Chapter 2: Social changes in the USA from the end of the 1850’s to the 1970’s
Chapter based on the Afro-American question
Source : US Census 1850
I. Segregation, a strong system, from slavery to the 1950’s:
A. The Civil War era
Source 1: Slave auctions in Chicago in 1845.
Source: Historical Pictures Service, Inc., Chicago
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Source 2: The situation of Blacks in the USA in the 1850’s
During the period of slavery, free blacks made up about one-tenth of the entire African American
population. In 1860, there were almost 500,000 free African Americans – half in the South and half in
the North. The free black population originated with former indentured servants and their descendants.
It was augmented by free black immigrants from the West Indies and by blacks freed by individual
slave owners.
But free blacks were only technically free. In the South, where they posed a threat to the institution of
slavery, they suffered both in law and by custom many of the restrictions imposed on slaves. In the
North, free blacks were discriminated against in such rights as voting, property ownership, and
freedom of movement, though they had some access to education and could organize. Free blacks also
faced the danger of being kidnapped and enslaved.
The earliest African American leaders emerged among the free blacks of the North, particularly those
of Philadelphia, Boston, and New York City. Free African Americans in the North established their
own institutions – churches, schools, and mutual aid societies. […]
Free blacks were among the first abolitionists. […] Beginning in 1830, African American leaders
began meeting regularly in national and state conventions. But they differed on the best strategies to
use in the struggle against slavery and discrimination. Some, such as David Walker and Henry
Highland Garnet, called on the slaves to revolt and overthrow their masters. Others, such as Russwurm
and Paul Cuffe, proposed that a major modern black country be established in Africa. […] However,
most black leaders then and later regarded themselves as Americans and felt that the problems of their
people could be solved only by a continuing struggle at home. […]
As a result of the Union victory in the Civil War and the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to
the Constitution (1865), nearly four million slaves were freed. The Fourteenth Amendment (1868)
granted African Americans citizenship, and the Fifteenth Amendment (1870) guaranteed their right to
vote.
Source: "African Americans." Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite.
Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, 2011.
Source 3: Compromise among slavery from 1820 to 1854:
Source: Encyclopedia Britannica, 2011.
2
Source 4: Republican national program adopted at Chicago in 1860:
Resolved, That we, the delegated representatives of the Republican electors of the United States,
[…] unite in the following declarations:
[…] 2. That the maintenance of the principles promulgated in the Declaration of Independence and
embodied in the Federal Constitution, "That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their
Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness;
that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the
consent of the governed," is essential to the preservation of our Republican institutions; and that the
Federal Constitution, the Rights of the States, and the Union of the States, must and shall be preserved.
3. That to the Union of the States this nation owes its unprecedented increase in population, its
surprising development of material resources, its rapid augmentation of wealth, its happiness at home
and its honour abroad; and we hold in abhorrence all schemes for Disunion, come from whatever
source they may: And we congratulate the country that no Republican member of Congress has uttered
or countenanced the threats of Disunion […] and we denounce those threats of Disunion […].
[…] 8. That the normal condition of all the territory of the United States is that of freedom; That as
our Republican fathers, when they had abolished Slavery in all our national territory, ordained that "no
person should be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law," it becomes our
duty, by legislation […] to maintain this provision of the Constitution against all attempts to violate
it; and we deny the authority of Congress, of a territorial legislature, or of any individuals, to give
legal existence to Slavery in any Territory of the United States.
9. That we brand the recent re-opening of the African slave-trade, under the cover of our national flag,
aided by perversions of judicial power, as a crime against humanity and a burning shame to our
country and age; and we call upon Congress to take prompt and efficient measures for the total and
final suppression of that execrable traffic. […]
12. That, while providing revenue for the support of the General Government by duties upon imports,
sound policy requires such an adjustment of these imposts as to encourage the development of the
industrial interest of the whole country; and we commend that policy of national exchanges which
secures to the working men liberal wages, to agriculture remunerative prices, to mechanics and
manufactures an adequate reward for their skill, labour, and enterprise, and to the nation commercial
prosperity and independence. […]
16. That a Railroad to the Pacific Ocean is imperatively demanded by the interest of the whole
country; that the Federal Government ought to render immediate and efficient aid in its construction;
and that, as preliminary thereto, a daily Overland Mail should be promptly established.
