LICEUL TEORETIC “ION BARBU” BUCUREȘTI

SECTOR 5 - BUCURESTI

LUCRARE DE ATESTAT LA
LIMBA ENGLEZĂ
THE PROBLEM OF RACISM IN THE
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

CANDIDAT:
CHIRIȚĂ ANDREEA-CRISTINA
COORDONATOR:
PROFESOR CRIVĂȚ LUIZA

2017-2018
BUCUREȘTI

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Table of Contents

Argument……………………………………………………………………………………….…..3

Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………..…...4

Chapter 1: History of Racism in the U.S.A……………………………………………...4

 The story of the first slaves

 Chronology of slavery until the outbreak of the American Independence
War (1776)

Chapter 2: Understanding Racism in the U.S.A…………………………..…………7

 The pendulum

 When the past isn't past

Final Consideration…………………………………………………………………………….11

Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………………11

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Argument
Racism has been a problem in the United States of America for a long time, dating back to
early America when the Native Americans were often attacked, relocated, and forcibly assimilated into
European culture. The African slave trade also helped contribute to the environment of a racist culture
in America by debasing the African races and teaching Caucasian Americans that they are better than
the African races. Although the civil rights of African Americans has improved over the last few
decades and America now has an African American president racism still has a strong presence.A
common modern trend in America is incidental racism, which is giving other races equal opportunity
and using other elements to justify racist behavior.

Garret (2009) tells us that prejudice and bigotry are learned behaviors, or habits that people
begin to form when they are in an environment where others do the same. The adults in the young
American’s live are the examples that the young children see and learn from, and when a parent or
other significant other displays racist behavior the child is likely to learn at a young age that other
races are not equal to his or her own race. One important step to reducing the racism in America is to
include curriculum in all education programs that supports equality in the minds of the youth. A
second step that could be taken is to eliminate stereotypes in the classroom through open discussion of
equality and education regarding the dangers of stereotypes. These measures can help support equality
and counter the effects of any racism or bigotry that takes place in the children’s homes by helping
them see and understand what stereotypes and racism are and that they should be avoided. This shows
incidental racism in that the African Americans were allowed to have their own rally, but the rally was
segregated and prejudice was shown by the. In this case the African American crime rate would justify
security precautions, however degraded quality of the route and the excessiveness of the police
response reveals a racist intent.

While there has been much progress made towards the idea of racial equality in America there
still is work to be done in educating the youth and optimizing their environment to support equality
and racial tolerance. The adults and significant others in the lives of the children are the examples that
the children learn to follow as they get older. By educating the children at a young age about the
dangers of stereotype we can minimize the transference of racism to the future generations.

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Introduction
Racism in the United States has been widespread since the colonial era. Legally or socially
sanctioned privileges and rights were given to white Americans but denied to Native
Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, and Hispanic and Latino Americans. European
Americans (particularly the affluent white Anglo-Saxon Protestants) were granted exclusive privileges
in matters of education, immigration, voting rights, citizenship, land acquisition, and criminal
procedure over periods of time extending from the 17th century to the 1960s. However, non-
Protestant immigrants from Europe; particularly Irish people, Poles, and Italians, suffered xenophobic
exclusion and other forms of ethnicity-based discrimination in American society, were vilified as
racially inferior and were not considered fully white. In addition, Middle Eastern American groups
like Jews and Arabs have faced continuous discrimination in the United States, and as a result, some
people belonging to these groups do not identify as white. East and South Asians have similarly faced
racism in America.
Major racially and ethnically structured institutions included slavery, segregation,
the American Indian Wars, Native American reservations, Native American boarding schools,
immigration and naturalization law and internment camps. Formal racial discrimination was largely
banned in the mid-20th century and came to be perceived as socially unacceptable and/or morally
/repugnant as well. Racial politics remains a major phenomenon, and racism continues to
be reflected in socioeconomic inequality. Racial stratification continues to occur in employment,
housing, education, lending, and government.
In the view of the U.S. Human Rights Network, a network of scores of U.S. civil rights and
human rights organizations, "Discrimination in the United States permeates all aspects of life and
extends to all communities of color". While the nature of the views held by average Americans have
changed much over the past several decades, surveys by organizations such as ABC News have found
that, even recently, large sections of Americans self-admit to holding discriminatory viewpoints; for
example, a 2007 article by the organization stated that about one in ten admitted to holding
prejudices against Hispanic and Latino Americans and about one in four did so regarding Arab-
Americans.

