slave rebellions. In 1739, the Stono
Uprising was the first slave rebellion. About 100 slaves attempted to flee to
Florida but were attacked by the colonial militia. Those who were not killed there
were taken back and executed. The long-term result of the rebellion was that it
led to fear of more, which caused the colonies to pass more restrictive laws to
govern the behavior of slaves. New York experienced a “witch hunt” period in
which 31 blacks and 4 whites were killed on suspicions of conspiring to free
slaves. By 1790, 750,000 blacks were enslaved in the North American colonies.
Slavery was more common in the South, where tobacco, rice, and indigo were
grown for large profits on plantations. While slavery never took off in the North,
there were still some present in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania,
Massachusetts and Rhode Island. They were used as house servants, in shipping
operations and on farms.
1800-1850
The 1800s was when slavery began to be challenged starting with banning the
slave trade in 1808 due to its inhumane conditions. Then in 1820, the Missouri
Compromise is created outlawing slavery in states above the southern Missouri
border excluding Missouri. The Missouri Compromise postponed the slavery
debate for 30 years until the Compromise of 1850 took its place. The
Compromise of 1850 was necessary after the territory gained in the MexicanAmerican War beating out the Wilmot Proviso which attempted to prohibit
slavery in acquired territory. It admitted California as a free state and left the
Utah and New Mexico territories left to be decided by popular sovereignty also
implementing the fugitive slave law which made for the return of escaped slaves
to their owners. Prior to the Compromise of 1850 Nat Turner led a significant
slave rebellion leading to stricter slave laws in Virginia. The same year, 1831,
William Lloyd Garrison begins publishing The Liberator an abolitionist paper
also forming the American Anti-slavery Society in 1833. Along with William
Lloyd Garrison, Fredrick Douglass and Sojourner Truth were also abolitionist
advocates who began to become influential characters in the abolitionist
movement, Douglass with his North Star newspaper and Sojourner Truth with
her charismatic speaking. Harriet Tubman, also an escaped slave, helped many
slaves escape with the Underground Railroad.
1850- 1900
From 1850 to 1900 the United States is occupied with civil rights. Harriet
Beecher Stowe helps to add to the already high tensions of slavery with her novel
Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Afterwards the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 was passed
which left the decision of slavery in Kansas and Nebraska up to popular
sovereignty. The slavery debate became so heated that Kansas became known as
Bleeding Kansas during this period due the 200+ deaths and Senator Andrew
Butler beat Senator Charles Sumner with a cane due to slavery. After the
bleeding Kansas fiasco the Dred Scott v. Sanford case in 1857 hurt the
abolitionist movement. In this court case the Supreme Court ruled that slaves
were property not citizens and that congress could not regulate slavery in the
territories. With increasing tensions the southern states began to threaten to
secede from the union. John Brown, an abolitionist, led a raid on Harper’s Ferry
in hopes to initiate a slave rebellion but he failed and was executed. One year later
the election of 1860 led to the formation of the Confederate States of America
with Jefferson Davis as their president after Abraham Lincoln won the
presidency. The creation of the Confederate states marked the beginning of the
Civil War. During the Civil War Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation
Proclamation which declared that all slaves in the confederate states were free.
