African Americans Freedom Summer Essay

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.

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

“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 preparation for the movement it was noted that leading up to 1964, Mississippi had received far too little attention for how the state treated blacks. The Freedom Summer Project’s main goal was to raise awareness about the lack of voting rights for African Americans in the south and the summer of 1964 was chosen to push this movement because it was an election year. One of the main pieces of the project was setting up Freedom Schools to help educate black children and adults on things such as basic civil rights, black history, and American History. White Southerners felt threatened by the project and characterized the goals of the Freedom Summer differently than what they actually were. A June 1964 article published in the Charleston Post claimed that “(Freedom Summer) had nothing to do with voting” and that the two goals of the project were military occupation of Mississippi and to force socialist economics on the

African American Studies is a very complex subject. To confuse African American studies with black history is a common occurrence. African American studies is much deeper and more profound than just Black history alone. There are many unanswered and unasked questions among the Black American culture which causes confusion and misunderstanding in modern day society. In unit one there were many themes, concepts, and significant issues in the discipline of Africana studies. Both W.E.B Du Bois and Vivian V. Gordan touched on many concerns.

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.

In Birmingham, Alabama between 1957 and 1962 seventeen black churches and homes had been bombed, racial tension continued to grow, and more and more African Americans were being killed. Although the population of Birmingham was 40% African American, there seemed little hope for a political solution to the racial divide; of 80,000 registered voters, only 10,000 were black due to a barrier that was placed on the new state constitution of Alabama. One of these barriers was an annual poll tax that had to pay for two years before the new election season. African Americans in Mississippi could barely afford the necessities in order to live such as food, clothes, and a roof over their head. African Americans were the poorest part of Mississippi’s population. The other barrier that was placed in the new state constitution was a literacy test. It required a person seeking to register to vote to read a section of the state constitution and explain it to the county clerk, a white man, who processed voter registrations. This new law was setup for African Americans to fail. Along with many other civil rights leaders and members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Dr. Martin Luther King traveled to Birmingham, Alabama to lead and participate in several boycotts, marches, and picketing leading up to Dr. Martin Luther King’s arrest. While being incarcerated, Dr. King wrote an open letter more known as The “Letter from Birmingham Jail”. In this letter, King highlights many

In the deep south, many Anglo American Males assaulted myriads of black voters who went to cast in their votes. Black men who tried to vote were often beaten and threaten, and on many occasions, killed. (Brooker) They threatened to hurt their family, and burn down their houses. They also fired them from their work places if their boss discovered that they were voting. While Other supremacist used harshed tactics to disenfranchise black Americans, Others used the tactics of all white primary elections ("Direct Disenfranchisement"). In these elections, The primary elections are the first elections to occur where the republicans run against the Republicans and the democrats run against the Democrats. The winner of the groups then run against each other, and the winner of that would be elected. The Democratic Party usually won while the republicans never one. In the Democratic Party, black peoples were not allowed to vote in their only election that helped their cause. This prevented black Americans from voting for anti-slavery abolitionist in the government. ("Direct Disenfranchisement")Lastly, white supremacist performed poll purges at the elections. Men who were in charge of the election could easily remove the registered names from the list (Brooker). This tactic mainly pertain the black Americans because white supremacists promoted the

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 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 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.

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.

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).

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 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.