Part of a series of articles on Racial segregation

Chapter 1:History of Racism in the U.S.A

Until the American Civil War (1861-1864), slaves and their slaves of African slaves were a
common landscape of early American society. It is known that George Washington, the first American
president, had inherited slaves from his father, the owner of a Virginia colony plantation. One fifth of
the population of US colonies under British Crown tutelage consisted of slaves. Promoting citizens'
liberties and equality in the US was initially accompanied by the rise of slavery. We can never
understand how American democratic institutions and civil rights evolved until we have objectively
analyzed the role that slavery has had since the beginning of the American colonies.
The great challenge for a historian is to explain how the American people could develop an increased
attachment to the human freedoms and dignities of the American Revolution, every moment human
dignity and freedom.

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The story of the first slaves
As US historian Edmund S. Morgan says in his American Slavery, American Freedom,
slavery was not considered necessary nor profitable in the early years of American colonies.
Employees employed by officials were in the first instance those who did different work within
colonies.
Slavery in America began, initially, by the deportation of the various individuals who
violated the law in the British Metropolis in the Virginia colony. Generally, offenders in England
could be punished in three ways: whipping and sending back to the parish they came from, enforced
enlistment in military expeditions or deportation to the colonies.
Once they arrived in the colonies, these deportees had to perform different work for
colonists, in return for which they were poorly paid. Historian Edmund Morgan argues that officials in
Virginia have quickly found a way to trick this class of laborers to come to a punishment. The
colonists of Virginia artificially created a shortage of land, so that the workers who needed to become
free men to have no place to live and return to service. They also took as much as they could from the
workers' profits, through various methods of extortion, such as rents, and the various taxes and fees to
be paid to the bourgeoisie and civil servants. As a result, the risk of a rebellion inside the colony was
very high.
The ambition of landowners to make profits as quickly and as easily as possible, set up with
swift steps, slavery in the state of Virginia. Those who have been serving Virginia's tobacco
plantations for a long time have gradually become subject to increasingly severe punishments in case
of escape. In Virginia, in 1620, such workers came to be sold and bought as commodities. Once
slavery became accepted as a work system, the central authority no longer wanted to give up the
benefits of maintaining it (covering labor, overproduction and free markets).

Chronology of slavery until the outbreak of the American Independence War (1776)

