On August 28, 1963, about a quarter-million people participated in the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom gathering near the Lincoln Memorial.More than 3,000 members of the press covered this historic march, in which Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered the exalted “I Have a Dream” speech.Originally conceived by renowned labor leader A. Phillip Randolph and Roy Wilkins, Executive Secretary of the NAACP, the March on Washington evolved into a collaborative effort amongst major civil rights groups and icons of the day.Stemming from a rapidly growing tide of grassroots support and outrage over the nation’s racial inequities, the rally drew over 260,000 people from across the nation.
Celebrated as one of the greatest—if not the greatest—speech of the 20th century, Dr. King’s celebrated speech, “I Have a Dream,” was carried live by television stations across the country.
Leaders of the six prominent civil rights groups at the time joined forces in organizing the march.
The group included Randolph, leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters; Wilkins, Executive Secretary of the NAACP; Dr. King, Chairman of the SCLC; James Farmer, founder of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE); John Lewis, President of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC); and Whitney Young, Executive Director of the National Urban League.It didn’t take long for King’s dream to come to fruition — the legislative aspect of the dream, that is.
After a decade of continued lobbying of Congress and the President led by the NAACP, plus other peaceful protests for civil rights, President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
One year later, he signed the National Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Together, these laws outlawed discrimination against blacks and women, effectively ending segregation, and sought to end disenfranchisement by making discriminatory voting practices illegal.
Ten years after King joined the civil rights fight, the campaign to secure the enactment of the 1964 Civil Rights Act had achieved its goal – to ensure that black citizens would have the power to represent themselves in government.
For many African Americans growing up in the South in the 19th and 20th centuries, the threat of lynching was commonplace. The popular image of an angry white mob stringing a black man up to a tree is only half the story. Lynching, an act of terror meant to spread fear among blacks, served the broad social purpose of maintaining white supremacy in the economic, social, and political spheres.
Author Richard Wright, who was born near Natchez in southwest Mississippi, knew of two men who were lynched -- his step-uncle and the brother of a neighborhood friend. In his book Black Boy, he wrote:
"The things that influenced my conduct as a Negro did not have to happen to me directly; I needed but to hear of them to feel their full effects in the deepest layers of my consciousness. Indeed, the white brutality that I had not seen as more effective control of my behavior than that which I knew."
Lynchings (in many forms) were daily threats the kept African Americans in oppressed positions as they navigate daily life in the 20th century. However, during the reconstruction era, southerners began to reach for all reason to kill who they could no longer hold as property. Although the practice of lynching had existed since before slavery, it gained momentum during the Reconstruction Era, when viable black towns sprang up across the South and African Americans began to make political and economic inroads by registering to vote, establishing businesses, and running for public office. Many whites -- landowners and poor whites -- felt threatened by this rise in black prominence. Foremost on their minds was a fear of sex between the races. Some whites espoused the idea that black men were sexual predators and wanted integration to be with white women. This leads to the depiction of black men as ‘white women ravishing beast’. Although rape is often cited as a rationale, statistics now show that only about one-fourth of lynchings from 1880 to 1930 were prompted by an accusation of rape. In fact, most victims of lynching were political activists, labor organizers, or black men and women who violated white expectations of black deference, and were deemed "uppity" or "insolent." Though most victims were black men, women were by no means exempt.
Lynchings were frequently committed with the most flagrant public display. Like executions by guillotine in medieval times, lynchings were often advertised in newspapers and drew large crowds of white families. Lynchings were covered in local newspapers with headlines spelling out the horrific details. Photos of victims, with exultant white observers, posed next to them, were taken for distribution in newspapers or on postcards. Body parts, including genitalia, were sometimes distributed to spectators or put on public display. Most infractions were for petty crimes, like theft, but the biggest one of all was looking at or associating with white women. Many victims were black businessmen or black men who refused to back down from a fight.
Growing up, I was told of the strange fruit that hung from our southern trees. Billie Holiday song the beautiful song that rings in my mind as we travel across the south. Most don’t realize that sundown towns still exist and people still get lynched. I always say northern blacks only had to fear the government and Southern blacks had to fear the white man next door and the government. White militants terrorize southern blacks outside of the metropolitan areas and no one speaks on it. It may shock you, however, one wrong move in some parts of the south could land a rope around your neck.