Source 5: Glory, Film from Matthew Broderick, 1989 (trailer)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9r72aGkShD4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWGt9Yr2bCw
Questions:
1. Which was the situation of the USA in 1850?
2. Which was the situation of African Americans in that period in the North and in the South)?
3. How did the African Americans act during the Civil War (December 20th 1861-June 2nd, 1865)?
4. What did the African American obtained at the end of the war?
B. Theoretical rights but a persistent segregation
C. From the Great Migration to WWII: cultural emancipation from the North.
Source 1: Giving education to the African American
[…] We must bear in mind that one of the influences of slavery was to impress upon both master and
slave the fact that labor with the hand was not dignified, was disgraceful, that labor of this character
was something to be escaped, to be gotten rid of just as soon as possible. Hence, it was very natural
that the Negro race looked forward to the day of freedom as being that period when it would be
delivered from all necessity of laboring with the hand. It was a large proportion of the race,
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immediately after its freedom, should make the mistake of confusing freedom with license. Under the
circumstances, any other race would have acted in the same manner.
One of the first and most important lessons, then, to be taught the Negro when he became free
was the one that labor with the hand or with the head, so far from being something to be dreaded and
shunned, was something that was dignified and something that should be sought, loved, and
appreciated. Here began the function of the industrial school for the education of the Negro. […]
Source: Booker T. Washington1 and William E. B. Du Bois2, The Negro in the South, chapter 2, 1907, p. 45-46.
Source 2: The Great migration
In U.S. history, the widespread migration of African Americans in the 20th century from rural
communities in the South to large cities in the North and West, was called the Great Migration. At the
turn of the 20th century, the vast majority of black Americans lived in the Southern states. From 1916
to 1970, during this Great Migration, it is estimated that some six million black Southerners relocated
to urban areas in the North and West.
[…] The urban industries were faced with labour shortages. A huge internal population shift among
African Americans addressed these shortfalls, particularly during the World Wars, when defense
industries required more unskilled labour. […]
The “push” factors for the exodus were poor economic conditions in the South – exacerbated by the
limitations of sharecropping, farm failures, and crop damage from the boll weevil3 – as well as
ongoing racial oppression in the form of Jim Crow laws4. “Pull” factors included encouraging reports
of good wages and living conditions that spread by word of mouth and that appeared in African
American newspapers. With advertisements for housing and employment and firsthand stories of
newfound success in the North, the Chicago Defender, for example, became one of the leading
promoters of the Great Migration. In addition to Chicago, other cities absorbed large numbers of
migrants, including Detroit (Michigan), Cleveland (Ohio), and New York City.
Seeking better civil and economic opportunities, many blacks were not wholly able to escape racism
by migrating to the North, where African Americans were segregated into ghettos and urban life
introduced new obstacles. Newly arriving migrants even encountered social challenges from the black
establishment in the North, which tended to look down on the “country” manners of the newcomers.
Black Population Trends
1890’s
1960’s
Southern 90.3%
10%
Rural
90%
5%
Northern 9.7%
90%
Urban
10%
95%
Source: US census bureau
Source 3: The Harlem Renaissance:
The Harlem Renaissance was a phase of a larger New Negro movement that had emerged in the early
20th century and in some ways ushered5 in the civil rights movement of the late 1940s and early 1950s.
The social foundations of this movement included the Great Migration of African Americans from
rural to urban spaces and from South to North; dramatically rising levels of literacy; the creation of
national organizations dedicated to pressing African American civil rights, “uplifting” the race, and
opening socioeconomic opportunities; and developing race pride, including pan-African sensibilities
and programs. […] The Harlem Renaissance is unusual among literary and artistic movements for its
1
Booker Taliaferro Washington (April 5th, 1856 – November 14th, 1915) was an American educator, author,
orator, and political leader. He was the dominant figure in the African American community in the United States
from 1890 to 1915. Representative of the last generation of black leaders born in slavery, he spoke on behalf of
the large majority of blacks who lived in the South but had lost their right to vote.
2
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (February 23rd, 1868 – August 27th, 1963) was an intellectual leader in
the United States as a sociologist, historian, civil rights activist, Pan-Africanist, author, and editor.
3
It’s a disease touching the cotton plants.
4
Any of the laws that enforced racial segregation in the South between the end of the formal Reconstruction
period in 1877 and the beginning of a strong civil rights movement in the 1950s.
5
To introduce.
4
close relationship to civil rights and reform organizations. Crucial to the movement were magazines
such as The Crisis, published by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP); Opportunity, published by the National Urban League; […]. Negro World, the newspaper
of Marcus Garvey's6 Universal Negro Improvement Association, also played a role, but few of the
major authors or artists identified with Garvey's “Back to Africa” movement, even if they contributed
to the paper.