The history of African-American slaves officially began on August 20, 1619, when a Dutch
ship brought 20 slaves of African origin to Jamestown (Virginia). Officially, these primitive African-
American slaves were originally designated as apprentices. The owner of a tobacco plantation, John
Rolfe, writes the event in his diary: "In late August, a Dutchman came and sold us 20 blacks."
In the first phase, the first African Americans could regain their liberty after 4 or 7 years in
the service of the master. After the first generation, African-American servants gradually increased
their dependency until they became enslaved for life.
The one who will actively engage in transatlantic trade with Slavs was the West Indies
Company (1621), a corporation that held the monopoly in this area. The Dutch Colony New
Amsterdam (current New York) has been a headquarters for this company.
The House of Burgesses, Virginia's lawmaker, adopted a law imposing fines for all those
involved in affairs with African Americans in 1622 to prevent interracial marriage, but the law
banning interracial marriage would only be adopted in 1691. The main justification for this law was
related in particular to the legally uncertain status of children resulting from interracial relationships.
This was the foundation of racial segregation.
According to the archives of the Virginia Colonial Court in 1622, the first Black Americans
who became free men were Anthony and Mary Johnson. But Anthony Johnson will become the slave
owner. It is therefore important to remember that the propagation of slavery in the 13 US colonies was
also done with the collusion of the free color population.
Since 1626, the Dutch colonists from New Holland (the East Coast of the Americas - the
Mid-Atlantic area) have begun to introduce Africans to Hudson Valley farms. If initially they were
able to release after many years of work, the afro-Americans exploited by the Dutch would gradually
become slaves, just like in Virginia. Under Dutch law, children born of slavish parents were also
slave-holders.
From 1629, slaves will also be imported to the area known as Connecticut. This colony will
legalize the institution of slavery in 1650. It is worth noting the migration of slaves from one territory
to another. In 1630, the Massachusetts Gulf Colony even approved a fugitive slave law designed to
protect them from the ill-treatment of their masters. From 1634, Massachusetts began to import slaves.
In the same year, slavery was introduced for the first time in the Maryland Colony, and after two years
in the Delaware colony. Among the first regions in North America to provide access to education for
these African-American slaves was the Louisiana French colony. The first slaves in Barbados began to
arrive from 1638 onwards. Boston's settlement was received by sea freight and such slaves as other
goods. In 1640, House of Burgesses condemns servant John Punch to life for life because of the fact
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that he has fled from his master. Other white companions of John Punch will be sentenced to lighter
punishments. From that moment on, it became clear that African-American servants had begun to get
the official status of slaves in the Virginia colony. John Punch's trial also showed that whites and
blacks were not equal before the law. Though they committed the same deed, Punch's white comrades
have benefited from more leniency. In the next year, one more step is taken to recognize the slavery
institution when the Massachusetts colony legalizes it, recognizing it as a practice in Section 91 of the
Freedom Corps. It was only sanctioned to capture slaves through "unwarranted violence". The
provision will also be referred to in the laws of the other New England Confederation.
In Virginia, if a slave was caught escaping for the second time, he could be infuriated. The
measure will be followed by other similar orders that have led to the worsening of the condition of
slaves. Recognition by a local magistrate was sufficient evidence to condemn a fugitive slave. There
was no code of procedure, so in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries all kinds of contradictory laws
related to the status of the slave appeared. American colonists began to build commercial ships to get
involved in transatlantic slave trade. The first such vessel was Rainbowe, which began to transport
slaves from 1645. That same year, the New Hampshire colony introduced slavery. With the adoption
of a new navigation law, the British Parliament set itself the goal of limiting as much as possible the
Dutch influence of slave trade, especially in the 13 US colonies. After the Spanish Succession War
(1700-1714), the English will take control of the slave trade in the hands of the Dutch. The practice of
slavery is officially legalized as an institution in 1660 in British America. In turn, the colonial
assemblies began to adopt laws known as slavery codes, which embraced the slaves' liberties and
protected their masters at the same time.
The English political philosopher, John Lucke, wrote in 1660 a Constitution for the Carolina
colony, in which he granted every man free power in relation to the slaves he owned. Even if Lucke's
constitutional draft was not adopted, the slavish owners received increased powers in colonial laws.
Slavery became officially hereditary in Virginia, with the adoption of the measure requiring all
newborns to receive the mother's social status. In the Act of Controlling Blacks on British Plants,
approved by the English Parliament in 1667, Africans are described as wildly barbarous, which must
be kept under strict surveillance.
In 1664, two other colonies, New York and New Jersey, legalized the institution of slavery.
The Amerindians and Christian Africans were also used as slaves. In the Virginia colony, as early as
1669, any master who killed his slave was acquitted. For the legislators in Virginia, slaves were not
perceived as persons, but as consumer goods owned by a free man. The fledgling slaves from Virginia
were able to establish isolated communities in the mountains, swamps and forests, from where they
then made incursions on the colony plantations in order to obtain the necessary daily living. The
authorities of Virginia offered more rewards to those who helped catch those fugitives.
As for the Dutch slave traders, they still managed to bring about 15,000 African slaves a year
from Angola to America. The slaves were bought from Africa with 15 florins and sold in America at
prices ranging from 300 to 500 florins. In America, those who opposed the greatest energy of slavery
were the Protestant Christians (quakeri) who promoted pacifism and austerity. They succeeded in
persuading legislators to ban slavery in the western part of New Jersey.
The Royal African Company obtained from the British Parliament in 1672 the monopoly over
slave trade between Africa and America.
Although the Declaration of Independence of 1776, which marked the birth of the US, states
that all men were born equal, the practice of slavery remains legally in all 13 former British Crown
colonies.
The first step in the liberation of slaves has been taken since 1777, when the laws of
emancipation of slaves began to emerge in states. The first was Vermont (1777), followed by
Pennsylvania (1780), Massachusetts and New Hampshire (both in 1783), Connecticut and Rhode
Island (1784), New York (1799) and New Jersey (1804).
The last step in the emancipation of slaves in the northern states was made in 1787 when the
Northwest Ordinance, responsible for the administration of the territories of the future states of Ohio,
Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin, banned the practice of slavery. Thus, along with the
emancipation laws in states, a Nordic Free Slave was created.