The following are the lynching stories told to me as a child:
Mary Turner was a 21-year-old pregnant woman who was hung upside down from a tree and set on fire. Her unborn child was cut from her stomach and stomped to death by the angry mob. After insisting her husband, who was also lynched, did not kill his boss. Valdosta, GA (1918)
The 17year oldJesse Washington was coerced into signing a confession to raping and murdering his white boss's wife, Lucy Fryer. After pleading guilty to the crime and sentenced to death, he was dragged out of the courtroom by an angry mob. The mob proceeded to drag him through the streets by a chain wrapped around his neck. He was beaten, stabbed, dismembered, castrated, hung, and hung up on a tree where he was burned alive on May 15, 1916. This tragedy was watched by an estimated 20,000 people. The images of Washington’s murder was later sold as postcards and prints. Waco, TX (1916)
Emmett Till was a 14-year-old boy for Chicago, who was dragged out of his family’s home in Money, Mississippi after a white woman accused him of whistling at her. Her husband and brother made Emmett carry a 75-pound cotton-gin fan to the bank of the Tallahatchie River and ordered him to take off his clothes. The two men then beat him nearly to death, gouged out his eye, shot him in the head, and then threw his body, tied to the cotton-gin fan with barbed wire, into the river. Mamie Bradley, Till’s mother, demanded an open casket funeral after seeing what happened to her son. Bradley wanted the world to see what had happened to her baby.Money, Mississippi (1955)
This is a history of hate in America — not the natural discord that characterizes a democracy, but the wild, irrational, killing hate that has led men and women throughout our history to extremes of violence against others simply because of their race, nationality, religion or lifestyle.
Since 1865, the Ku Klux Klan has provided a vehicle for this kind of hatred in America, and its members have been responsible for atrocities that are difficult for most people to even imagine. Today, while the traditional Klan has declined, there are many other groups which go by a variety of names and symbols and are at least as dangerous as the KKK.
Some of them are teenagers who shave their heads and wear swastika tattoos and call themselves Skinheads; some of them are young men who wear camouflage fatigues and practice guerrilla warfare tactics; some of them are conservatively dressed professionals who publish journals filled with their bizarre beliefs — ideas which range from denying that the Nazi Holocaust ever happened to the contention that the U.S. federal government is an illegal body and that all governing power should rest with county sheriffs.
The Klan itself has had three periods of significant strength in American history — in the late 19th century, in the 1920s, and during the 1950s and early 1960s when the civil rights movement was at its height. The Klan had resurgence again in the 1970s, but did not reach its past level of influence. Since then, the Klan has become just one element in a much broader spectrum of white supremacist activity.Released in 1915, Birth of a Nation was a cinematic masterpiece that set new standards for the fledgling film industry. The story it tells fits perfectly into the version of history the Klan preaches. A romantic version of the Klan was depitced as heroes protect White America from the ‘beast’ that were the negro. Birth of a Nation lead to the boom in Klans members as immigrants came in hoards.
The Klan launched a campaign of terrorism in the early and mid-1920S, and many communities found themselves firmly in the grasp of the organization. Lynching’s, shootings and whippings were the methods employed by the Klan. Blacks, Jews, Catholics, Mexicans and various immigrants were usually the victims.However, not infrequently, the Klan’s targets were whites, Protestants and females who were considered “immoral” or “traitors” to their race or gender. In Alabama, for example, a divorcee with two children was flogged for the “crime” of remarrying and then given a jar of Vaseline for her wounds. In Georgia, a woman was given 60 lashes for a vague charge of “immorality and failure to go to church”; when her 15-year-old son ran to her rescue, he received the same treatment. In both cases, ministers led the Klansmen responsible for the violence. But such instances were not confined to the South. In Oklahoma, Klansmen applied the lash to girls caught riding in automobiles with young men, and very early in the Klan revival, women were flogged and even tortured in the San Joaquin Valley of California.
In a period when many women were fighting for the vote, for a place in the job market and for personal and cultural freedom, the Klan claimed to stand for “pure womanhood” and frequently attacked women who sought independence.
