In the 18 th century the amount of slaves grew by 36,000 a year. In the 1780s the amount of slaves in a year grew up to 80,000. Over 90% of Africa’s population was forcibly imported to America, 70% arrived directly from America. 20 million African were slaves when they arrived in America. Slavery

In 1807, the British government passed an Act of Parliament abolishing the slave trade throughout the British Empire The slave trade refers to the transatlantic trading patterns which were established as early as the mid-17th century. Trading ships would set sail from Europe with a cargo of manufactured goods to the west coast of Africa. There, these goods would be traded, over weeks and months, for captured people provided by African traders. European traders found it easier to do business with African intermediaries who raided settlements far away from the African coast and brought those young and healthy enough to the coast to be sold into slavery.

Slavery in the British Isles existed from before Roman occupation. Chattel slavery virtually disappeared after the Norman Conquest to be replaced by feudalism and serfdom. Slavery was finally abolished throughout the British Empire by the Slavery Abolition Act 1833, with exceptions provided for the East India Company, Ceylon, and Saint Helena. These exceptions were eliminated in Forced labour existed between the 17th and 19th centuries in the form of transportation of convicts, and in the workhouse for the poor. The three way trade in the North Atlantic

Over the next 300 years more than 11 million enslaved people were transported across the Atlantic from Africa to America and the West Indies, and Britain led this trade from the mid-17th century onwards. Ports such as Bristol, Liverpool and Glasgow sent out many slaving ships each year, bringing great prosperity to their owners. Many other cities also grew rich on the profits of industries which depended on slave-produced materials such as cotton, sugar and tobacco. Slave sale, Charleston, South Carolina 1856 (ZPER 34/29)

Emboldened by a feeling that history was finally going their way, blacks in the South did what had once been unthinkable. They openly rebelled against racial discrimination. This new civil rights movement began in Montgomery, Alabama, in Mrs Rosa Parks refused to obey a bus driver who ordered her to surrender her seat to a white man. Her arrest prompted 50,000 blacks to boycott the city buses for more than a year, until seating was finally integrated. Not only was the protest a triumphant success, garnering worldwide sympathy, but it also threw up a inspiring and eloquent leader, a young Baptist clergyman called Martin Luther King, Jr.

As blacks in the South became increasingly confident about the sympathy of the outside world, their protests snowballed. In 1960, black college students staged 'sit-ins' at cafeterias that served only whites. In 1961 integrated teams of black and white travellers staged bus journeys, or 'Freedom Rides', across the South, challenging segregation laws along the way. Civil rights protests reached a crescendo in , with dramatic confrontations in Birmingham and Selma. After the Birmingham protest, Congress passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, banning racial segregation. The Voting Rights Act, passed in 1965, guaranteed the right to vote - a right that had already been granted in 1868, but that had been abridged in 1900.

The African-American Civil Rights Movement encompasses social movements in the United States whose goal was to end racial segregation and discrimination against black Americans and enforce constitutional voting rights to them. This article covers the phase of the movement between 1954 and 1968, particularly in the South.

From 1890 to 1908, southern states passed new constitutions and laws to disfranchise African Americans by creating barriers to voter registration; voting rolls were dramatically reduced as blacks were forced out of electoral politics. While progress was made in some areas, this status lasted in most southern states until national civil rights legislation was passed in the mid- 1960s to provide federal enforcement of constitutional voting rights. For more than 60 years, blacks in the South were not able to elect anyone to represent their interests in Congress or local government. [6] Since they could not vote, they could not serve on local juries. [6]

Civil rights activist Rosa Parks was born on February 4, 1913, in Tuskegee, Alabama. Her refusal to surrender her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery, Alabama bus spurred a city-wide boycott. The city of Montgomery had no choice but to lift the law requiring segregation on public buses. Rosa Parks received many accolades during her lifetime, including the NAACP's highest award.