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Chapter 2: Understanding Racism in U.S.A
There will never be an acceptable explanation for what happened between Michael Brown and
Darren Wilson in Ferguson but we will never fully graspwhy the stage was set for such an encounter
unless we know American history.
We cannot fully comprehend why Dylan Roof murdered nine parishioners at Emanuel AME
Church in Charleston unless we study the Civil War and the Confederacy.
We cannot truly fathom how a minor traffic stop in Cincinnati could result in a white campus
police officer blowing out the brains of an unarmed black man unless we delve into the role race has
played in law enforcement from the enactment of the federal Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 to today's
mandatory minimum sentencing statutes.

Examining American history provides us with the tools to analyse how the death of Michael
Brown and the demonstrations on Florrisant Avenue became a tipping point and sparked a movement.
Connecting the dots between the past and the present helps us to see the origins of our current national
debate - about race, police misconduct, white supremacy, white privilege, inequality, incarceration and
the unfinished equal rights agenda.

The pendulum
The history of people of African descent in America - which is to say the history of America -
is a pendulum of progress and setbacks, of resilience and retaliation, of protest and backlash. There
have been allies and there have been opponents. There have been demagogues, who would divide
Americans on the basis of colour and class, and visionaries who would seek to lead us to common
ground.
The quest for "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" has been an American aspiration since
the Declaration of Independence, but black Americans, Native Americans and women were not at the
table in 1776. Forty of the 56 signers owned other people.
Lest there be any doubt about where the young nation's sentiments lay, the Supreme Court's
1857 Dred Scott decision made clear that people of African descent - whether enslaved or free - would
not be considered American citizens and had no legal standing in the courts. It mattered not that some
of their grandfathers had served in George Washington's Continental Army during the Revolutionary
War.
Last month in Washington, DC, at the third annual March on Washington Film Festival,
Clarence B Jones, a confidant and personal legal counsel to Martin Luther King, Jr., said "a definitive
discussion and description of the institution of slavery, the concomitant supporting ideology of white
supremacy and the impact it has had on subsequent generations" are missing from the history
curriculum of most American high schools and colleges.
Without that knowledge, he said, it is impossible to understand America today.
"Our history has never taught the centrality of race as the key barometer to how well we are
doing with the American Experiment," added Pulitzer Prize winning historian Taylor Branch that same
evening. "If you don’t have race at the forefront of an investigation of how America is fulfilling its
goals, then something is wrong. And unfortunately right now we are paying the price for 50 years of
trying to avoid and hide that subject."
Indeed every time we see another video - of Sandra Bland, of Freddie Gray, of Tamir Rice -
we witness the horrifying evidence of our national failure to confront this legacy.
What used to be called "the Negro problem", really is a matter of the intransigence of white
supremacists who are mired in the past.
Slavery was not the benign, paternalistic system described in the history textbooks of my
youth. Instead, it was a brutal, often sadistic, form of domination over the bodies and minds of people

