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Black Americans

About 27 million people, or a little more than one tenth of all US citizens, are descended from people brought across the Atlantic from Africa between 150 and 300 years ago as slaves.

From the beginning the colonists in Pennsylvania, New York and New England stayed out of the slave trade, but they could not prevent the plantation owners of the South from buying slaves from Africa.

Towards the 1800 the southern states stopped the trade, and from then onwards no more slave ships came in, except for a few which came illegally. But by then there nearly a million slaves in the plantations of the South, and the US Constitution had not changed their status. Southern slavery was ended only with the victory of the northern states in the civil war of 1861 -1865. The US Constitution was amended so as to outlaw slavery, and to grant automatic citizenship to any person born in the USA.

But long after 1865 the whites in most of the South were still finding ways of excluding black citizens from real equality. Even in the 1950s there were cases of southern black people being intimidated when they came to register as voters; and in the South they were still separate schools, separate seats in local buses, even separate hospital car parks – and many whites-only facilities of many kinds. Black opposition to discrimination was led by the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, with strong support from liberally-minded whites. The 1950s brought the beginnings of major change.

At this time a black clergyman, Martin Luther King, became the informal leader of active movements of non-violent protest against racial segregation, and he gained admiring support from white Americans in the South as well as in the North. King came to the center of the stage at the time when television was becoming widely available. When defenders of the white supremacist traditions of the South reacted violently against a peaceful campaign for equal treatment, television showed the unpleasant scenes which they provoked. When the University of Mississippi admitted its first black student in 1962, he met with such threats of violence that he had to be protected by large groups of armed soldiers wherever he went.

The people responsible for the intimidation soon learned that their actions were seen on TV, with hostile commentary around the world.

After the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, his successor as President Lyndon Johnson, expanded his ideas and led Congress to pass laws to eliminate racial discrimination. In 1969, Luther King became a martyr too, and like Kennedy and his brother was assassinated. Later the US Congress set aside one day each year as a national holiday in his memory – an honour given to only one other man, George Washington, the nation's first president.

By the 1970s blacks were registered as voters in the South in almost the same proportion as whites. Soon many were elected to important offices in the southern states, and the South's most important city had a black mayor. Blacks have been elected as mayors of several of the country's biggest cities (including Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Cleveland and Washington D.C.). There are now some thousands of black millionaires, not only athletes and entertainers but also in business and the professions as well. Except for a few pockets of resistance (such as the obscure county in Georgia which still excluded black residents even in 1987), race discrimination in the South had ceased to be a special problem by around 1970. But this did not mean that the conditions of blacks everywhere had become altogether happy, particularly in the northern cities. There are by now more blacks in the north than in the South. The condition in the North by no means free of social problems. The average earnings of blacks are relatively low, and they are in general the first to become unemployed.



De facto residential segregation still survives. A hundred years ago, when the first waves of blacks moved into the northern cities, white residents would move away from their homes when black people bought or rented houses nearby. Within a few years the street once occupied by whites would be inhabited only by black people. As the process continued, whole areas of cities would become all-black while others stayed white. Segregation of this kind does not affect blacks only; there are concentrations of Poles, Italians, 'ethnics' of every kind

In Cleveland, Chicago and Philadelphia, a third to a half of the city inhabitants are now black, many of them concentrated in the least salubrious areas. In Detroit, Washington D. C. and Baltimore the figure is more than half. The schools are not segregated by law, but if a black child goes to the nearest school he or she may find de facto segregation there: only black children because no others live nearby.

Discrimination against blacks, both in admission to all public places and in employment, is now illegal. In some police forces and many northern and southern state and national government departments, blacks have been systematically and openly favoured for promotion, and where there have been promotion examinations to be passed, the minimum grade has been set at a lower level for blacks than for whites. Universities have done the same in admitting students – but this practice has caused difficulties. A white man failed to gain admission to a University of California Medical school because his grades were not good enough, while a black man with lower grades was accepted. The white man's complaint, that he was being denied equal treatment, gave the US Supreme Court great difficulty. In principle it allowed positive discrimination in favour of one person (and thus against another).

By now a generation has passed since the great reforms of the 1960s, and the general enthusiasm that supported them has tended to dry up.


Date: 2015-01-02; view: 819


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