History Paper 1877 - 1900

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.

Females across the nation started speaking out against gender inequality. Discrimination in areas such as the workplace, marriage, and government had become overwhelmingly obvious and women started fighting back (Banks 207). This uprising coincided with the Civil Rights Movement. During the same time, African-Americans were standing up against segregation and for racial equality. These two movements went hand-in-hand, as they both had similar motives. Both women and blacks were fighting against oppression in their own country, and they benefitted from each other’s successes. But it wasn’t strictly these two minority groups standing up for themselves during this time, as Mexicans and Native Americans joined the cause too. They also spoke out against inequality by hosting similar protests and demonstrations as the black and women’s rallies. This showed how the 1960’s were a popular time for minority groups to take a stand and make their voices heard, and women were only one of the many groups of people who rallied for change during that time.

The South did all that it could to suppress and terrorize blacks. The idea was to demonstrate white superiority even though blacks were no longer slaves. The Ku Klux Klan was formed for this purpose and because of it, the Force Bill had to be imposed to control the racist men (Doc I and H). The Force Bill sent in the military to control the KKK terrorization but was ultimately useless because the KKK had already fulfilled its purpose of intimating blacks (Example). Because of this intimating, it is no surprise that social change did not occur. Blacks, though yearning, still did not have the power to counter racist white efforts against them.

Ever since the founding of the United States of America, blacks have continuously been considered inferior to the white race. In the year of 1954, a substantial advancement in the fight for equality for blacks was prevalent. Countless prominent leaders of the United States realized the injustices that the blacks were forced to endure daily. Stated blatantly in the Declaration of Independence, it is said that all men are created equally. Disregarding the opinions of the men in the South, people began to realize that it was time to truly consider every man who is a citizen of the United States as equals. A life where segregation was not prevalent in schools, restaurants, theatres, parks, buses, and all public

The Transcontinental Railroad was a technological breakthrough that managed to make the USA feel smaller to travelers. Railroad systems had been in place decades before the transcontinental railroad had been constructed. However, these systems were not in synch as there were many different railroad companies and even more laws in place from state to state. This was in part due to the civil war, during this period both governments wanted better transportation of goods and troops. This caused many factors like track gauge (spacings of the rails) lengths to differ vastly. These differences in factors caused the slowing of transportation as, many of the times, people and goods being transported had to move trains where these railways met up. Also, many railways would not intersect towns, causing them to board trains on the other side of town. The Transcontinental Railroad was one of the stepping stones towards standardization as these factors were enforced by law for uniformity, and towns began to be built around these railways. This allowed people to travel from the eastern coast to the western coast without having to swap railways many times and would bring people and their ideas closer together, and, most importantly, caused the massive increase in western expansion. The transcontinental railroad was brought forth due to the Pacific Railroad Act of 1862, Chinese laborers, and western migration allowing for decreased travel times, bulk movement of resources and products, and

The reaction of the South signalled a deeper division there. The Ku Klux Klan tried to suppress the blacks. State government also did this with their Black Codes. These included voting restrictions which made it difficult for blacks to vote. Thomas Nast noted this division and the hatred it contained in his cartoon in Harper’s Weekly in 1874. (Doc

In 1860, the United States had more railroad track than the rest of the world combined. Shipping freight by rail became much more practical and affordable, easily beating out the use of steamboats. The railroad directly led to the increase of urban centers. Chicago, for example, virtually quadrupled its population during the 1850’s. By the 1880’s, there were at least 93, 267 miles of rail that stretched across the plains and just ten years later, there were 163,597 miles of rail. By 1862, Congress passed the Pacific Railroad Act, which gave the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific Railroads responsibility for building the transcontinental railroad. Congress also granted both railroads lands and millions of dollars of government loans. May 10, 1869, after six long years of hard intensive labor, the tracks of the two railroads finally met at

Railroads began being built much more following the Civil War going from 35000 miles of track in 1865 to 192,556 miles in 1900

By 1861, tracks were installed throughout the northern and southern states to increase production wealth. What many Southerners don't realize the full potential of the rail system during the Civil War. The South had always been less enthusiastic about the railroad industry than the North; its citizens preferred an agrarian living and left the mechanical jobs to men from the Northern states. The railroads existed, they believed, solely to get cotton to the ports (Civilwar.org). With lack of care to the rail systems in the South, train tracks soon started to deteriorate which made traveling unsafe and hazardous to many train conductors and passengers that travel

The era was crammed with corruption, but the years between 1877 and 1900 were also some of the most momentous and dynamic in American history. They set in motion developments that would shape the country for generations, the reunification of the South and north, the integration of four million newly freed African Americans, westward expansion through railroads, immigration, industrialization, urbanization. It was also a period of reform, in

They thought that if they were to treat the Blacks as equals then this would encourage interracial relationships. They used violence to keep the Blacks in place and at the bottom of the racial chain. This caused several Jim Crow Laws to be set forth such as a black man could not shake hands with a white man because it meant that they were socially equal. A black man could not also extend a hand or other body part towards a White woman for the fear of being accused of raping her. Blacks and Whites were forbidden from eating together and if they did the

Many black women were involved in the woman suffrage movement. From Sojourner Truth, a former slave, to Rosa Parks, these women have been fighting for the rights of women. All women were the same except for one thing, the color of their skin. The color of people skin determined how people view others. Black women had strong support for woman’s suffrage, but sometimes had to deal with discrimination within the suffrage movement itself. Black women scandalous behavior was judged and meant differently from white women. Scandalous had a different racial undertone in our society.

Violence against black people in America began when slaves were kidnapped from Africa and sent to America. White slave owners would beat them, breed them, make them work without pay and sell them as if they were animals. When Abraham Lincoln was elected president of the United States in 1860, he wanted to abolish slavery in the south. This lead to the civil war, a war between the north, called the Union, and south, which was called the Confederacy. The Confederacy wanted black people to still be slaves and the Union wanted to abolish it. The war ended with the Confederacy losing and the creation of the Emancipation Proclamation which freed all of the black people in the south. Once black people were freed, a white supremacist group called the Ku Klux Klan was created to prevent black people from fighting for equal rights. They would do this by terrorizing and murdering innocent black people. Not only did black people had to deal with the KKK, but they also had to deal with Jim Crow laws. Jim Crow laws were the laws that were specifically made to hurt the black community. All of these injustices lead to the beginning of the civil rights movement, where people fought for equality. After the Civil Rights movement, a majority of black people have equal rights, but still, have to face violent acts of racism in America.

During 1880 to 1860, The United States of America went through social, political and economic changes, which affected the North and South in different ways.

Ida B. Wells-Barnett dedicated her life to social justice and equality. She devoted her tremendous energies to building the foundations of African-American progress in business, politics, and law. Wells-Barnett was a key participant in the formation of the National Association of Colored Women as well as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). She spoke eloquently in support of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association. The legacies of these organizations have been tremendous and her contribution to each was timely and indespensible. But no cause challenged the courage and integrity of Ida B. Wells-Barnett as much as her battle against mob violence and the terror of lynching at the end of