In Regents of University of California v. Bakke (1978), the Supreme Court ruled that a university's use of racial "quotas" in its admissions process was unconstitutional, but a school's use of "affirmative action" to accept more minority applicants was constitutional in some circumstances. The case involved the admissions practices of the Medical School of the University of California at Davis. The medical school reserved 16 out of 100 seats in its entering class for minorities, including "Blacks," "Chicanos," "Asians," and "American Indians." The rigid admissions quota was administered by a special school committee.
Allan Bakke, a white applicant, was twice denied admission to the medical school even though his MCAT scores, GPA, and benchmark scores were "significantly higher" than those of some minority applicants recently admitted. Bakke sued the University of California in a state court, alleging that the medical school's admission policy violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. The California Supreme Court agreed, finding that the quota system explicitly discriminated against racial groups and holding that "no applicant may be rejected because of his race, in favor of another who is less qualified, as measured by standards applied without regard to race." The medical school, ordered to shut down its quota system, appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which reviewed the case in 1978.
The Court held that the medical school racially discriminated against whites because it excluded them from 16 out of 100 spots solely by virtue of their race. The fact that blacks have historically had been discriminated against more than whites was irrelevant to this case, because racial quota systems, whether applied against whites or blacks, are always "odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality." Indeed, because the school's quota was designed to redress past discrimination against racial minorities, the Court stated, it was intended to prefer "one group for no other reason other than race or ethnic origin." Thus, the Court ruled that the school's quota system "must be rejected ... as racially invalid" under the Equal Protection Clause.
On October 15, 1966, College students Bobby Seale, Huey P. Newton, and Elbert Howard founded “The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense” in Oakland, California. Like Malcolm X, the Black Panthers believed that nonviolent protests could not truly liberate black Americans or give them power over their own lives, leading them to become the most influential black militant movement of the era, with reigns in similar movements in Africa and Southeast Asia.
Disappointed in the failure of the civil rights movement to improve the condition of blacks outside the South, the young men began to organized young, poor, disenfranchised African Americans into the Black Panther Party. They saw brutality against civil rights protesters as part of a long tradition of police violence and state oppression and felt it was something they no longer could stand. As the group began to immerse themselves in Black History; the idea of self-survival was implicated.
The BPP chose to teach, protect, and serve the Black communities around them while also lending a hand to all they saw as oppressed as the belief, all oppressed people are our people, took a hand. The Yellow Peril, the BPP’s Asian counterparts even found support and solidarity within the Black Community.
Women-led chapters focused their attention on community “survival programs.” They organized a free breakfast program for 20,000 children each day as well as a free food program for families and the elderly. They sponsored schools, legal aid offices, clothing distribution, local transportation, and health clinics, and sickle-cell testing centers in several cities. They campaigned for prison reform, held voter registration drives, and created Freedom Schools in nine cities including the noteworthy Oakland Community School, led by Ericka Huggins from 1973 to 1981. They also assisted in Cesar Chavez's United Farm Workers union boycott against Safeway. These activities provided concrete aid to low-income communities and drew support for the Panthers.
In 1896, the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that racially segregated public facilities were legal, so long as the facilities for blacks and whites were equal.The ruling constitutionally sanctioned laws barring African Americans from sharing the same buses, schools, and other public facilities as whites—known as “Jim Crow” laws—and established the “separate but equal” doctrine that would stand for the next six decades.By a vote of 7-1 (one justice did not participate), the Court approved the principle of separate but equal, which for the next half-century and more was used to justify laws mandating segregation in every area of life in the South, from transportation to education to public accommodations. The one lonely, courageous dissenter against the Plessy v. Ferguson decision was a Kentuckian, Associate Justice John Marshall Harlan.
At issue was a Louisiana law compelling segregation of the races in rail coaches. To test the law's constitutionality, Homer Plessy, a Louisianan of mixed race, made a point of getting arrested for sitting in the whites-only section of a train car. When his case reached the Supreme Court, Plessy argued that enforced segregation in theoretically separate-but-equal accommodations compromised the principle of legal equality and marked blacks as inferior. The Court majority disagreed, declaring the law constitutional while saying it stamped blacks with "a badge of inferiority" only if "the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it."
But if his fellow justices found no objections to the Louisiana law, John Harlan could find little else. He wrote:
"In the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. "Our constitution is colorblind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful. . .The arbitrary separation of citizens on the basis of race, while they are on a public highway, is a badge of servitude wholly inconsistent with the civil freedom and the equality before the law established by the Constitution. It cannot be justified upon any legal grounds."
