This book is about the true history of black Americans, which started about the seventeenth century with indentured servitude in British America and progressed on to the election of Barack Obama as the forty-fourth president of the United States.
Between those landmarks were other events and issues, both resolved and ongoing, that were faced by black Americans. Some of these were slavery, reconstruction, development of the black community, participation in the great military conflicts of the United States, racial segregation, and the civil rights movement.
Black Americans make up the single largest minority in the United States, the second-largest group after whites in the United States.
The Great Migrations, Underground Railroad and Abolitionist, Harlem Renaissance, the Civil Rights Movement, and Women in Black-American History.
This book is about the true history of black Americans, which started about the seventeenth century with indentured servitude in British America and progressed on to the election of Barack Obama as the forty-fourth president of the United States.
Between those landmarks were other events and issues, both resolved and ongoing, that were faced by black Americans. Some of these were slavery, reconstruction, development of the black community, participation in the great military conflicts of the United States, racial segregation, and the civil rights movement.
Black Americans make up the single largest minority in the United States, the second-largest group after whites in the United States.
The Great Migrations, Underground Railroad and Abolitionist, Harlem Renaissance, the Civil Rights Movement, and Women in Black-American History.
Black Americans 17th Century to 21st Century: Black Struggles and Successes
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Black Americans 17th Century to 21st Century: Black Struggles and Successes
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Overview
This book is about the true history of black Americans, which started about the seventeenth century with indentured servitude in British America and progressed on to the election of Barack Obama as the forty-fourth president of the United States.
Between those landmarks were other events and issues, both resolved and ongoing, that were faced by black Americans. Some of these were slavery, reconstruction, development of the black community, participation in the great military conflicts of the United States, racial segregation, and the civil rights movement.
Black Americans make up the single largest minority in the United States, the second-largest group after whites in the United States.
The Great Migrations, Underground Railroad and Abolitionist, Harlem Renaissance, the Civil Rights Movement, and Women in Black-American History.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781490717333 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Trafford Publishing |
| Publication date: | 11/07/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 622 |
| File size: | 844 KB |
Read an Excerpt
Black Americans 17th Century to 21st Century
Black Struggles and Successes
By JOHN H. JORDAN
Trafford Publishing
Copyright © 2013 John H. JordanAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4907-1732-6
CHAPTER 1
Black American's History started in the 17th century with indentured servitude in British America and progresses onto the election of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States. Between those landmarks there were other events and issues both resolved and ongoing, that were faced by blacks. Some of these were slavery, reconstruction, development of the black community, participation in the Great Military Conflicts of the United States, racial segregation, and the Civil Rights Movement. Blacks made up the single largest racial minority in the United States, the second largest group after whites in the United States.
The first recorded blacks (Africans) in British North America (United States) arrived in 1619 as indentured servants who settled in Jamestown, Virginia. As English settlers died from harsh conditions, more and more blacks were brought to work as laborers. Blacks for many years were similar in legal position to poor English indentures, who traded several years labor in exchange for passage to America. Blacks could legally raise crops and cattle to purchase their freedom. They raised families, marrying other blacks and sometimes intermarrying with Indians (Native Americans) or English settlers. By the 1640s, several Black families owned farms around Jamestown and some became wealthy by colonial standards.
The popular conception of a race based slave system did not fully develop until the 18th century. The first Black congregation and churches were organized before 1800 in both Northern and Southern cities following the Great Awakening. By 1775, Blacks made up 20% of the population in the American Colonies, which made the second largest ethnic group after the English. During the 1770s, Blacks, both enslaved and free, helped rebellious English colonists secure American Independence by defeating the British in The American Revolution. Blacks and English fought side by side and were fully integrated. James Armistead, a Black American, played a large part in making possible the 1781 Yorktown victory, which established the United States as an Independent Nation. Other Blacks were Prince Whipple and Oliver Cornwell, who are both depicted in the front of the boat in George Washington's Famous 1776 Crossing the Delaware portrait.
By 1860, there were 3.5 million enslaved Blacks in the United States due to the Atlantic Slave Trade, and another 500,000 Blacks lived free across the country. In 1863, during the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. The Proclamation declared that all slaves in states which had seceded from the Union were free.