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who were kidnapped, whipped, beaten and raped. Generations of human beings toiled against their
will without pay or legal rights.
For 246 years - from 1619, when 20 Africans were forced into indentured servitude in
Jamestown, Virginia, until the end of the Civil War in 1865 - most people of African descent in
America were enslaved. Those who had purchased or otherwise been granted their freedom lived a
precarious, circumscribed existence.
Slavery and the slave trade were essential to the American economy and to the development of
American capitalism, especially after Native Americans were driven off their ancestral land in the
Deep South in the 1830s to make way for vast cotton plantations. The wealth of the nation was
inextricably dependent upon uncompensated labour, which enriched not only the planters, but
universities, banks, textile mills, ship owners and insurance companies, who held policies on their
bodies. To settle a debt, an owner merely needed to sell one of his slaves.
By 1850, enslaved Americans, who were listed in their owners' inventory ledgers alongside
cattle and farm equipment, were worth $1.3bn or one-fifth of the nation's wealth. When the first shot
of the Civil War was fired at Fort Sumter in April 1861, the value of that human collateral exceeded
$3bn and was worth more than the nation’s banks, railroads, mills and factories combined. Now
numbering four million souls, they were, as Ta-Nehisi Coates has written, America's "greatest
financial asset".
Immediately after the Civil War, during the hopeful, but brief period of Reconstruction, black
people were finally recognised as citizens with rights. But just as quickly as the 13th, 14th and 15th
amendments abolished slavery, provided equal protection under the law and granted black men the
right to vote, Reconstruction ended with retaliatory Redemption.
When federal troops abandoned their posts in the South after the Compromise of 1877, the
defeated Confederates regrouped as the Ku Klux Klan and the Knights of the White Camellia. They
regained control of their workforce, not by owning them, but by circumscribing their lives through
terror, violence and voter suppression.

In Louisiana, the number of registered black voters plummeted from 130,334 in 1896 to 5,320
in 1898. Fraudulent voting schemes pushed black elected officials from state legislatures and from
Congress. During the late 19th century, there were 20 black members of Congress . When North
Carolina's George Henry White left in 1901, there would not be another until 1928, when Oscar
DePriest was elected in Chicago. For virtually the first half of the 20th century the 15th Amendment
had no value for blacks in the former Confederate states, where they were denied the right to vote
through the cynical artifice of poll taxes, literacy tests and grandfather clauses.
Jim Crow laws and Black Codes obliterated Reconstruction wins and codified racially based
discrimination. The sharecropping system, which left black farmers in debt at the end of every harvest,
was equivalent to slavery. Black children were allowed to attend school only during times of the year
when there were no farm chores to do. Historian Rayford Logan called the period "nadir of American
race relations".
Those who got too uppity were lynched, firebombed in their homes and chased from land they
owned.
In 1915, DW Griffith's technically groundbreaking movie, Birth of a Nation, glorified the Klan
and fed the trope of black inferiority and criminality. Around the same time, a migration wave began
that would eventually see more than six million black Americans flee the brutality and deprivation of
the South for the relative freedom of the North and the West.
Four years later, when black soldiers returned from World War I military duty in France, they
were attacked during the "Red Summer" as resentful whites instigated riots in at least 34 cities, from
Chicago and Washington, DC to Memphis and Charleston. Their goal was to put men who had
received France's Croix de Guerre back in their place as the Klan had done after Reconstruction. The
NAACP investigated and black newspapers editorialised. During the succeeding decades - through the
Depression, the New Deal and World War II - the pendulum continued to swing between progress and
setbacks.

