Black people were brought to America from Africa as slaves.
map of the slave trade
By the 1800s there were 4,000,000 slaves who lived and worked in the South.
At the end of the Civil War in 1865 the slaves were freed.
Many thought that African Americans would be treated equally and fairly.
But that didn’t happen.
Many whites all over the country continued to discriminate against colored people.
They treated colored people in a rude way to make them feel inferior. For example, no matter how old a black man was, many whites would call him “boy”.
Southern States passed laws that kept colored people poor and separated from whites.
That was called segregation.
What was segregated?
Almost all public places in the South were segregated
by law.
Schools
Kids went to different schools. More money was spent for white schools.Black schools were run-down buildings.Few black schools had running water.Most had no electricity.=>It was hard for colored children to get a good
education.
Colored people:
• sat at separate lunch counters• went to separate restrooms• drank at separate water fountains• went to black hospitals=> If you walked out of your house,
any place you could think of was probably segregated.
The civil rights movement:
In the 1950s and 1960s colored people throughout the South began to get together to fight for their rights as free people. Thousands and thousands of people, including their white supporters, worked together to change the laws and customs that said white people were superior to colored people.
Montgomery, Alabama 1955:
One of the first protests began in 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama.Thousands of African Americans refused to ride the city buses for more than a year. They stayed off the buses because the bus company didn’t treat colored people and whites equally.The bus company lost a lot of money.
Most people walked, some as many as fourteen miles a day. Others hitchhiked, rode bicycles, or
shared car rides with friends.
How did the Montgomery bus boycott start?
On December 1st, 1955 Rosa Parks left her job to go home. She was happy she found a seat on the bus as she was tired. The bus began to fill up. The driver ordered the African Americans to stand up for the whites to sit. Three African Americans gave up their seats. Rosa Parks didn’t. The police arrested her because she had broken the segregation law. She had to pay a fine.
What did they achieve?
The boycott was a success.The African Americans formed a group with Martin Luther King as their president and went to court. The Court said that segregation on the buses was against the Constitution. Bus drivers could no longer force blacks to sit in the back or give up their seats to the whites.
Were there other protests?
• Sit-ins at segregated places, like libraries that wouldn’t lend books to African Americans.
• Stand-ins • Marches• Freedom Rides
People protested non-violently against every kind of segregation and many whites joined their colored brothers.
What were the sit-ins?
• On February 1, 1960 four black students from a college in South Carolina went to the Woolworth’s store in town. They bought a few school supplies and then went to the lunch counter. “I’m sorry, we don’t serve here”, they were told. They answered that the clerk hadn’t put their money in a box marked “black only”, so why should there be a “white only’ counter? They sat on the stools until the store was closed.
What were the sit-ins?
• Overnight the word spread to other schools.• Within days, students in different cities were sitting-
in . Some white students joined the blacks. So many students wanted to sit-in that they worked in shifts.
• Some whites segregationists ignored them, others yelled at them, pushed them, hit them or even poured ketchup on them.
• By the spring of 1961 segregation laws had been changed in 140 cities because of the sit-ins.
Covered with sugar, salt, mustard, and other slop and beaten during a sit-in in 1963.
What were the Freedom Rides?
• The Supreme Court had ruled that long-distance buses could not be segregated, but it was ignored in the South.
• The Freedom Riders challenged this status quo by riding interstate buses in the South in mixed racial groups to challenge local laws or customs that enforced segregation in seating. As a result, they were met with violence reactions by mobs of whites.
Freedom Riders
Martin Luther King
One of the most famous leaders of the civil rights movement.
“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.”
Was the civil rights movement successful?
Americans got many things from the civil rights movement.
• Laws were passed to end discrimination.• Black people throughout the South could now vote.• African-Americans became congressional
representatives, state government officials, city mayors, police chiefs etc.
• Martin Luther King’s birthday is a national holiday.• Schools teach about the history of black people in
America.
What’s left to be done?
• Most whites in America have better jobs and earn more money than blacks.
• They live in better neighborhoods and go to better schools.
• More young white people go to college than blacks.
• And there are still white people prejudiced against blacks, who need to learn that all people are equal.
People should be color-blind in the way they treat others.
