Gary Finch
September 17, 2013
Ms. Turner
P4 English LIS

Throughout American History there have been prejudices toward people of different religions, political views, ethnicity, nationalities, sexual orientations, gender and disabilities. Even though our nation has taken great steps forward to end hatred and ignorance there is a near impossibility to end such and unfortunate part of the individual mind. Through the middle of the 19th century to the beginning of the Second World War a massive influx of Irish Catholic immigrants filled the slums of major cities such as New York and Boston. The “traditional” Anglo-Saxon Protestant American saw the Irish as a threat or conspiracy by the Catholic Church. The Irish began to be viewed as a nuisance and undesirable. The Irish filled prisons where were innocent. Riots and crowds of people protested the influencing Irish… who left Ireland to escape the same intolerance from Great Britain. Since the arrival of Europeans in Jamestown and Plymouth who came for religious freedom there has been a constant disrespect for Native Americans. Entire tribes were forced to relocate to lands that were completely different from the ones in which they had no knowledge of. Tribes such as the Lakota Sioux were stripped of their firearms, which they needed for survival. The US Army relocated the Sioux to Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota. Hundreds of women and children were surrounded by US forces and slaughtered after an accidental gun discharge. This type of injustice was a result of hundreds of years of prejudice. German Americans were discriminated in the US between the years of 1914 and 1945. From the beginning to end of both World Wars Germans were labeled as bloodthirsty “Huns” or “Krauts”. A friend of my grandfather named
Otto von Münnerstadt, both from Cincinnati, was found murdered after being brutally beaten to death in an alleyway in a German ghetto. Münnerstadt was found with an engraving of a swastika on his forehead and a sign around his neck labeled “KRAUT”. Throughout the history of the United States hatred toward people who are different from the American people when the Constitution stated that we are all the same. This “Shadow of Hate” has only brought darkness to our country and though we have made great leaps to end the darkness, there is still much to light up on the horizon.