African Americans

Over two hundred years ago, black people were captured in Africa by white men known as slavers.

They were chained in slave ships and brought to the United States.

The black people were were sold at auctions like cattle. They became slaves to white people.

They were sold to southern plantation owners who wanted them to work in their fields and in their homes.

The slaves lived in small shacks or cabins.

Many of them worked in the fields from dawn until dark. They were not paid any wages and were made to work long and hard.

Other slaves worked in the plantation houses.

Slaves were punished if they did not mind their masters or work hard or fast enough.

During the Civil War, after the battle of Antietam, President Abraham Lincoln gave a speech in which he declared the slaves to be free. It was called The Emancipation Proclamation. The date was January 1, 1863

100 years after the African Americans were freed, they still were not considered equal in many parts of our country, especially in the south.

Black children had to go to different schools than white children. Blacks were not allowed to use the same drinking fountains, benches and restaurants. This was called segregation. Adults were paid less wages for jobs and all African Americans were treated like second class citizens.

Men in an organization called the Ku Klux Klan used terror and cruelty to frighten African Americans. They did not want them to try to be equal in any way.

In August 1955, fourteen-year-old Chicagoan Emmett Till visited relatives in Mississippi. At Bryant's Grocery and Meat Market, a store owned by a white couple, Roy and Carolyn Bryant. Till is said to have whistled at Mrs. Bryant. Several days later, on Aug. 28, Till was kidnapped, brutally beaten, shot, and dumped in the Tallahatchie River. The Ku Klux Klan even used murder as a tool of terror. This is only one example.

Despite this, black people begin to fight for equal rights. Another term for equal rights is Civil Rights. These are pictures of what happened in Little Rock, Arkansas when eight brave African American students enrolled in a white high school. They were bullied and treated cruelly by many white students and parents.

A women named Rosa Parks did not believe it was right that black people had to always sit in the back of the bus so she sat in the front. She was arrested. They fought for Civil Rights in many ways…..

Some blacks sat at “all white” lunch counters and others rode “freedom” buses through the south where they helped others in the fight for equal rights.

Many whites also believed in equality for all. Together, blacks and whites, marched for Civil Rights.

On Sunday morning, September 15, 1963, a bomb exploded in the 16th Street Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama. The explosion killed four young girls who were in the church for Sunday school and injured another 20 people. Equal rights for all was not easily won. Many, many people were hurt and killed. Here are just a few…

Medgar Evers was a leader in the fight for Civil Rights. On June 12, 1963, he was killed by an assassin’s bullet. Housewife Viola Liuzzo was killed during a Civil Rights March. On June 21, 1964, three young civil rights workers—James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, 20, and Michael Schwerner, 24— were murdered in Nashoba County, Mississippi. They had been working to register black voters in Mississippi.

This is part of one of his famous speeches. “So I say to you, my friends, that even though we must face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American 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 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!” Martin Luther King was a minister and a famous black leader. He was a key leader in the fight for equal rights. He was later assassinated by a man who did not believe in Civil Rights.

However, the battle was eventually won. In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act. This Act made it illegal for any Americans to be discriminated against.

Bullies? Do you think the African Americans were victims of bullying? Who bullied them? Why?

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