Blacks quickly set up congregations for themselves, as well as schools, community and civic associations, to have space away from white control or oversight. Southern states enacted Jim Crow Laws to enforce racial segregation and disenfranchisement. Most Blacks followed the Jim Crow Laws, using a mask of compliance to prevent becoming victims of racially motivated violence. To maintain self-esteem and dignity Blacks such as Anthony Overton and Mary McLeod Bethune continued to build their own schools, churches, banks, social clubs, and other businesses.
The Civil Rights Movement from 1954 to 1968 was directed at abolishing racial discrimination against Blacks, particularly in Southern United States. The March on Washington for jobs and freedom and the conditions which brought it into being are credited with putting pressure on President John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.
Lyndon B. Johnson put his support behind passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that banned discrimination in public accommodations, employment, and labor unions; and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which expanded federal authority over states to ensure Black political participation through protection of voter registration and elections.
Politically and economically, Blacks have made substantial strides during the post-civil rights era. In 1989, Douglas Wilder became the first Black elected Governor in U.S. History. Clarence Thomas became the second Black Supreme Court Justice. In 1992 Carol Moseley-Braun of Illinois became the first Black woman elected to the U.S. Senate. There were 8,936 Black officeholders in the United States in 2000, showing a net increase of 7,467 since 1970. In 2001 there were 484 Black mayors.
On November 4, 2008, Democratic Senator Barack Obama defeated Republican Senator John McCain to become the first Black to be elected President of the United States. At least 95 percent of Black voters voted for Obama. He received overwhelming support from young and educated whites, a majority of Asians, Hispanics, and Native Americans.
Running as the candidate of change, Obama made hope the center of his campaign. His platform focused on advocating for working families and poor communities, education, caring for the environment, and ethics reform.
Obama's Early Years
January 20, 1961, John F. Kennedy succeed Dwight Eisenhower as the 35th President of the United States of America.
May 4, 1961, U.S. Freedom Riders begin interstate bus rides to test the new U.S. Supreme Court Integration Decision.
August 4, 1961, Barack Hussein Obama was born at Kapi'olani Maternity and Gynecological Hospital in Honolulu, Hawaii. His mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, was born in Wichita, Kansas. His father, Barack Obama, Sr. was a Luo from Nyang'oma Kogelo, Nyanza Province, Kenya. The couple married on February 2, 1961, and divorced in 1964.
From age six to ten, Obama attended school in Jakarta, including Besuki Public School and St. Francis of Assisi School. In 1971, Obama returned to Honolulu to live with his maternal grandparents, Madelyn and Stanley Armour Dunham. He attended Punahou School, a private college preparatory school, from fifth grade until his graduation from high school in 1979.
Following high school, Obama moved to Los Angles in 1979 to attend Occidental College. In February 1981, he made his first public speech, calling for Occidental's disinvestment from South Africa due to it's policy of apartheid. In 1981, he transferred to Columbia University in New York City, where he majored in political science, with a specialty in International Relations, and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1983. He worked for a year at the Business International Corporation, then at the New York Public Interest Research Group.
Two years after graduating, Obama was hired in Chicago as Director of the Developing Communities Project, a church-based community organization originally comprising eight catholic parishes in Greater Roseland (Roseland, West Pullman, and Riverdale) on Chicago's far Southside. He worked there as a community organizer from June 1985 to May 1988.
In late 1988, Obama entered Harvard Law School. He was selected as an editor of the Harvard Law Review at the end of his first year, and president of the Journal in his second year.
During his summers, he returned to Chicago, where he worked as a summer associate at the law firms of Sidley Austin in 1989 and Hopkins & Sutter in 1990. After graduating with a J.D. Magna cum laud from Harvard in 1991, he returned to Chicago. Obama's election as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review gained national media attention and led to a publishing contract and advance for a book about race relation, which evolved into a personal memoir. The manuscript was published in mid 1995 as Dreams From My Father.
In 1991, Obama accepted a two-year position as visiting Law and Government Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School while he worked on his first book. He then served as a Professor at the University Of Chicago Law School for twelve years as a Lecturer from 1992 to 1996, and as a Senior Lecturer from 1996 to 2004 teaching Constitutional Law.
