To what extent had the situation for black people in America improved by 1900?

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24/09/05

To what extent had the situation for black people in

America improved by 1900?

The situation for black people in America underwent a huge improvement after their emancipation, but by 1900, due to segregation laws and discrimination in general, life was still very difficult for black people. A common black American saying, 'We ain't what we ought to be, we ain't what we going to be. But thank God we ain't what we used to be.', was how they summed up the situation for themselves. By 1900, the black people of America had many more opportunities than pre-1865, but there was still a long way to go before they gained equality with whites. They had poor jobs, poor pay and were generally treated as some kind of a subspecies by whites.

On the positive side, black people were no longer slaves to white people. In 1865, after president Lincoln's death and the end of the civil war, slavery was abolished. The former slaves now had the freedom to travel, and therefore to find work, and to set up a home.

In the South, radical Republicans had given blacks equal voting rights to whites; this ensured that the newly enfranchised blacks would vote for Lincoln's Republican Party. In the North blacks had legal and political equality; they could all vote. The right to vote is often thought of as the badge of citizenship; 700,000 black men in the South wore this badge after the end of the Civil War, which gave them some representation (which they had never previously experienced). In 1868, former black male slaves officially became US citizens through the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution; this meant that they, and everybody else in America, had equality before the law. The Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1870 went even further, officially specifying that the right to vote 'shall not be denied... On account of race, colour or previous condition of servitude.'
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Education was also available to improve the situation for blacks. In southern America, Black churches and the federal Freedmen's Bureau (1865-1872) made this possible; some colleges of higher education (such as Howard and Fisk) even emerged. Education made it possible for black people to get better jobs, e.g.; doctors, teachers, businessmen, lawyers and even political leaders, and improved the literacy rate.

However, many of these improvements were reversed or 'downgraded' later on. For example, in the Southern states of America literacy and income voting qualifications were introduced, which affected a higher rate of blacks than whites; ...

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