The Emancipation Proclamation led to nearly 200,000 free blacks and escaped
slave joining the union army. Lincoln later supported complete emancipation
leading to the Thirteenth Amendment. Lincoln negotiated with southern
leaders on this topic at the Hampton Roads Conference. People known as
Copperheads began to criticize Lincoln saying he was instigating social
revolution. Once the union were about to be the victors of the war they
established thee Freedman’s Bureau to help freed slaves survive. The Civil war
ended in 1865 leading to the period of reconstruction. Lincoln’s plan was called
the Ten-Percent Plan where ten percent of the voters in 1860 election had to take
an oath to the union and they would reorganize their state government and apply
for readmission. Radical Republicans felt it was too lenient and the Wade-Davis
Bill was enacted which required 50% rather than 10% and they would repeal their
secession and accept the thirteenth amendment. One year later, 1965, Lincoln was
assassinated and Andrew Johnson became president. Johnson’s reconstruction
plan was to create a provisional military government until they were readmitted
into the union and required all citizens to take a loyalty oath. Johnson unwilling
to compromise led to congress overriding vetoes an d taking over reconstruction
leading to Congressional Reconstruction and the Fourteenth Amendment,
which made all people born in the US citizens. Congress passed the Military
Reconstruction Act of 1867 which imposed martial law in the south and made
them ratify the fourteenth amendment. The Fifteenth Amendment was passed
in 1869 under Ulysses S. Grant it enfranchised black men. Southerners who
cooperated with reconstruction were referred to as scalawags and Northerners
who ran the programs were called carpetbaggers. With reconstruction being a
failure the Ku Klux Klan was formed targeting people who supported
reconstruction. In addition the failure led to sharecropping which was the new
slavery. Freed slaves had nowhere to go so many of them still worked on the
plantations. The end of reconstruction occurred with Compromise of 1877 when
the troops were pulled out of the south. Things went even worse for blacks when
the court case Plessy v. Ferguson validated the discriminatory Jim Crow Laws
stating that separate but equal facilities were legal. Booker T. Washington arose
as a leader for the blacks with his accommodationist mentality refusing to
demand equal rights immediately.
1901-1950
Entering the twentieth century, progressivism achieved great successes
regarding public enlightenment. During this time period, groups were formed to
fight a battle against discrimination that had been haunting blacks for far too
long. W.E.B Dubois, a civil rights activist, headed the National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People or NAACP in an attempt to achieve racial
justice. During World War I, more than 500,000 Southern blacks migrated to the
North in search of jobs since wartime manufacturing was creating jobs. Dubois
encouraged blacks to enlist in the armed forces in hopes of once again promoting
the idea of social equality but unfortunately the army segregated blacks and
assigned them to inferior labor. After World War I, America’s prosperity was sky
rocketing and in Harlem, the largest black neighborhood in New York City, the
Harlem Renaissance was born. Dubois helped draw attention to Harlem’s
cultural movement and among others who joined in the movement were the poets
Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen and Zora Neale Hurston. Another great
development for the black cultural development was the popularization of jazz.
Due to the fact that jazz was such a free-spirited form of self-expression it became
an emblem of the era now known as the Jazz Age. The roaring twenties were an
era of transition into the modern age that proved to bring a new spirit to the
nation but also brought the reemergence of a new and more powerful Ku Klux
Klan. During the 1920s, the KKK grew to more than 5 million members and now
not only targeted blacks but Jews, urbanites and anybody who didn’t follow
acceptable Christian behavior. Leading into World War II, more than a million
blacks served in the army but they lived in segregated units. The United States
army was not desegregated until after the war in 1948 during Truman’s
administration and in addition to that, Truman called for a more aggressive
enforcement of anti-lynching laws. Also, Jackie Robinson, the first black to be
induced into Major League Baseball, managed to break the color barrier in
baseball and with that sparked and outbreak of flagrant racism in the South but
none of that seemed to matter anymore. Going into the mid-1950s, blacks had
achieved far more that was every imagined and were slowly but surely heading
into what would be the one of the most symbolic periods of history.
1951-Present Day
During the mid-1950s, the civil rights movement experienced great success
beginning in 1954 with the Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education
brought on behalf of Linda Brown by the NAACP which overturned the “separate
but equal” rule and helped desegregate all schools. Although it was a great
victory for civil rights, it didn’t solve the issue overnight. In 1957, the governor
of Arkansas called the National Guard to Little Rock High School in order to
deny 9 teenagers knows as the Little Rock Nine, access into the school. Another
pivotal event in the civil rights movement was the Montgomery bus boycott in
the fifties. Civil rights activist Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat in the front
of the bus for a white man as required by the Jim Crow Laws leading to her
arrest. Parks’ arrest sparked the opposition of blacks to ride the buses for a year.