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 The attitudes that informed Jim Crow laws and discriminatory public policy existed in the
North as well as the South. The results are evident today in major American cities, where banks
refused loans to black home buyers in the 1950s and 1960s, literally drawing on maps red lines around
predominantly black neighbourhoods and ensuring that those homes would not appreciate in value at
the same rate as comparable white neighbourhoods.
In 1957, when my parents were ready to finance a new home in an all-black development of
newly constructed residences in a suburb of Indianapolis, they were unable to secure a loan from any
of the city's large banks. Both were college graduates and business executives. Our neighbours were
doctors, teachers, coaches, plumbers, entrepreneurs, realtors, nurses, ministers, architects, insurance
salesmen and carpenters. Many of the men were veterans of World War II and the Korean War and
therefore eligible for the GI Bill's home loan guaranty. In other words, people who normally would
have had no trouble qualifying for mortgages. Instead, they went to Mammoth Life Insurance, a black-
owned insurance company then based in Louisville, Kentucky, for their loans.
In 1954, the Supreme Court's Brown v Board of Education decision struck down so-called
separate but equal education and mandated that American schools be racially integrated. As a post-
Brown v Board child, I always attended integrated schools, encountering the occasional racist, but,
like my parents, rolling with the punches, keeping perspective and finding progressive kindred spirits
in the process. But in many communities - both in the South and the North - the diehard
segregationists responded with paranoia and bitterness, decrying the evils of race-mixing and
miscegenation.
In 1957, nine students at Little Rock High School were harassed and spit upon. In 1963,
Alabama governor George Wallace tried, but failed, to block the enrollment of Vivian Malone and
James Hood. Across the South, federal troops were called in to facilitate the process.
For a time, it seemed that American schools might be integrated, but that pendulum soon began to
move in the other direction as all-white academies opened. Today, most Americans are enlightened
enough not to oppose interracial marriage and are much more tolerant than their grandparents and
great-grandparents, but American public schools in most areas are more segregated than ever, as
Nikole Hannah-Jones' April 2014ProPublica investigation of Tuscaloosa, Alabama schools so well
illustrated.
Pressure from Martin Luther King, Jr., Fannie Lou Hamer, thousands of activists and a
powerful cadre of civil rights leaders combined with the political muscle and willingness of the
Kennedy and Johnson administrations to push for critical legislation during the mid-1960s. The Civil
Rights Act of 1964 forbade discrimination on the basis of sex as well as race in hiring, promoting and
firing. Today, our workplaces are undoubtedly more diverse than they were in the 1950s, with more
people of colour employed as physicians, firefighters, attorneys, journalists, investment bankers and
professors. But it is still true that when a white person and a black person with comparable credentials
apply for a job, the white person is more likely to be hired.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlawed poll taxes and made it possible for thousands of
formerly disenfranchised black Americans to vote. Now, throughout America, there are thousands of
people of colour who are city council members, mayors, members of Congress, on school boards and
of course, now in the White House. During the last two presidential elections, black voters turned out
in record numbers because they were motivated and because many of the old obstacles to voting had
been removed.
But a backlash has developed in that arena, too. Two years ago, in Shelby County v Holder,
the Supreme Court gutted Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, removing the "preclearance"
provisions that required states with a history of voter discrimination to seek permission for changes
to electoral procedures. Despite no evidence of significant voter fraud, Republican legislators
immediately passed new voter ID laws that groups like the Brennan Center for Justice and the
Advancement Project argue will suppress voter turnout among black, Latino, elderly and young voters,
who are more likely to vote for Democrats.
President Barack Obama's election in 2008 and re-election in 2012 provided evidence of how
much the nation has changed in the last half a century . While arrival of the "post-racial" era was much
overstated and a result of magical thinking, Americans rightly celebrated the progress on Inauguration
Day 2009. The high of the moment, though, was accompanied by the rise of the Tea Party and the
reminder of the strain of white supremacy that is baked into the American DNA.
Rattled by the presence of a black family in the White House, "birthers" emerged and
fabricated a myth that America's first black president - by some amazing feat of molecular
transference - had been born not in Hawaii, where his mother was located at the time, but in Kenya. In

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this age of social media, Youtube and cable television, their illogical stories took flight, promulgated
not just by the poorly educated prone to conspiracy theories, but by people who clearly knew better.

When the past isn't past

William Faulkner famously said, "The past is not dead. It is not even past". This is certainly
true when it comes to the Civil War. Most credible scholars and historians agree that slavery was the
root cause of the war, whether they focus on the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the Kansas Nebraska
Act of 1854, President Lincoln's election in 1860 or a myriad of other events and factors. But for an
adamant segment of the American population the reason for "The Late Unpleasantness" remains in
dispute, 150 years after Confederate General Robert E Lee surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse.
Five years ago, the Pew Research Center found that nearly half - 48 percent - of those polled believed
"states' rights" was the main cause of the war, compared to 38 percent who thought that it was slavery.
Particularly disturbing is that 60 percent of respondents under the age of 30 selected the states' rights
option.
One suspects the current Red States/Blue States polarisation - where Republican-controlled
legislatures resist federal programmes like the Affordable Care Act in the name of "states' rights" - has
seeped into the historical debate and conflated the past with the present.
There is so much to remind us that the past is neither dead, not past.