Obama is married to Michelle Obama, a Chicago native who also graduated from Harvard Law School. Barrack and Michelle met in Chicago, where they both worked for the law firm Sidley and Austin.
Michelle worked in corporate law for three years before pursuing a career in public service. She has worked for the city of Chicago, and she co-founded Public Allies, which helps young adults acquire skills to work in the public sector. In 2005, she was appointed vice president of community and external affairs at the University Of Chicago Medical Center. Barack and Michelle have two daughters, Malia Ann and Sasha.
Illinois And Black Americans
From 1719 to the 1820s, the French had Black slaves. Slavery was banned by the Northwest Ordnance, but was not enforced. When Illinois became a Sovereign State in 1818, the ordnance no longer applied, and there were about 9000 slaves in Illinois. As the southern part of the state was largely settled by migrants from the South, this section was hostile to free Blacks and allowed settlers to bring slaves with them for labor. Pro slavery elements tried to call a convention to legalize slavery, but they were blocked by Governor Edward Coles who mobilized anti- slavery forces, warning that rich slave owners would buy up all the good farm lands. A referendum in 1823 showed 60% of the voters opposed slavery, the efforts to make slavery official failed. But, some slaves were brought in seasonally or as servants as late as the 1840s.
Black Americans in Chicago dates back to Jean Baptiste Point Du Sable's trading activities in the 1780s. Du Sable is the city's founder. Fugitives and freedmen established the city's first Black community in the 1840s.
Jean Baptiste Point Du Sable is widely regarded as the first permanent resident of Chicago, Illinois. In 1779, he was living on the site of present-day Michigan City, Indiana, when he was arrested by the British military on suspicion of being an American sympathizer. In the early 1780s he worked for the British lieutenant-governor of Michilimackinac on an estate at what is now the city of St. Clair, Michigan, before moving to settle at the mouth of the Chicago River. He is first recorded living in Chicago in early 1790, having apparently become established sometime earlier. He sold his property in Chicago in 1800 and moved to St. Charles, Missouri, where he died on August 28, 1818. Perrish Grignon, who visited Chicago in about 1794, is said to have described Point Du Sable as a large man who was a wealthy trader. In 1800 he sold his farm to John Kinzie's frontman, Jean La Lime, for 6,000 livres; the bill of sale, which was re-discovered in 1913 in an archive in Detroit, outlined all of the property Point Du Sable owned as well as many of his personal artifacts. This included a house, two barns, a horse drawn mill, a bakehouse, a poultry house, a dairy and smokehouse. The house was a 22-by-40-foot (6.7x12m) log cabin filled with fine furniture and paintings.
Point Du Sable married a Potawatomi woman named Catherine some time in the 1770s, they had a son named Jean and a daughter named Susanne.
Jean Baptiste Point Du Sable become known as the "Founder of Chicago" and the place where he settled at the mouth of the Chicago River in the 1780s is recognized as a National Historic Landmark, now located in Pioneer Court. In 1965 a plaza called Pioneer Court was built on the site of his homestead as part of the construction of the Equitable Life Assurance Society of America building. The Jean Baptiste Point Du Sable Homesite was designed as a National Landmark on May 11, 1976. It is located at what is now 401 North Michigan Avenue in the Near Northside of Chicago; currently Pioneer Court is located on the site. In 2009, the City of Chicago and a private donor erected a large bronze bust by Chicago-born sculptor Erik Blome on Chicago's magnificent Mile near the Chicago River. In October 2010 the Michigan Avenue Bridge was renamed Du Sable Bridge in honor of Point Du Sable.
The Great Migrations from 1910 to 1960 brought hundreds of thousands of Blacks from the South to Chicago, where they became an urban population. They created community organizations, churches, important businesses, and great music and literature. Black Americans of all classes built their community on the South Side of Chicago decades before the Civil Rights Movement. Their goal was to build a community where blacks could pursue life with the same rights as whites.
Especially after the Civil War, Illinois had some of the most progressive anti-discrimination legislation in the nation. School segregation was first outlawed in 1874, and segregation in public accommodations was first outlawed in 1885.