The boycott shined a bright spotlight on the famous civil rights activist, Martin
Luther King Jr. King inspired others to take a peaceful stand against segregation
and in 1960, black college students in Greensboro organized a sit-in at a local
lunch counter designated for whites only which encouraged blacks across the
nation to take this approach to combat segregation. In 1962, President Kennedy
enforced desegregation at the University of Mississippi and in the summer of
1963, he asked Congress for a legislation that would outlaw desegregation in all
public facilities. After Kennedy’s assassination, President Lyndon B. Johnson was
able to push that legislation, the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Martin Luther King
Jr. continued to guide blacks through an active period for the civil rights
movement and led the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC),
which organized sit-ins, boycotts and other peaceful demonstrations. The
Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), organized the Freedom Riders who
staged the sit-ins, boycotts, etc. The group was initially the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC), whose main focus was antisegregationist
activism yet all these groups still faced tremendous struggles and threats. In
1963, Mississippi’s NAACP director, Medgar Evers was shot to death by an antiintegrationist and not too long after that in Montgomery, Alabama active
demonstrators were assaulted by the authority. During the 1960s, civil rights
victories did not come easy for blacks. Resistance to change was as strong as ever.
In Selma, police tried to keep blacks from voting and in Birmingham police and
fireman attacked protesters. Meanwhile, all over the South, the KKK and other
racists bombed black churches and homes of civil rights activists. When news of
the violence and bombings arose, blacks became outraged and they demanded a
more aggressive approach to protest which Malcolm X, a minister of the Nation
of Islam, brought. Malcolm X urged blacks to claim their rights under any
circumstances. Later, influenced by Malcolm X, the SNCC and CORE expelled
their white members and formed Black Power. By 1968, when Martin Luther
King Jr. was assassinated, the civil rights movement had split with some
continuing to advocate peaceful change and others who were for aggression and
empowerment.
Glossary:
1600s-1700s Key Terms
Indigo: a tropical plant of the pea family, which was formerly widely cultivated as
a source of dark blue dye.
Middle Passage: the sea journey undertaken by slave ships from West Africa to
the West Indies.
Rice: a swamp grass that is widely cultivated as a source of food
Stono Uprising: slave rebellion that commenced on 9 September 1739, in the
colony of South Carolina.
Tobacco: he plant of the nightshade family that yields tobacco, native to tropical
America. It is widely cultivated in warm regions, especially in the US and China.
Triangular Trade Route: used to refer to the trade that involved shipping goods
from Britain to West Africa to be exchanged for slaves, these slaves being shipped
to the West Indies and exchanged for sugar, rum, and other commodities, which
were in turn shipped back to Britain.
1800-1900 Key Terms
Abraham Lincoln- 16th president led during civil war and ended slavery
Accommodationist - individual who believed in economic independence before
equal rights for blacks
American Anti-slavery Society- a society of opposed to slavery
Andrew Butler- Senator that beat Charles Sumner over slavery debate
Bleeding Kansas- Period of extreme violence in Kansas due to election whether it
would be a slave state or a free state
Booker T. Washington- An accommodationist that became an influential
character in equal rights
Carpetbaggers- Northerners who ran reconstruction programs
Civil War- 1961- 1965 Confederacy v. Union fought over slavery
Compromise of 1850- Compromise that enacted the fugitive slave law, admitted
California as a free state, and left the territories of New Mexico and Utah up to
popular sovereignty
Compromise of 1877- Marked the end of reconstruction by pulling out all troops
from the south
Confederate States of America- Name of the states that seceded from the union
Congressional Reconstruction- period when congress took over reconstruction
Copperheads- citizens that accused Abraham Lincoln of instigating a social
revolution
Dred Scott v. Sanford- Supreme court case that declared slaves to be property
Emancipation Proclamation- Speech given by Lincoln that freed the slave in the
