Blacks were brought as of 1619
Blacks in Central Africa in 1800
A plantation in Mississippi
Advertisement for Slave Auction, 1829
This American slave auction advertised slaves for sale or
temporary hire by their owners. Buyers often paid as
much as $2,000 for a skilled, healthy slave.
Such auctions often separated family members from one
another, many of whom never saw their loved ones again.
Struggle for freedom and emancipation
Escaped slaves with Harriett Tubman
The underground railroad.
(she helped 300 Blacks to
freedom from 1849 to 1860)
Slave states
(Dixie Land)
The American Civil War
Abraham Lincoln
Won the elections in 1860
The South seceded and formed the Confederate Union
He was assassinated in 1865 by John Wilkes Booth
Union casualties during the Civil War (1860-1865)
All slaves were emancipated
They were freed
In 1863
In 1865
(13th amendment of the constitution)
They became American citizens
In 1868
(14th amendment of the constitution)
They were given equal voting rights
(15th amendment of the constiution)
In 1870
Waiting for Rations
Recently freed blacks line up for rations
at a Freedmen’s Bureau in the US South.
The Bureau was formed in 1865 to provide food
and medical and legal assistance to the newly
emancipated blacks as well as needy whites.
The programme produced several schools and
educational institutions before it was abandoned
only a few years later.
The whites in the South resented the freedom of the blacks
It gave birth to hate groups Who resorted to murder and
lynching, going unpunished
They enforced discrimination.
They imposed black codes to deprive the Blacks of their rights.
To impose segregation
Minstrel Show, theatrical entertainment originated
and developed in the United States in the first half of the 19th
century, and consisting of songs, dances, and comic
repartee typically performed by white actors made up
as blacks
the “father of American minstrelsy” was Thomas Dartmouth
“Daddy” Rice, who between 1828 and 1831 developed
a song-and-dance routine in which he impersonated an
old, crippled black slave, dubbed Jim Crow
The whites imposed SEGREGATION
It means that the Blacks ...
Couldn ’t
Weren’t allowed to
go to the same public places as the whites
go to the same schools as the whites
They had to live in their own villages
So the Blacks had to fight again
Marcus Garvey
Before the forties
Separatists who advocated to return to Africa
Integrationists wanted equal rights before the law
1954: « The principle of separate but equal » was ruled out
Desegregation in the South
Einsenhower had to send federal troops to protect Black children on
Their way to school ( Little Rock, Arkansas)
Integration in the South
Integration in the South
President John F. Kennedy sent federal troops to
Mississippi in 1962 to quell riots after the U.S. Supreme
Court ordered the University of Mississippi to admit James
Meredith. Meredith, who became the first black student
to attend the institution, is seen here (centre) being
escorted by Justice Department officials on his first day
at the university.
Rosa Parks
Rosa Parks
In 1955 Rosa Parks was arrested for disobeying a
segregation law in Montgomery, Alabama, that
required her to give up her seat on a bus to a white
person. Her action helped to stimulate protests
against inequality. For 382 days following her trial,
blacks refused to use the city’s bus system. The
boycott received national attention and forced city
officials to repeal the discriminatory law.
1963 « I have a dream »
Washington memorial
1968: assassinated in Memphis
The SCLC (Southern Christian
Leadership conference.)
NON VIOLENT
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Martin Luther King, Jr., emerged as a leader
of the American civil rights movement after organizing
the famous 1955 bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama
.Throughout his career he pressed for equal treatment
and improved circumstances for blacks, organizing
nonviolent protests and delivering powerful speeches
on the necessity of eradicating institutional racial
inequalities. In 1963 King led a peaceful march between
the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial,
where he delivered his most famous speech,
“I Have a Dream”.
‘ I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out
the true meaning of its creed ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident
that all men are created equal’. I have a dream that one day, on the
red hills of Georgia the son of former slaves and the sons of former
slave-owners will be able to sit down together a the table of
brotherhood … I have a dream that my four little children will one
day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the the color
of their skin, but by the content of their character’
Washington DC August 28th 1963
CIVIL RIGHTS ACT
1964
VOTING RIGHTS ACT
1965
Marchers for Civil Rights
Marchers protest to demand greater civil rights in 1968.
State officials who feared violence during the march called
out the National Guard. Although the US Congress
passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, American blacks
in the South often found it difficult to exercise their civil
rights during the 1960s.
UPI/BETTMANN
In the sixties
Malcom X
Black Muslims
Black panthers
Black Power / leader : Stokeley Carmickael
THEY ADVOCATED VIOLENCE
JESSE Jackson
He campaigned for a multiracial Rainbow Coalition
(INTERETHNIC SOLIDARITY OF ALL MINORITIES (Indians
chicanos, gays, women …)
James Baldwin
« The fire next time »
Alex Haley
« Roots »
Toni Morisson
« Sula »
Famous writers