African Americans Freedom Summer Essay

The United States first began to deal with the issue of voter suppression during the Reconstruction. During Reconstruction freed slaves earned their right to vote and hold office through the fifteenth amendment in 1870. In 1877, Democrats, known as Dixiecrats, began to impose laws that were designed to suppress the African American vote or better known as Jim Crow Laws. The Jim Crow voting laws required the freedmen to pass literacy tests that they were unable to pass because of no formal education because of their status of slaves. Many states created poll taxes, which many poor Americans, white and black, were unable to pay. Many precincts made their voting precincts “white only” so that blacks would have nowhere to cast their votes. The Jim Crow voter suppression tactics were so successful that only three percent of African Americans in the south were registered to vote in 1940. Although African American males were given the right to vote in

The United States is a immigrant country, which faces varieties of problems. The African American problem is one of the most serious one. Racial segregation is a deep-rooted social problem, which reflects in every field in the United States. For example, education, labor market and criminal justice system. In the aspect of education, most of black children were not permitted to enter the school, because the white children studied there. In the aspect of labor market, the black people 's average wages were lower than the whites. They did the manual work. In the aspect of criminal justice system, the blacks were easily in jail. Badly, their sentences were also more serious than the whites. In general, the blacks live in the bottom of the American society. Martin Luther King delivered the famous speech I Have a Dream, ' ' I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. ' ' (1) However, it was difficult for African American to get the freedom. The 1776 Declaration of Independence announced that everyone are equal and freedom.But black slavery still occurred in the southern states of America. Then the Civil War broke out, African American kept struggling for land and political rights.

During my early years of school, I remember being taught white accomplishments and wondering if blacks and other people of color had made any significant contributions to today's world. I noticed that television consist of all white people. Throughout my research paper I hope to cover certain aspects of African American heritage. Aspects such as blacks making up the largest minority group in the United States, although Mexican-Americans are rapidly changing that. The contributions blacks have provided to our country are immeasurable. Unfortunately though rather than recognizing these contributions, white America would rather focus on oppressing and degrading these people. As a consequence American

Slavery began in the late 16th century to early 18th century. Africans were brought to American colonies by white masters to come and work on their plantations in the South. They were treated harshly with no payments for all their hard work. In addition, they lived under harsh living conditions, and this led to their resistance against these harsh conditions. The racism towards the African Americans who were slaves was at its extreme as they did not have any rights; no civil nor political rights.

African Americans now constitute nearly 1 million of the total 2.3 million incarcerated; that is 60% of 30% of the African American population. African Americas are incarcerated at nearly six times the rate of whites. “Between 6.6% and 7.5% of all black males ages 25 to 39 were imprisoned in 2011, which were the highest imprisonment rates among the measured sex, race, Hispanic origin, and age groups." (Carson, E. Ann, and Sabol, William J. 2011.) Stated on Americanprogram.org “ The Sentencing Project reports that African Americans are 21 percent more likely to receive mandatory-minimum sentences than white defendants and are 20 percent more likely to be sentenced to prison.” Hispanics and African Americans make up 58% of all prisoners in 2008, even though African Americans and Hispanics make up approximately one quarter of the US population. (Henderson 2000). Slightly 15% of the inmate population is made up of 283,000 Hispanic prisoners.

“The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is a landmark piece of federal legislation in the United States that prohibits racial discrimination in voting.” In the 1880’s poll taxes and literacy requirements that afterward advocated African Americans to vote. Meanwhile Klan violence frightens from police and employers, blacks were still “protesting”about voting rights. As a result, there were over two dozen blacks serving in state congress across some

The right to vote for African American became difficult during the time because the northern didn’t want to consider the blacks as equal to the society. As Frederick Douglass, has once stated “Slavery is not abolished until the black man has the ballot.” African American fought their way to gain their right to vote is by coming together, free blacks and emancipated slaves, to create parades, petition drives to demand, and to organize their own “freedom ballots.” As a free African American, they except the same respect as the whites and nothing

Black voting fell off sharply in most areas because of threats by white employers and violence from the Ku Klux Klan.The reading and writing ability test did not just keep out the 60 percent of voting-age black men (most of them ex-slaves) who could not read. It left out almost all black men because the clerk would select complicated technical passages for them to understand. Very differently, the clerk would pass whites by picking simple series of words that make sense and that have a subject and a verb in the state constitution for them to explain.Mississippi also puts into law a "grandfather clause" that allowed registering anyone whose grandfather was qualified to vote before the Civil War. Obviously, this benefited only white person (who

The National Newspaper Publishers Association also made efforts during this time to encourage greater Negro voter registration. It was quoted “We have seen men shot down in the streets as they moved to exercise the basic right of suffrage. We have seen, only recently, more than a dozen men in Mississippi lose their lives when they attempt to register to vote …” “This alone should motivate every eligible man and woman to resolve now to vote in the coming presidential election.” These statements tie in with my survey question: Do you think African Americans take for granted the voting rights their ancestors fought so long for?, majority of survey takers, a good 55% either agreed strongly or moderately.