confederate states
Fifteenth Amendment- Enfranchised black men
Fredrick Douglass- Abolitionist leader
Freedman’s Bureau – helped freed slaves survive by giving them food and
housing
Fourteenth Amendment- Made anyone born in the United States a US citizen
Fugitive slave law- Allowed for the recapturing of escaped slaves
Hampton Roads Conference- negotiation between Lincoln and southern leaders
on the thirteenth amendment
Harper’s Ferry- was raided by John Brown and supporters in hopes to start a
slave rebellion but failed
Harriet Tubman- helped many slaves escape through the Underground Railroad
Jefferson Davis- president of the Confederate States of America
John Brown- Abolitionist who led a raid on Harper’s ferry was arrested and
executed
Johnson’s Reconstruction Plan- President Andrew Johnson’s plan for
reconstruction consisting of provisional military government for southern states
and all citizens to take an oath to the US
Ku Klux Klan- group of racist radicals that attacked individual that supported
reconstruction
The Liberator- an abolitionist paper published by William Lloyd Garrison
Mexican- American War- War that heated the slavery debate by acquiring
territory (1846-1848)
Military Reconstruction Act of 1867- imposed martial law in the south and made
them ratify the 14th amendment
Missouri Compromise- outlawed slavery in all states above Missouri southern
border except for Missouri
Nat Turner- Slave that led the most significant slave rebellion was eventually
shut down and he was executed.
North Star- abolitionist newspaper published by Fredrick Douglass
Plessy v. Ferguson- supreme court case that established the law “separate but
equal”
Popular sovereignty – idea that slavery should be decided by election
Reconstruction- period after the civil war to help freed slaves and the have the
confederacy rejoin the US
Scalawags- Southerners who complied with reconstruction programs
Sojourner Truth- an abolitionist and women’s right speaker
Thirteenth Amendment- prohibits slavery
Uncle Tom’s Cabin- propaganda novel written by Harriet Beecher Stowe
intensifying the slavery debate
Underground Railroad- network of hiding places and safe trails to help slaves
escape
Wade- Davis Bill-required that 50% of voters in 1860 election take oath of
allegiance to the US and established a military governor in the south
Wilmot Proviso- attempted to prohibit slaver in territory acquired in the
Mexican American
1901- Present Day Key Terms
Brown v. Board of Education: Supreme court case which overturned “separate but
equal” ruling of Plessy V. Ferguson.
Civil Rights Act of 1964: act to enforce the constitutional right to vote and to
provide relief of segregation in public accommodations.
Congress of Racial Equality (CORE): U.S civil rights organization that played a
pivotal role in the Civil Rights Movement.
Freedom Riders: civil rights activists who rode buses to challenge the Jim Crow
Laws.
Harlem Renaissance: cultural movement in the 1920s
Jackie Robinson: first black to be allowed to play in Major League Baseball.
Jazz: music that originated from black culture and tradition.
Jazz Age: the era where jazz music and dance became popular.
Jim Crow Laws: racial segregation laws that mandated the racial segregation of
Ku Klux Klan: an organization that advocated white supremacy, white
nationalism and anti-immigration.
all public facilities.
Little Rock Nine: 9 teenagers who attempted to enter Little Rock High school.
Malcolm X: human rights activist who promoted an aggressive approach towards
civil rights.
Martin Luther King Jr.: leader in the African-American civil rights movement.
Medgar Evans: civil rights activist from Mississippi involved in efforts to
overturn segregation at the University of Mississippi and director of the NAACP
during that time.
Montgomery bus boycott: a boycott which kept blacks in Montgomery from
using the bus system for over a year.
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP): an
organization that was meant to ensure the political, educational, social and
economic equality of rights of all people and to eliminate racial hatred and
discrimination.
Rosa Parks: civil rights activist who refused to give up her seat for a white man.
Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC): African-American civil rights
organization.
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC): organization formed by
students who formed part of the American Civil Rights Movement.
W.E.B Dubois: American civil rights activist during the early 1900s and one of
the leaders of the NAACP.