In the 1920s, however, homeowners in the state became pioneers in using racially restrictive housing covenants, which state courts honored. The large Black population in Chicago (40,000 in 1910, and 278.000 in 1940) faced some of the same discrimination in Chicago as they had in the South. It was hard for many Blacks to find jobs and find decent places to live because of the competition for housing among different groups of people at a time when the city was expanding in population so dramatically.
At the same time that Blacks moved from the South in the Great Migration, Chicago was still receiving tens of thousands of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. The groups competed with each other for working-class wages.
Though other techniques to maintain housing segregation had been used, by 1927 the political leaders of Chicago began to adopt racially restrictive covenants. The Chicago Real Estate Board promoted a racially restrictive covenant to YMCA ss, churches, women's clubs, PTAs, Kiwanis clubs, chambers of commerce and property owners' associations. At one point, as much as 80% of the city's area was included under restrictive covenants.
The Supreme Court of the United States in Shelley v Kraemer ruled in 1948 that racially restrictive covenants were unconstitutional, but this did not quickly solve Black's problems with finding adequate housing. Homeowners' associations discouraged members from selling to black families, thus maintaining residential segregation. European immigrants and their descendants competed with Black-Americans for limited affordable housing.
Many middle and upper-class whites moved out of the city to new housing. Ethnic whites and Black families occupied the older housing left behind them. The White residents who had been in the city the longest were the ones most likely to move to newer, more expensive housing, as they could afford it. After World War II, the early white residents (many Irish immigrants and their descendants) on the South Side began to move away under pressure of new migrants and with newly expanding housing opportunities. Black-Americans continued to move into the area, which had become the Black capital of the country. The South Side became predominantly black. The Black Belt was formed.
At the turn of the century, southern states succeeded in passing new constitutions and laws that disfranchised most blacks and many poor whites. Deprived of the right to vote, they could not sit on juries or run for office. They were subject to discriminatory laws passed by white legislators, including racial segregation of public facilities. Segregated education for black children and other services were consistently underfunded in a poor, agricultural economy. As white-dominated legislatures passed Jim Crow laws to re-establish white supremacy and create more restrictions in public life, violence against blacks increased, with lynchings used as extra-judicial enforcement.
In addition, the boll weevil infestation ruined much of the cotton industry in the early 20th century. Voting with their feet, blacks started migrating out of the South to the North, where they could live more freely, get their children educated, and get new jobs.
Industry buildup for World War I pulled thousands of workers to the North, as did the rapid expansion of railroads, and the meatpacking and steel industries. Between 1915 and 1960, hundreds of thousands of black southerners migrated to Chicago to escape violence and segregation, and to seek economic freedom. They went from being a mostly rural population to one that was mostly urban. Black-Americans from the rural south to the urban north became a mass movement that radically transformed Chicago, both politically and culturally.
From 1910-1940, most Black-Americans who migrated North were from rural areas. They had been chiefly sharecroppers and laborers, although some were landowners pushed out by the boll weevil disaster. After years of underfunding of public education for blacks in the South, they tended to be poorly educated, with relatively low skills to apply to urban jobs. Like the European rural immigrants, they had to rapidly adapt to a different urban culture. Many took advantage of better schooling in Chicago and their children learned quickly. After 1940, when the second larger wave of Migration started, black migrants tended to be already urbanized, from southern cities and towns. They were the most ambitious, better educated with more urban skills to apply in their new homes.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Black Americans 17th Century to 21st Century by JOHN H. JORDAN. Copyright © 2013 John H. Jordan. Excerpted by permission of Trafford Publishing.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Black-American's History, 1,Obama's Early Years, 4,
Illinois and Black Americans, 6,
The Great Migrations, 8,
During Slavery, 55,
The First Black-American Physicians, 135,
Underground Railroad and Abolitionist, 185,
Obama Years Part 2, 218,
Harlem Renaissance, 251,
The Civil Rights Movement, 356,
Jim Crow, 394,
The Nation of Islam, 409,
Black American Civil Rights Leaders, 424,
Reconstruction era of the United States, 441,
Racism In The United States of America, 459,
Racism In Chicago, 481,
Slavery In New York, 503,
Emancipation Proclamation, 525,
Black Women In History, 545,
Women In Black-American History Unrecognized, 565,
Black-American Politicians, 586,
Barack Obama 44th President of the United States, 588,
Is Racism in the United States Dead Today?, 602,