“Freedom Summer”, a book by Bruce Watson, talks about that historic time of 1964 in Mississippi. He explains in detail about the events that went on. Even the most painful details from that summer he has you relive as he tells about them. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee went to Mississippi to educate African Americans and help them vote. Watson talks about the murder of three innocent people while down there in Mississippi. Three people that were young and just helping African Americans be educated were murdered for helping. He uses many different quotes from those that were there or experienced what went on. All these to tell the story so important because it shaped American democracy. It made sure that African Americans had

In Mississippi and elsewhere, vagrancy laws were another tool used by southern whites to maintain power over free blacks. In Mississippi these laws defined any black not having employment, meeting with other blacks or whites unlawfully, or being intimately involved with a member of the opposite race as vagrants. Consequently, they could then be fined and/or jailed. These laws also allowed for any free Negro who could not pay his fine to be hired out to any white man who was willing to pay the debt. This set up a system in which a free black was confined to working for a white employer who could dictate control over most of their lives, or be declared a vagrant and then hired out into a similar position.

From the 1920’s to the mid 1930’s a literary, intellectual, and artistic movement occurred that kindled the African Americans a new cultural identity. This movement became known as the Harlem Renaissance, which is also known as the “New Negro Movement”. With this movement, African Americans sought out to challenge the “Negro” stereotype that they had received from others while developing innovation and great cultural activity. The Harlem Renaissance became an artistic explosion in the creative arts. Thus, many African Americans turned to writing, art, music, and theatrics to express their selves.

The black freedom struggle has not yet come to an end – there are still prejudiced and racist radicals that try to negotiate white supremacy and dominance in order to prevent the blacks from their long wait for equality. Consequently, the movement has progressed very sluggishly in the past few centuries. Nevertheless, the campaign for equal rights has led to the triumph over slavery and has led to the accrual of suffrage rights. However, this is still not enough, not after centuries of enslavement, lynching, segregation, and discrimination. Oftentimes, there is still no justice in court houses, especially when black people are accused and convicted, even for the simplest of crimes – as compared to the white and powerful who are charged for heinous misconducts and get away scratch free. Hence, throughout the period of the Blacks’ long fight for freedom and equality, several Black intellectuals have come front with ideas that could administer better treatment for their people. A good strategy to encourage the black populace to fight for their freedom and their rights is by inverting popular ideas so that there is a clear distinction between the reasonable and unreasonable notions of equality and justice. Thus, it was not uncommon for these literati to undermine dominant discourses in order to bolster their own analyses. Among the discussed black intellectuals who inverted prevailing dissertations, three that stood out the most are Frederick Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, and

It was a time of conflict, excitement, and confusion in the United States. And this was also “Black Power” of the Civil Rights Movement. Moody at that time was a member of NAACP. She was involved in her first sit-in, and her social science professor, John Salter, who was in charge of NAACP asked her to be the spokesman for a team that would sit-in at Woolworth’s lunch counter (Moody 1968, 286). Although she could go to jail for this, but she still agreed. After that, she joined CORE and continued to fight for the voting rights (Moody 1968, 311). Following passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, the struggle for racial justice moved to the next battleground: voting rights in the Deep South. The campaign was already under way in places like Selma, Alabama, where local activists, facing intense white resistance, asked Martin Luther King, Jr., and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference for support (Ayers 2010, 780). Black voter registration in the South was one of the great accomplishments of the civil rights movement. Within months of its passage, more than 2 million black southern were registered to vote. Most supported the Democratic Party of Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, which had endorsed the cause of civil rights (Ayers 2010, 782).

Despite the horrific violence, two influential projects had their start during Freedom Summer, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, or MFDP, and Freedom Schools. The goal of the MFDP was to show the whites of Mississippi that if given the chance the African American voters would come to the polling places in droves to vote. The party was led by African American residents of the state who wanted the elective franchise, or the vote. In addition to registering voters to the party, the African American leaders held a Freedom Vote on the same day as the actual elections in the state to show that the state’s African Americans wanted to be involved in the political process. The vote was a huge success with over 80,000 African Americans across the state registering and “voting” for representatives from the party.