Furthermore, argued Harlan, the decision would poison relations between the races.
"What can more certainly arouse race hate, what more certainly create and perpetuate a feeling of distrust between these races, than state enactments, which, in fact, proceed on the ground that colored citizens are so inferior and degraded that they cannot be allowed to sit in public coaches occupied by white citizens? That, as all will admit, is the real meaning of such legislation."
The northern Manhattan neighborhood of Harlem was meant to be an upper-class white neighborhood in the 1880s, but rapid overdevelopment led to empty buildings and desperate landlords seeking to fill them.
In the early 1900s, a few middle-class black families from another neighborhood known as Black Bohemia moved to Harlem, and other black families followed. Some white residents initially fought to keep African Americans out of the area, but failing that many whites eventually fled.
American culture, particularly in the creative arts, and the most influential movement in African American literary history. Embracing literary, musical, theatrical, and visual arts, participants sought to reconceptualize “the Negro” apart from the white stereotypes that had influenced Black peoples’ relationship to their heritage and to each other. They also sought to break free of Victorian moral values and bourgeois shame about aspects of their lives that might, as seen by whites, reinforce racist beliefs. Never dominated by a particular school of thought but rather characterized by intense debate, the movement laid the groundwork for all later African American literature and had an enormous impact on subsequent Black literature and consciousness worldwide. While the renaissance was not confined to the Harlem district of New York City, Harlem attracted a remarkable concentration of intellect and talent and served as the symbolic capital of this cultural awakening.
The Harlem Renaissance was a phase of a larger New Negro movement that had emerged in the early 20th century and in some ways ushered in the civil rights movement of the late 1940s and early 1950s. The social foundations of this movement included the Great Migration of African Americans from rural to urban spaces and from South to North; dramatically rising levels of literacy; the creation of national organizations dedicated to pressing African American civil rights, “uplifting” the race, and opening socioeconomic opportunities; and developing race pride, including pan-African sensibilities and programs. Black exiles and expatriates from the Caribbean and Africa crossed paths in metropoles such as New York City and Paris after World War I and had an invigorating influence on each other that gave the broader “Negro renaissance” (as it was then known) a profoundly important international cast.
The Harlem Renaissance is unusual among literary and artistic movements for its close relationship to civil rights and reform organizations. Crucial to the movement were magazines such as The Crisis, published by the NAACP; Opportunity, published by the National Urban League; and The Messenger, a socialist journal eventually connected with the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a Black labor union. Negro World, the newspaper of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, also played a role, but few of the major authors or artists identified with Garvey’s “Back to Africa” movement, even if they contributed to the paper.
The renaissance had many sources in Black culture, primarily of the United States and the Caribbean, and manifested itself well beyond Harlem. As its symbolic capital, Harlem was a catalyst for artistic experimentation and a highly popular nightlife destination. Its location in the communications capital of North America helped give the “New Negroes” visibility and opportunities for publication not evident elsewhere.
Several icons including Claude McKay, W.E.B DuBois, James Wheldon Johnson, Duke Ellington, Langston Hughes, and many more.
The Tuskegee Airmen were the first black military aviators in the U.S. Army Air Corps (AAC), a precursor of the U.S. Air Force. Trained at the Tuskegee Army Air Field in Alabama, they flew more than 15,000 individual sorties in Europe and North Africa during World War II. Their impressive performance earned them more than 150 Distinguished Flying Crosses, and helped encourage the eventual integration of the U.S. armed forces.
The program’s trainees, nearly all of them college graduates or undergraduates, came from all over the country. In addition to some 1,000 pilots, the Tuskegee program trained nearly 14,000 navigators, bombardiers, instructors, aircraft and engine mechanics, control tower operators and other maintenance and support staff.
With pioneers like Amelia Earhart and Charles Lindbergh breaking ground, many young Africa Americans aspired to be pilots; however, experienced several obstacles. With the belief that black soldiers being inferior to white soldiers, soldiers struggled to gain positions as Roosevelt expanded the civilian pilot training, in responds to the ongoing war in Europe.
Black newspapers like the Chicago Defender and Pittsburgh Courier joined civil rights groups like the NAACP in arguing that black Americans be included, leading to the Tuskegee Experiment. Roosevelt and the Department of War chose to place the trainees in Jim Crows’ Alabama, near the prestigious Tuskegee University.
