Racism in the United States in the 1900’s

I cover how racism has changed over the years, and how it has affected African Americans in jobs, social activities, and their everyday lives.

How African Americans became slaves, and how Whites justified their inhuman actions.

I discuss how after the Civil Rights Movement, African Americans still faced racism, especially in the South.

I include a timeline of how racism has changed from 1915-1947.

Lauren SowellEnglish 100

October 12, 2009

Racism in the United StatesRacism in the United States has been a major issue since the colonial era. Historically, the country has been

dominated by a settler society of religiously and ethnically diverse whites. The heaviest burdens of racism in the country have historically fallen upon African Americans, as well as other immigrant groups. Major racially structured institutions include slavery, Indian reservations, segregation, residential schools (for Native Americans), internment

camps, and affirmative action. Racial stratification has occurred in employment, housing, education and government. Formal racial discrimination was largely banned in the mid-20th century, and it came to be perceived as socially

unacceptable and/or morally repugnant as well, yet racial politics remain a major phenomenon.

Racist attitudes, or prejudice, are still held by significant portions of the U.S population. Members of every American ethnic group have perceived racism in their dealings with other groups.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_the_United_States

The Slave Trade

To justify the slave trade its supporters dehumanised the African race, used as slaves, hence they were called "Black cattle". This led to Africans being thought of as an inferior race, the consequences of which can still be seen in acts of racism today. The slave became a non-person: a chattel, a thing, an object to be bequeathed and inherited, sold and bought. Moreover the slave was black; a person transmuted into a object of loathing by white society. All slave societies devised complex legal and social conventions for maintaining the separation, the uniqueness of blacks, by limiting their access to the law, to property, to certain relationships with white people. At times, whites went to bizarre lengths to maintain these racial hierarchies (and to ensure that whites remained on top). The end results were legal codes and local conventions which secured black humanity a permanent and inherited place at the bottom of the social heap. Nor was this simply a matter of legal practice. whites everywhere across the Americas internalised this hierarchy, believing in and living out as daily reality the racialism of slavery.

Slavery was thus the critical force in the racialising of the western world in the years after the European invasions of the Americas. the legacy of those ideas lived on - and continues - long after slavery in the Americas itself had ended. Hence what seems at first glance to be a relatively simple historical story - the slave trade - forms the core of a complex historical process whose ramifications continue to reverberate throughout the modern world. The slave trade has to be, one of the most significant historical forces in the shaping of the Atlantic world.

http://blogs.citypages.com/gop/slave-back.jpg

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.garstangfairtrade.org.uk/userfiles/racism.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.garstangfairtrade.org.uk/slave-trade-fairtrade/racism-slave-

It is important to separate fact from fiction when it comes to racism and the plight of African-American people in the history of this place we call the United States.

White people have lived from the beginning of western society, with a relative amount of comfort. They have for the most part, had the ability to work and be paid fairly for that day's labor.

Black Americans of African descent on the other hand, lived generation after generation as slaves from 1619 to 1865. That is when the southern states that separated from the United States in a bloody Civil War that cost millions of lives, was defeated. Slavery was abolished.

But it did not end there for African-Americans. As the years after the Civil War passed, one law after another was drafted incorporating direct prejudice blacks. As you will see below; one state would pass a racism-inspired law and then another would follow, and another one would slime out another law based purely on racism. The last state time after time, would be Oklahoma.

Some people argue that we are all born with prejudice as part of our psyche, and maybe that is true; but it is our personal responsibility as adults and parents to educate ourselves and others by learning to respect other races and cultures, hopefully through co-existing with people of other backgrounds.

http://www.salem-news.com/articles/july122008/prejudice_history_7-11-08.php

1915"D.W. Griffith's "Birth of A Nation" represented the essence of racism in film. The movie set the stage for future portrayals of blacks in film. Griffith showed blacks as, "endearing inferiors duped into rising above their accustomed station by misinformed abolitionists and vindictive reconstruction congressmen who had betrayed Lincoln's benign plans for the defeated South."

1919The mob of about 400 whites in Washington, D.C. that went on a rampage, was motivated by weeks of sensational newspaper accounts of alleged sex crimes by a "Negro fiend" that unleashed a wave of violence that swept over the city for four days.

1921A riot destroyed a 30-square-block area of north Tulsa, Oklahoma known as Greenwood, a primarily black neighborhood. Newspaper accounts reported 76 dead, but historians have put the figure closer to 300. Blacks here have long maintained that whites used airplanes to bomb homes, churches and businesses in north Tulsa.

1930Jessie Daniel Ames formed the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching. She got 40,000 white women to sign a pledge against lynching and for change in the South.

1940This is the year the Second Great Migration began - In multiple acts of resistance, more than 5 million African Americans left the violence and segregation of the South for jobs, education, and the chance to vote in northern, midwestern and California cities.

1947Jackie Robinson plays his first game for the Brooklyn Dodgers, becoming the first black baseball player in professional baseball in 60 years, and President Harry S. Truman issues Executive Order 9981 ordering the end of segregation in the Armed Forces.

1915"D.W. Griffith's "Birth of A Nation" represented the essence of racism in film. The movie set the stage for future portrayals of blacks in film. Griffith showed blacks as, "endearing inferiors duped into rising above their accustomed station by misinformed abolitionists and vindictive reconstruction congressmen who had betrayed Lincoln's benign plans for the defeated South."

1919The mob of about 400 whites in Washington, D.C. that went on a rampage, was motivated by weeks of sensational newspaper accounts of alleged sex crimes by a "Negro fiend" that unleashed a wave of violence that swept over the city for four days.

1921A riot destroyed a 30-square-block area of north Tulsa, Oklahoma known as Greenwood, a primarily black neighborhood. Newspaper accounts reported 76 dead, but historians have put the figure closer to 300. Blacks here have long maintained that whites used airplanes to bomb homes, churches and businesses in north Tulsa.

1930Jessie Daniel Ames formed the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching. She got 40,000 white women to sign a pledge against lynching and for change in the South.

1940This is the year the Second Great Migration began - In multiple acts of resistance, more than 5 million African Americans left the violence and segregation of the South for jobs, education, and the chance to vote in northern, midwestern and California cities.

1947Jackie Robinson plays his first game for the Brooklyn Dodgers, becoming the first black baseball player in professional baseball in 60 years, and President Harry S. Truman issues Executive Order 9981 ordering the end of segregation in the Armed Forces.

Timeline of Racism in the United Timeline of Racism in the United StatesStates

Early 1900’sEarly 1900’s