History and Significance of Race in America
Race prejudice abounded in the colonial America, shaped by cultural connotations of blackness in medieval Europe and Judeo-Christianity. The existence of Slave trade is arguably the root of subsequent conceptualization of the black-Americans. The Native Americans population of the country’s labor force proved drastically reduced after the whites were decimated by violence and diseases. The voluntary European labor force used was unsustainably costly and detrimental to their home county labor and competitiveness. The introduction of slavery of the Africans who were brought in large numbers and their labor was cheap, made the agricultural plantations in America much profitable. The 19th century saw an introduction of institutionalized racism and legal discrimination against the black Americans. Racial discrimination, expression and segregation concerning supremacy of the white people increased hence increasing the levels of anti-black violence that included both race riots and lynching’s of the black people. The African American activists and politicians advocated for the peoples civil rights in the 20th century, this saw the peaking of human rights movement with the desegregation of education in the year 1954 thus leading to the organization of a widespread strike across the United States under the leadership of the young generation activists. Martin Luther King was the catalyst for most strikes which led to the passage of the civil rights act in 1964. This act illegalized the discrimination in public facilities like the Hospitals, in the government and when employing workers thus invalidating the laws of Jim Crow, which allowed segregation in these facilities with a consideration of separate but equal status of the blacks and the other non-white races. This prohibition of segregation symbolized a change in the social