By their last combat mission on April 26, 1945, two weeks before the German surrender, the Tuskegee Airmen had destroyed and damaged 36 German planes in the air and 237 on the ground, as well as nearly 1,000 rail cars and transport vehicles and a German destroyer.
Even after their brave service, the Tuskegee Airmen returned home to a country where they continued to face systematic racism and prejudice.
But they did represent an important step forward in preparing the nation for the racial integration of the military, which began with President Harry Truman who issued Executive Order 9981 desegregating the U.S. Armed Forces and mandating equality of opportunity and treatment on July 26, 1948.
In 1896, the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that racially segregated public facilities were legal, so long as the facilities for blacks and whites were equal.
The ruling constitutionally sanctioned laws barring African Americans from sharing the same buses, schools, and other public facilities as whites—known as “Jim Crow” laws—and established the “separate but equal” doctrine that would stand for the next six decades.
But by the early 1950s, the NAACP was working hard to challenge segregation laws in public schools and had filed lawsuits on behalf of plaintiffs in states such as South Carolina, Virginia, and Delaware.
Linda Brown was denied entrance to Topeka’s all-white elementary schools. In his lawsuit, Brown claimed that schools for black children were not equal to the white schools and that segregation violated the so-called “equal protection clause” of the 14th Amendment, which holds that no state can “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka became a landmark case in 1954 in which the justices ruled unanimously that racial segregation of children in public schools was unconstitutional, ultimately reversing the Plessy v Fergurson. Brown v. Board of Education was one of the cornerstones of the civil rights movement and helped establish the precedent that “separate-but-equal” education and other services were not, in fact, equal at all.
The Constitution of the United States does permit any public authority to know the race of those entitled to be protected in the enjoyment of such rights. Every true man holds pride in himself and his race and with the rights of others, his being equal before the law, shall not be stripped from him. As it is his privilege to express such pride in his race and take action based on what seems proper to him.
The 14th amendment actively states that “All persons”. I’ll repeat that “All persons, born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are hereby citizen of the United States. The 14th amendment continues as such, “ No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
It was said in argument that the statute of Louisiana does not discriminate against either race but simply in act a rule applicable alike to white and colored citizens. Many are aware that the statues in question had its origin in the purpose, not so much to exclude white persons from railroad cars occupied by blacks, as to exclude colored people from coaches occupied by or assigned to white persons. The fundamental objection, therefore, to the statues is that it interferes with the personal freedom of citizens. If a white man and a black man choose to occupy the same public conveyance on a public highway, it is their right to do so, and no government, proceeding alone on grounds of race, can prevent it without infringing the personal liberty of each.
The white race has deemed itself to be the dominating race of very this country. However, in the view of the Constitution, supposedly in the eyes of the law, this country has no superior race or ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our Constitution is color-blind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect to civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The law regards man as man, not as a black man or a white man. Therefore all civil rights are guaranteed those who are American by the supreme law of the land are involved.
In 1829 Elizabeth Jones, who owned a slave named Lydia, hired her out for a year to John Mann of Chowan County. Lydia was unhappy with the arrangement, and at one point Mann decided to punish her, possibly by whipping her. But Lydia escaped during the punishment and began to run away. Mann shouted to her, ordering her to stop, but Lydia continued to run. Mann then shot and wounded her. Such, at least, was Mann's story.
The circumstances were so odd, however, that a local grand jury took the unusual step of indicting Mann for assault and battery against a slave. During the trial, the judge told the jury that if it believed that the punishment Mann inflicted was "cruel and unwarrantable, and disproportionate to the offense committed by the slave that, in the law, the Defendant was guilty," particularly since he was not even her owner. This is obviously exactly what the jury thought, for it found Mann guilty. Mann then appealed to the Supreme Court of North Carolina.
Thomas Ruffin was the chief justice of that court, and the appeal put him in a very bad position. He disliked the idea of slavery, and he was horrified that a white man had used such violence against a black woman. On the other hand, he could not escape the fact that slavery was perfectly legal in North Carolina. Torn between his sense of justice and his sense of duty to the law, he penned a startling opinion.