The renaissance had many sources in black culture, primarily of the United States and the Caribbean,
and manifested itself well beyond Harlem. […] The phenomenon known as the Harlem Renaissance
represented the flowering in literature and art of the New Negro movement of the 1920s, with […]
writers like the poets Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and Claude McKay and the novelists
Rudolph Fisher, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer. The “New Negro,” […] questioned traditional
“white” aesthetic standards […] to cultivate personal self-expression, racial pride, and literary
experimentation. […] In Harlem and in others cities in the USA, like Chicago, Jazz musicians
developed also their performances in clubs and created a new wave of music in the north. Among
them, famous musicians like Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong took the lead.
Source: Encyclopedia Britannica
Source 4: African American and the New Deal:
The Great Depression of the 1930s worsened the already bleak economic situation of African
Americans. They were the first to be laid off from their jobs, and they suffered from an unemployment
rate two to three times that of whites. In early public assistance programs African Americans often
received substantially less aid than whites, and some charitable organizations even excluded blacks
from their soup kitchens.
[…] In the 1932 presidential race African Americans overwhelmingly supported the successful
Democratic candidate, Franklin D. Roosevelt. The Roosevelt administration's accessibility to African
American leaders and the New Deal reforms strengthened black support for the Democratic Party. A
number of African American leaders, members of a so-called “black cabinet,” were advisers to
Roosevelt. Among them were the educator Mary McLeod Bethune […].
African Americans benefited greatly from New Deal programs, though discrimination by local
administrators was common. […]
The industrial boom that began with the outbreak of World War II in Europe in 1939 ended the
Depression. However, unemployed whites were generally the first to be given jobs. […] Although
discrimination remained widespread, during the war African Americans secured more jobs at better
wages in a greater range of occupations than ever before.
During the war, […] a large proportion of African American soldiers overseas were in service units,
and combat troops remained segregated. […].
Source: Encyclopedia Britannica
Questions:
1. Find the different phase of the evolution of the African Americans’ situation from WWI to the end
of WWII.
2. Which was the evolution of the black population settlement during that period?
3. How did the African Americans’ rights evolve?
4. Were segregation and despise over?
II. The Civil Rights movements and fights for equality : 1950’s-1970’s:
A. The Civil Rights movements
6
Garvey urged African American to go back to Africa and to create a state. It was done in 1922 with the creation
of Liberia.
5
Source 1: Martin Luther King, Jr., and other civil rights leaders of a municipal bus boycott in
Montgomery, Ala., riding an integrated bus, December 1956 by the photographer Bettmann
Source 2: Civil rights demonstrator being attacked by police dogs, May 3, 1963, Birmingham,
Ala. Photo taken by the photographer Bill Hudson for Associated Press
Source 3: Martin Luther King speech, I have a dream (extract), March on Washington D. C.,
August 1963:
[...] One day even the state of Mississippi, a state, sweltering7 with the heat of injustice, sweltering
with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream
that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of
their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today. I have a dream that one day,
down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of
interposition and nullification, one day, right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be
able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today.
[...]
7
Étouffer à cause de la chaleur.
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Source 4: Civil rights movement’s achievements
In 1960, the sit-in movement […] was launched at Greensboro, North Carolina, when black college
students insisted on service at a local segregated lunch counter. Patterning its techniques on the
nonviolent methods of Indian leader Mohandas Gandhi, the movement spread across the nation,
forcing the desegregation of department stores, supermarkets, libraries, and movie theatres. […] By
September it was estimated that more than 70,000 students had participated in the movement, with
approximately 3,600 arrested; more than 100 cities in 20 states had been affected. The movement
reached its climax in August 1963 with the massive March on Washington, D.C., to protest racial
discrimination and demonstrate support for major civil rights legislation that was pending in Congress.
[…]After President Kennedy's assassination (November 1963), Congress, under the prodding of
President Lyndon B. Johnson, in 1964 passed the Civil Rights Act. This was the most far-reaching
civil rights bill in the nation's history (indeed, in world history), forbidding discrimination in public
accommodations and threatening to withhold federal funds from communities that persisted in
maintaining segregated schools. It was followed in 1965 by the passage of the Voting Rights Act, the
enforcement of which eradicated the tactics previously used in the South to disenfranchise black
voters. This act led to drastic increases in the numbers of black registered voters in the South, with a
comparable increase in the numbers of blacks holding elective offices there.
