Freedom: Sharon and Port Hurom Statement Essay

Phillips writes that the defining characteristic of a ‘Southerner’ is a feeling of white racial solidarity which casts all other social considerations in the shade; it is the “cardinal test of a Southerner.” When Phillips touches upon the subject of non-slaveholding whites, he emphasizes their zeal for the primacy of white civilization as an end unto itself. He relates two contemporary accounts of non-slaveholders, one a tinner and the other an overseer, to demonstrate this fervor but pointedly devalues their economic attachments to slavery, writing, “Both of them, and a million of their non-slaveholding like, had a still stronger social prompting: the white men’s ways must prevail; the Negroes must be kept innocuous.” Phillips rejects out of hand the sway of overt pecuniary motives against the weight of racial ones and this rejection is so absolute in part because “it is otherwise impossible to account

The 13th amendment abolished slavery and freed millions of African Americans. This was supposed to improve their lives and give them a new beginning. However, more than 30 years after the abolishment, their situation has not improved. Their right to vote was revoked in many southern states during the early 1890s. Less than 40% of black children were enrolled in schools in Georgia by 1880. Between 1880 and 1918, over 2400 African Americans were hanged. Africans had the lowest paying jobs and very few owned land. Jim Crow laws were established in many southern states to legalize segregation. Their situation was disastrous and wasn’t improving. Four respected spokespersons presented their ideas to fix this racial inequality crisis. The four courageous people who offered their alternatives were Ida B Wells, Booker T. Washington, Henry Turner and W.E.B Du Bois.

Although it did temporarily provide African Americans with de jure equality, Radical Reconstruction did not eliminate the intrinsic barriers of prejudice and neglect to African American prosperity in the South and did not keep freedmen from being once again disenfranchised to sharecropping and enslaved to debt after Northern supervision stagnated. Freedom, as defined by Garrison Frazier, a Baptist minister representing Savannah’s black community, was “placing us where we could reap the fruit of our own labor, and take care of ourselves,” and African Americans were unable to do that despite laws that purportedly freed African Americans. In fact, most of the impacts of Radical Reconstruction—an abandoned black community, a makeshift union, and an empowered white supremacy movement overlooked by a corrupt state government system—could have been achieved by simply engaging with the normal Reconstruction. Radical Reconstruction may have actually been worse because of the widened rift between the North and the South, with resentment of the federal government’s military intervention fostering a reluctancy for the South to cooperate. Even though African Americans would have to wait decades for a semblance of justice, it is perhaps for the better that the North did not force the South the alter their worldview. For the United States government is not Orwell’s thought police, and the nation’s laws are unable to oversee every single interaction and microaggression that citizens face as a result of others’ preconceived notions and judgements. Considering that both gentle and strict approaches were tried, there is very little that officials could have done to feasibly create a perfect reconstruction, and hitting with a heavier hand would only further a stronger backlash. If they had done any one thing better, it would have

Unfortunately, there are two sides to every coin. The poor whites of the South may have built a community among themselves, but unlike the communities built in Freak the Mighty and the lady insurrectionists and black women, they did not reach out to help other prejudiced groups. The South’s poor whites were not as disadvantaged as the previously mentioned groups, for they were fed their privileges by the rich white Southern man. Rather

The Port Huron Statement was written by Tom Hayden, a social activist, in 1962. He was part of a group calling itself, Students for a Democratic Society”.

Although this book is titled, “The Black Codes of the South,” the writer begins his story discussing slavery, then leads up to emancipation, where four million slaves were freed. The freedom of slaves brought about the enactment of the Black Codes in the southern states. Interestingly, the writer includes newspaper sources from the South, as well as the North, excerpts from various plantation owners ‘diaries, notices and laws. The Black Codes came to fruition because the Southerners needed them as laborers , and because the free Negros were not anxious to sign contracts, the South labeled them as idle and vagrants

A Negro leader living in Boston, made it quite clear where the laws came from, “it is five times as hard to get a house in a good location in Boston as in Philadelphia, and it is ten times as difficult for a colored mechanic to get work here as in Charleston.” (19) His dilemma exhibited how a Negro man figured life in the South might be superior to the North. He made this statement in 1860. In 1860, the South was pushing through the process of Reconstruction. The Negro leader’s statement shocked those who believed the North was where freedom reigned.

“I will say, then, that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races; that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people. And while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and

“What I told you is what your grandparents tried to tell me: that this is your country, that this is your world, that this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it.” (Coates). This powerful quote exemplifies the mistreatment of blacks in America as something that has been prevalent throughout our nation’s history and is still present in our contemporary world. Our national founding document promised that “All men are created equal”. As a nation we have never achieved the goal of equality largely because of the institution of slavery and its continuing repercussions on American society.

Slavery in the south created their own image of themselves, as well as “King Cotton,” that would leave no room for questioning the morality of an institution that they depended on.

From the Revolutionary War onwards, the South has been developed as the shining example of what an American should be like. Slavery was a huge attribute of Southern society, though looked down upon by the world, it was practiced and eagerly defended by political logic and religious zeal. One argument is made from a Senator

The Afro-American Almanac located on Professor Tygiel’s “Sites of Interest to History Majors” have a copy of Booker T. Washington’s famous “Atlanta Compromise” speech that he delivered in 1895. Neither before, nor since, has one speech had such a profound effect upon the career of a politician and the people that he sought to represent. Indeed, Washington’s primacy was assured when he in dramatic fashion promised (eye witness accounts have him thrusting his hand forward to underline this point) the south that: “In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.” The south, indeed America quickly embraced

quote means that as long as they where controlling them they could not fight back

The SDS can be traced back to The League for Industrial Democrats; where they broke off in 1959 and formed The Students for a Democratic Society in Chicago, in 1960 at the University of Michigan a meeting was formed and Alan Haber is elected president of SDS, Alan Haber’s background was described very leftist he enrolled in 1954 and graduated in 1965. In 1962, the group release a manifesto political statement called the Port Huron Statement, in this statement they criticized the power of big businesses and the corruption of government. To include the militarism of society and the idea of the arms race. The Port Huron Statement envisage the American society to have a nonviolent movement for the civil rights. They wanted to end the society’s ideas of

“It is a shift in the practice of democracy from hostility to civility, from advocacy to engagement, from confrontation to conversation, from debate to dialogue, and from separation to community.” (p. 4)