"A Judge cannot but lament when such cases as the present are brought into court," he began. "The struggle … in the Judge's own breast between the feelings of the man, and the duty of the magistrate is a severe test." But despite his veiled denouncement of the evils of slavery, Ruffin then proceeded to side with the law. "It is criminal in a Court to avoid any responsibility which the laws impose. With whatever reluctance therefore it is done, the Court is compelled to express an opinion upon the extent of the dominion of the master over the slave in North Carolina."
The reconstruction era was the period that followed the American Civil War and during which attempts were made to redress the inequities of slavery and its political, social, and economic legacy and to solve the problems arising from the readmission to the Union of the 11 states that had seceded at or before the outbreak of war. Reconstruction witnessed far-reaching changes in America’s political life. At the national level, new laws and constitutionalamendments permanently altered the federal system and the definition of American citizenship. In the South, a politically mobilized Black community joined with white allies to bring the Republican Party to power, and with it a redefinition of the responsibilities of government.
Reconstruction was a hostile era following the Civil War, it was the first attempt to reintegrate Southern states from the Confederacy and 4 million newly-freed people into the United States. Under the administration of President Andrew Johnson in 1865 and 1866, new southern state legislatures passed restrictive “black codes” to control the labor and behavior of former enslaved people and other African Americans. Outrage in the North over these codes eroded support for the approach known as Presidential Reconstruction and led to the triumph of the more radical wing of the Republican Party. During Radical Reconstruction, which began with the passage of the Reconstruction Act of 1867, newly enfranchised Black people gained a voice in government for the first time in American history, winning election to southern state legislatures and even to the U.S. Congress. In less than a decade, however, reactionary forces–including the Ku Klux Klan–would reverse the changes wrought by Radical Reconstruction in a violent backlash that restored white supremacy in the South.
Although the Civil War ended the official establishment of slavery, slavery still continued through the reconstruction era. Several newly freed slaves chose to stay on the plantation and continue to work, as these were places that they would be provided food and homes. This form of slavery ulimately evloved into what we know today as sharecropping. Sharecropping also became many people only as many states like South Carolina required large fees up to $100 if any African Americans had an occupation outside of farmer or servant.
Under Johnson’s Reconstruction policies, nearly all the southern states would enacted their own black codes between 1865 and 1866. While the codes granted certain freedoms to African Americans,including the right to buy and own property, marry, make contracts and testify in court (only in cases involving people of their own race),their primary purpose was to restrict blacks’ labor and activity.
Some states limited the type of property that blacks could own, while virtually all the former Confederate states passed strict vagrancy and labor contract laws, as well as so-called “anti-enticement” measures designed to punish anyone who offered higher wages to a black laborer already under contract.
Blacks who broke labor contracts were subject to arrest, beating and forced labor, and apprenticeship laws forced many minors (either orphans or those whose parents were deemed unable to support them by a judge) into unpaid labor for white planters.
Passed by a political system in which blacks effectively had no voice, the black codes were enforced by all-white police and state militia forces,often made up of Confederate veterans of the Civil War, across the South.
On the night of October 16, 1859, John Brown and seventeen other men seized the U.S. armory and arsenal, while also taking 60 hostages at Harpers Ferry, VA. The raiders held a train at bay for five hours, until finally allowing it to start its journey to DC; spreading the news of the raid.
A local militia had succeeded in killing and wounding ten of Brown’s men, including 2 of his sons; this lead Brown to acknowledge his failure. However, he was determined not to give up; therefore, Brown and the remainder of his men took the hostages and barricaded themselves into the fire engine house.
On the morning of October 18, Lt. Col. Robert E Lee and the U.S. Marines stormed the fire engine house, leading to the deaths and capture of the remaining raiders.
Among the proslavery community, Brown was known to be a violent murder, due to being the head conspirators of the Pottawatomie Massacre.
Antislavers, however, saw Brown be a frontier hero. While Brown saw himself as a peaceful man in a fight against the evils of slavery and a servant of God.
Brown hoped that the Raid at Harpers Ferry would lead to a slave revolt big enough to end slavery. The raid did ensure fear in the south as towns from Virginia to Georgia began to formed vigilante groups and mobilized militias, in the belief that this was the start of several Northern attacks to come.
Brown’s Raid was a success as I would become a contributing factor in the cause of the Civil War, so much so Union troops were known to sing “ John Brown’s body after their battle whether it in triumphantly or sadly.
