Why did the desegregation of schools become a major problem in the USA in the 1950s?

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Assignment 1: Model B: Civil Rights In The USA

Why did the desegregation of schools become a major problem in the USA in the 1950s?

Introduction

Slavery came under attack after 1800 because of the three groups who opposed slavery.

“The Abolitionists”.

Britain had abolished the slave trade in 1807, and, slavery in 1833. That same year, the American Anti- Slavery Society was formed and most of its members were white. Many people in the North of the United States wanted to put an end to slavery forever.

“The Merchants”

Slave plantations were not a cheap way of growing cotton. Slaves had to be housed and fed, which worked out to cost more than the ordinary workers. So after 1800, many of the merchants turned against slavery because it was simply pushing up the prices.

“Black People”

After 1800 many black people decided that it was about time they stood up for themselves and so decided that they should fight for freedom for themselves.

In March 1861, Abraham Lincoln became President and he didn’t allow slavery in any of the new states in the American West. The southern states decided to leave the USA. Lincoln went to war to stop them and this turned into a war to stop slavery (The American Civil War) .It was a war against the North and South of USA. In 1863, the US government said all slaves were free and in 1865 the southern states were defeated. Slavery was ended!

Black Americans did not share in the prosperity of the 1920s. In 1920 about 10% of Americans were black and most of them lived in the southern states that, sixty years earlier, had been the slave-owning Confederacy in the Civil War. In spite of the end of slavery black Americans continued to suffer from racial discrimination.

Segregation, a policy of keeping black and white people separate, was based on racial prejudice. In the southern states segregation was legal.

But freedom turned out not to be what the slaves thought it would be. Many black people had thought they the government would share out the plantation land between the slaves, but unfortunately they didn’t and the slaves left the plantation with absolutely nothing. They had nowhere to stay and nothing to eat.

Now that the black people were free, they had nothing, they needed to find jobs, and many were sharecroppers. This is where the freed slaves had to go to work for the white people. Even though the black people were free they still had to do what the White man said. Instead of paying them wages, the White farmers let them share the profit when the crop was sold. Until, then the White farmers lent the Black workers money. By the time the crop was sold, the Black workers owed the White people so much they had to keep working for them in order to pay off the debts. Their lives were just another vicious cycle of another kind of slavery.

Although blacks outnumbered whites, the sharecropping system that basically replaced slavery helped ensure they remained poor and virtually locked out of any opportunity for land ownership or basic human rights. The system grew from the struggle between planters and ex-slaves on how to organize production. Planters wanted gang labour, like they had used under slavery, to work the fields; freed people wanted to own and work their own land.


Under the system, the sharecropper rented a plot of land and paid for it with a percentage of the crop -- usually 30 to 50%. Sharecroppers would get tools, animals, fertilizer, seeds and food from the landlord's store and would have to pay him back at incredibly high interest rates. The landlord would determine the crop, supervise production, control the weighing and marketing of cotton, and control the recordkeeping. This was unfair and was a way that the white people would gain power over the black people. Very rarely would the black people see a profit in this sharecropping business.

The black people were unskilled; all they had done in their lives was being slaves to the white. They would of picked cotton on the plantations or do other very low paid jobs. They may of done temporary manual work or just simply of been labourers.

The Jim Crow laws were introduced throughout the South of USA which enforced segregation. The laws were known as the Jim Crow laws because it was a term taken from a nineteenth century comedians act that ridiculed black people. In 1896 the US Supreme Court, with its Plessey v. Ferguson decision, gave legal approval to local state laws that segregated blacks and whites. It was an appalling decision for blacks in the South, for it legally enforced a situation that guaranteed they would never get equal status, treatment or opportunity in their own country. White southerners could protect their way of life and continue to exploit those they believed to be racially inferior, the descendants of the slaves that once upon a time had belonged to their great grandparents.

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The Jim Crow laws were:

  • White nurses were forbidden to treat black males
  • White teachers were forbidden to teach black students
  • South Carolina had a law, which made it illegal for blacks and white workers to look out the same window
  • Florida: Separate warehouses for "Negro" and white textbooks
  • Separate telephone booths in Oklahoma
  • New Orleans: Segregated white and black prostitutes
  • Atlanta: Two sets of bibles for searing in witnesses
  • All circuses, shows and tent exhibitions, to which the attendance of . . . More than one race is invited or expected to attend shall provide for ...

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