Source: Encyclopedia Britannica
Questions:
1. Which were the actions made during the civil rights movement?
2. Which were the reactions in the southern states of the USA?
3. What did the African American obtain from that movement?
4. Who was the most important leader of that period?
B. Urban upheaval8
Source 1: The civil rights movement changed in the late 1960’s:
[…]Up until 1966 the civil rights movement had united widely disparate elements in the black
community along with their white supporters and sympathizers, but in that year signs of radicalism
began to appear in the movement as younger blacks became impatient with the rate of change and
dissatisfied with purely nonviolent methods of protest. This new militancy split the ranks of the
movement's leaders and also alienated some white sympathizers, a process that was accelerated by a
wave of rioting in the black ghettos of several major cities in 1965-67. After the assassination of King
(April 1968) and further black rioting in the cities, the movement as a cohesive effort disintegrated,
with a broad spectrum of leadership advocating different approaches and varying degrees of militancy.
In the decades that followed, many civil rights leaders sought to achieve greater direct political power
through elective office, and they sought to achieve more substantive economic and educational gains
through affirmative-action programs that compensated for past discrimination in job hiring and college
admissions. Although the civil rights movement was less militant, it was still persevering.
Source: Encyclopedia Britannica
Source 2: James Brown’s song, Say it loud – I’m black, I’m proud, 1968
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A big change that causes a lot of confusion, worry and problems.
7
Uh, with your bad self
Say it louder (I got a mouth) (x 2)
Look a'here, some people say we
got a lot of malice
Some say it's a lotta nerve
I say we won't quit moving
Til we get what we deserve
We've been buked and we've been
scourned
We've been treated bad, talked
about
As just as sure as you're born
But just as sure as it take
Two eyes to make a pair, huh
Brother, we can't quit until we get
our share
Chorus (x 3):
Say it loud,
I'm black and I'm proud
I've worked on jobs with my feet
and my hands
But all the work I did was for the
other man
And now we demands a chance
To do things for ourselves
we tired of beating our heads
against the wall
And working for someone else
Ooowee, ou're killing me
Alright uh, you're out of sight
Alright, so tough, you're tough
enough
Ooowee uh, you're killing me, oow
Sometimes we dance, we sing and
we talk
You know I do like to do the camel
walk
Alright now, hu alright,
Alright now, ha
Chorus (x 2)
Chorus (x 4)
Now we demand a chance to do
things for ourselves
We tired of beating our heads
against the wall
And working for someone else
A look a'here,
One thing more I got to say right
here
Now, we're people like the birds
and the bees
We rather die on our feet,
Than keep living on our knees
Now we's demands a chance to do
things for ourselves
We're tired of beating our heads
against the wall
And working for someone else, hu
Now we're our people, too
We're like the birds and the bees,
But we'd rather die on our feet,
Than keep a'living on our knees
Chorus (x 3)
Uh, alright now, good Lord
You know we can do the boog-aloo
Now we can say we do the Funky
Broadway!
Now we can do, hu
Chorus (x 5)
Oooow, oowee, you're killing me,
alright
Uh, outa sight, alright you're outa
sight
Ooowee, oh Lord,
Ooowee, you're killing me
Ooowee,
ooowee,
ooowee,
ooowee, ow
Chorus (x 4)
Chorus (x 4)
Source 3: Malcolm X’s Black Nationalism, interview from 1968.
“My personal political philosophy is black nationalism, which means the black man should control the
politics of his own community and control the politicians who are in his own community. My personal
economic philosophy is also Black Nationalism, which means the black man should have a hand in
controlling the economy of the so-called Negro community. He should be developing the type of
knowledge that will enable him to own and operate the businesses, and thereby to create employment
for his own people, for his own kind. And the social philosophy is also Black Nationalism, which
means that instead of the black man trying to force into the society of the white man, which should
eliminate from our own society the ills and the defects and make ourselves likable and sociable among
our own kind. […] I’m not dissatisfied with everything. […] The only way the problem can be solved:
first, the white man and the black man have to be able to sit down at the same table. The white man
has to feel free to speak his mind without hurting the feelings of that Negro. And the so-called Negro
has to feel free to speak his mind without hurting the feelings of the white man. They can bring the
issue that are under the rug out on the top of the table and take an intelligent approach to get the
problem solved. That’s the only way.
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Source 4: Between violence and international protestation.
Black Panther Party national
chairman Bobby Seale (left) and
defense minister Huey Newton by
an anonymous photographer for
Associated Press.
At The Olympic Games at Mexico city,
in 1968, Tommie Smith, the winner of
200 meters race and John Carlos the
third, gave the Black power salute to
protest against racial segregation.
Source 5: Meeting with a black panther, extracts from the film Forest Gump, 1994
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBMAOSgVp_w
Questions:
1. How has the African American Civil Rights movement evolved since the middle of the 1960’s?
2. Which were the claims, the objectives of this movement and was it still united?
3. Which were the reasons of such a radicalization of a part of the movement?
4. How could the Vietnam War be a new reason of division inside the movement?
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