Born a free woman to an affluent African American couple who were also abolitionists, Sarah Mapps Douglass became an educator, activist, abolitionist, and artist. She and her mother, Grace Bustill, were among the prominent women who founded the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, in 1833. This organization became a focus of her activism for most of the rest of her life; it included both Black and White women, working together to educate themselves and others, both through reading and listening to speakers, and to promote action to end enslavement, including petition drives and boycotts.
“My Friends—My People—My Brethren—My Sisters:
How important this occasion is for which we have assembled ourselves together this evening. Feeding the starvation of our minds, to be expressing such deeds of mercy, words of peace; to stir up in the gratitude to God for his increasing goodness, and feeling of deepening sympathy for our brethren and sisters, whom in this land of Godly light and liberty are held in bondage and degraded. We are here because their cause is not their own!
An English writer once wrote, “We must feel deeply before we can act rightly; from that absorbing, heart-rendering compassion for ourselves springs a deeper sympathy for others, and from a sense of our weakness and our own upbraidings arises a disposition to be indulgent, to forbear, to forgive.”
This is my experience.
The wails of the captive ring in my ears amid my happiness, and cause my heart to bleed for his wrongs.
Alas!
My impression is as evanescent as the early cloud with the smell of morning dew. However, I stand with this smile in the face of my oppressor. I once beheld the sight of the oppressor lurking on the border of my own peaceful home. I saw his iron hand stretched forth to seize me as his prey, and the cause of the slave became my own.
With the help of the Almighty Lord, I look to a higher power to elevate the character of my wronged and neglected race. As I no longer detest the slaveholder, but only pity and pray for him.
Has he not seen the error of his ways?
Do the cries not echo in his ears as he lays lashes to the backs of women and children?
Does the blood on his hands not make him weak, as he takes the manhoods and lives of his negro men?
Does the cracking of necks not bother him amidst his lynching mob?
Have you not felt, as my aching heart has, for such a hideous subject? I am assured some of you have.
And now, it is my wish that as intellects that we direct our concern to the cruelty that recks havoc at this very moment, in this very country we call home.”
Although we view religion as holy intuitions, slavery was an upheld establishment from the start of time. From slaves in Babylon to slaves in modern-day Africa, many people use their religious ideology to supplement their actions. However, as all things do, religion moves with time and all social ideas. Therefore, slavery has been condemned and shamed by heads of all major religions in some way.
Islam and Christianity worked hand in hand, as the Arab-controlled Trans-Saharan slave trade was the institutional foundation of slave trading on the continent of Africa. This was witnessed by European Christians during the ‘age of expedition’. Although the Islamic religion promoted the taking of war prisoners and those in debt as slaves, Christians during these early periods looked to the Bible as the ultimate source of knowledge therefore they slavery as a result of ‘sin’. They turned to Genesis IX, 18-27 as the answer.
Genesis IX,18-27 tells the story, incorrectly known as, “The Curse of Ham,” this was the ultimate misinterpretation that lead to Africans to be placed into slavery. “The Curse of Ham '' is actually “The Curse of Canaan”, Canaan and his descendants were cursed into servitude under the transgressions of Ham. Christians saw Canaanites to be black and considered their enslavement as a way to save their souls.Truthfully it has been proven that Canaan and his descendants are not black at all, rather they were cursed early day Lebanese, Jordanians, Syrians, and Palestinians. With the Bible as the way of passage for the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, the bible also became a tool to keep slave obedient. Slaves were encouraged to attend church where sermons promoting slaves to promote their earthly masters were preached; the publication of the ‘slave bible’ assisted in the push of slavery within Christianity as portions scriptures, including the Exodus story, were removed to prevent rebellious thinking.
With long standing hostility between Islam and Christianity, Jews became the trading middle men between both religions. Aaron Lopez and Jacob B. Rivera were two prominent Jewish slave traders. They were known to have 184 large vessels and 342 small coasters. With 20 rum distilleries under their belts, the men made consistent routines to Guinea; where they were known to trade around 180 gallons of rum per male slave. They would ultimately bring them back to Charleston North Carolina to be sold.
