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African American History

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African American History
Michele Matthews
HIS 204 American History Since 1865
Instructor: Mark Hoffman
November 13, 2013

African American History To earn their place in America’s Society, African Americans fought many battles that brought them a very long way from 1865. African Americans went through a whole lot of hardship to get where they are today. Yes it is not perfect now but every actions made a big different through history. There are many achievements African American has made since the ending of slavery. Many sat, spoke, marched, cried, fought, died, and dreamed to make footprint in history. In this paper I will discuss some very important event in African American history like our 44th President Obama back to when slavery was ended. It all started in 1865 when the Civil war ended. The African American felt their freedom was a great turning point. Once slavery ended African American made plan to expand their culture. In our textbook, it states “They had a clear vision of what freedom meant. It was not just freedom from white control, but also the opportunity to expand the institutions and autonomous culture that they made while they endured slavery” (Bowles, 2011). As they develop a new society and beliefs, the laws started to change as while. The Plessy v. Ferguson case was the birth of the Jim Crow law. In David Bishop journal, he stated “Bernstein concluded that the “Supreme Court was compelled to distort cases before it could pollute the stream of the law with the ‘separate but equal’ doctrine””(Bishop, 1977). The case was passed but was seen as racism because they wanted to allow the different race to be separate in different spaces. So basically saying African American was free but you could not be around the whites and have the nice things. As the ‘separate but equal’ continue, African American began to become afraid because times was getting harder for them. They were not having enough food to eat and their income was become smaller and smaller. “Their (blacks’) hopes for equality, justice, and political leadership that they had with Populism were replaced by despair and fear” (Cummings, 1977). The African American was in a need of a leader that will stand up for them and get them out of the depressed state. Booker t. Washington seems to fit that profile. He did a speech that encourages African American to work with the whites to reach an economic respectability. His speech was called the Atlanta Compromise. He basically wanted them to come together and to our world back together.

Reference
Bishop, D. W. (1977, Apr.). Plessy V. Ferguson: A Reinterpretation. The Journal of Negro History, Vol.62, No.2, pp.125-133. Published by: Association for the Study of African American Life and History, Inc. Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2717173
Bowles, M. (2011). American history 1865–present: End of isolation. San Diego, CA: Bridgepoint Education
Cummings, M. (1977, Sep.). Historical Setting for Booker T. Washington and the Rhetoric of Compromise, 1895. Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 75-82. Published by: Sage Publications, Inc. Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2783690
Hartt, R. L. (1921, Jan. 15). “The new Negro”: “When he’s hit, he hits back!”. Independent. Retrieved from http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5127

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