Later this month, when five million Texas students return to school, they will be learning
American history from a syllabus that equivocates about the reasons for the Civil War.
"Slavery was a side issue to the Civil War," declared Texas State Board of Education member
Pat Hardy, when the board adopted highly politicised standards in 2010. "There would be those who
would say the reason for the Civil War was over slavery. No. It was over states' rights."
This intentionally and unapologetically ideological approach to curriculum development is
akin to educational malpractice. By misinforming children, they are failing to prepare them for the
very diverse world, not only that they will inherit, but in which they already live. They might as well
tell them that the stork brings babies or that tooth fairies put dollars under their pillows.
In fact, the "states' rights" that Hardy holds so dear are the states' rights that defended
segregation in the 1950s and 1960s, with complaints about "outside agitators," Freedom Riders and
other young activists who registered voters, sat at lunch counters and integrated public facilities. To
the degree that states' rights factored into causing the Civil War, it was the effort to preserve the right
to continue slavery and the desire for western territories to enter the Union as states where slavery was
legal. States' rights was about the planters' prerogative to own other people rather than some highly
principled constitutional debate.
When those states seceded from the union, their reasons were quite precise. Mississippi's
declaration of secession could not have been clearer, in fact: "Our position is thoroughly identified
with the institution of slavery - the greatest material interest of the world … a blow at slavery is a blow
at commerce and civilisation."
Texas was equally as direct: " We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the
various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for
themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they
were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race."
Among the popular slogans on t-shirts at Civil War battle re-enactments and Confederate flag
rallies are "Know your history" and "If this shirt offends you, you need a history lesson".
Many of the people who agree with those sentiments will say that their ancestors were in the
states' rights camp and that they didn't own enslaved people. In truth "more than half of the
Confederate officers in 1861 owned slaves," writes historian Joseph Glatthaar, author of General Lee's
Army: From Victory to Collapse. As young army recruits, only a few of the enlisted men personally
owned anyone, but more than a third of them were members of slave-owning families. And as young
white men in America, they all benefitted from membership in a society which prospered from the
system of slavery.

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Final Considerations
Our society is full of hatred and politics. Many of us however, have kind, compassionate
hearts, to help overlook the hatred. In the last few centuries however, we have seen a change
in how people treat others outside of their own race. In the 1950s, your race was basically
how other people thought of you. A long time ago, long before my birth, slavery was a major
problem. People were ripped from their families, and sold to the white man, to do chores
around farms, houses, etc. They worked hard, doing labor-intensive jobs such as picking
cotton, cutting wood or anything else that their "master" wanted. If the slaves resisted or tried
to get away, they would be whipped and beaten. Otherwise, their reward for working
depended on the slave owner. In most cases this included poor housing conditions, little food
or water (even on the hottest of days), and ratty or torn clothing. In some countries slavery
still exists to this day. Some of these counties are Côte d'Ivoire, Mali, Mauritania, Niger and
Sudan. Most slaves now though are girls, women, and children. Laws were passed against
slavery but are not enforced all over the world. With a little more help from the government
and non-slavery supporters, this world can change. In my opinion, slavery is one of the worst
forms of racial discrimination. When slavery was first introduced slaves were discriminated
against by being considered and called animals, as if they were not human. I am unsure if
slaves are still considered that, however I am sure that the slavery that is happening today
discriminates against women and children. It also violates their human rights. As humans, we
should all be valued as equals. No matter, what race, religion, skin tone, gender or sexual
orientation ALL humans should be the same in each others’ minds.

Bibliography
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_the_United_States

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2015/08/race-history-ferguson-
150814082921736.html

https://www.historia.ro/sectiune/general/articol/sclavia-din-sua-origini-evolutie-si-efecte

Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom. Ed. W. W. Norton, New York,
2003.
Junius P. Rodriguez, Slavery in the United States, Ed. ABC-CLIO, Santa Barbara, 2007.
Jeff Forret, Slavery in the United States, Ed. Infobase Learning, New York, 2012.
https://www.mtholyoke.edu/~kmporter/slaverytimeline.htm

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