Although, we can know what know what has happened within history. Look at the actions of people in the name of religion is very different than looking at the holy word actually presented to the people. Although the Bible and Torah allowed slavery, as we see in Deuteronomy 20:13-14 and Leviticus 25:44, there are varies scriptures that forbade the very things that were done during the Slave trade Era. Exodus 21:2-16 and Deuteronomy 15:1-18 allowed the purchase of Hebrew children, but condemned the release at the age of seventeen; and allowed self-enslavement, but commanded the release in the seventh year with the cancellation of debt. We see this as an example of human evil, rather than the religion encouragement. Isaiah 61:1-2, proclaimed freedom of slaves in the name of ‘the jubilee’ and Amos 1:6 and 1:9-10 later condemned slavery from there on. Therefore, slavery was not meant to reoccur during the colonial period according to the bible.
In conclusion, slavery may have been held up by religious institutions in the past, however, our religious beliefs reflect those of our social beliefs. Christians and Jews could not deny the occurrence of slavery, it is something that occurs in the holy books they preach from, slavery is apart of their history. Islam ,however, appeared during this time and flowed with the current circumstances. Culture is to humans as water is to a fish, but the link between slavery and religion was simply the worm on the line.
Clarence-Smith, William G. Religions and the Abolition of Slavery - a Comparative ... www.lse.ac.uk/Economic-History/Assets/Documents/Research/GEHN/GEHNConferences/conf10/Conf10-ClarenceSmith.pdf.
“The Feminist Sexual Ethics Project.” Islam and Slavery | The Feminist Sexual Ethics Project | Brandeis University, www.brandeis.edu/projects/fse/muslim/slavery.html.
“Further Resources.” Princeton University, The Trustees of Princeton University, islamfyi.princeton.edu/islam-and-the-question-of-slavery/.
“Jews and Slavery.” The Jews in Colonial America, by Oscar Reiss, McFarland & Co., 2004.
Jordan, Winthrop D. “Slavery and the Jews.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 9 Oct. 2014, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1995/09/slavery-and-the-jews/376462/.
Rae, Noel. “How Christian Slaveholders Used the Bible to Justify Slavery.” Time, Time, 23 Feb. 2018, time.com/5171819/christianity-slavery-book-excerpt/.
“Slavery and the Making of America . The Slave Experience: Religion: PBS.” Slavery and the Making of America . The Slave Experience: Religion | PBS, www.thirteen.org/wnet/slavery/experience/religion/history.html.
Zauzmer, Julie. “The Bible Was Used to Justify Slavery. Then Africans Made It Their Path to Freedom.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 13 May 2019, www.washingtonpost.com/local/the-bible-was-used-to-justify-slavery-then-africans-made-it-their-path-to-freedom/2019/04/29/34699e8e-6512-11e9-82ba-fcfeff232e8f_story.html.
Growing up I saw the Supreme Court as the silent big sister of the executive and legislative branch. The Supreme Court was subtle surveillance of the 3 bickering children under which The Supreme Court had the power of checks and balance in a stronger form than the rest.
Allow me to break down my analogy.
The Legislative branch is a set of twins who choose to fight each other as legislation is passed along. The fraternal twins are divided due to the major ideas that stand in their house. The counter ideologies choose to be at major extremes instead of being able to compromise for the betterment of the nation.
The executive branch holds the president, one of the highest standing political roles in the United States. The contributions that are given to the legislative branch differs from president to president. Our current President has chosen to seek war against anything outside of his ideology. Initially, he was backed by his political idea to lead the Senate and fought by the opposing House of Representatives.
This is where the Judicial branch comes in. The judicial branch was birthed in case of an emergency that legislation is produced that rebelled against or sought to deny any of the original laws and rights established in the constitution by our Founding Fathers.
Although this was the original purpose is not often The Judicial branch is called upon to address behavior like this by the other branches. The supreme court practices certiorari, this way they reserve the right to address cases of their choosing. The Court usually only accepts about 2% of the petitions it receives, but if accepted, divisive debates usually follow during the oral arguments.
During the debate, each side is given thirty minutes to state their case and answer questions from the Justices. Justice is barred from directly asking each other questions but tend to question lawyers to make direct certain points to a fellow Justice. This forces Justices to allow other perspectives to be expressed. By adding a middle man some tension is relieved and the discussion proceeds with ease. Furthermore, Justices always begin by shaking hands, this establishes a personal connection and reminds them that all parties involved are serving in the public's interest.
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