Race and Representation in America - Essay Example

– I tried to write to you before, but am not sure the message got through. I was finishing up your paper earlier when my computer flipped out and I lost the paper entirely. I managed to find most of it, but had to rewrite some of it. If the delay hasn’t caused you any problems, I’d greatly appreciate it if you could add an extension to the original deadline so I am not penalized for it. Either way, the completed document is below. Student name Instructor name Course name Date Race and Representation in America America is generally thought of in terms of a ‘white’ culture. Americans are usually thought of as having white skin and as operating in a mostly European-oriented society. However, the country is also commonly referred to as a ‘melting pot’ because of its habit of mixing people together who are of all nationalities and races. This concept is usually thought of when one is thinking of people from other nations who have come to America voluntarily, seeking a better lifestyle for themselves and their children. This mixing of people and cultures has not always been as easy or as smooth as it sounds, though. The blending of cultures implied in the phrase melting pot has often not been complete as immigrants of a given nation tended to settle in communities of their own kind and the best properties always seemed to go to the whites. It many instances, the mixing has involved a great deal of violence as these various communities battled for their rights to live the way they saw fit. Mixing has also often not been voluntary on either side. An investigation into the history of African Americans on this continent reveals some of heat that has occasionally caused America’s ‘melting pot’ to boil and ultimately bring about a more even blending. The Arrival of the First African Americans In the initial phase of slavery in the New World (1519-1580), colonies were being formed on both the North and South American continents and the trade of slaves was somewhat limited. From 1580 to 1650, the slave trade from Africa soared because of massive Native American deaths due to disease, the growth of the economy in the colonies and the unification of the Portuguese and Spanish governments (Palmer, 1976). The early era of colonization in the New World was a time of enormous changes as “the native Indian populations were decimated by disease and increasingly dominated by the Spanish social and economic structure” (Meyer, 2003). However, slavery declined steadily during the years between 1650 and 1827. “From New England to Virginia to Jamaica, the English planters in seventeenth-century America developed the habit of murdering the soil for a few quick crops and then moving along. On the sugar plantations, unhappily, they also murdered the slaves” (Dunn in Nash, 2000). Estimates put the total number of African slaves brought to new colonies from 1519 to 1650 at 120,000 (Meyer, 2003). The bulk of these slaves worked in the important mining and agricultural industries but they also were used for other menial types of activities in the home such as servants and cooks. As is indicated by the importance of foreign aid in the outcome of the Revolutionary War, the United States and those who helped bring it about were strongly dependent upon the products produced by slaves. “They [the colonists] desperately needed the assistance of other countries, especially France, and their single most valuable product with which to purchase assistance was tobacco, produced mainly by slave labor” (Morgan, 2003: 6). This need and dependence seems to indicate that a large reason for slavery in the North American colonies was to produce tradable goods that would purchase the aid and support they required to make themselves free at the expense of someone else’s freedom. However, this also suggests that slavery was an important institution within the colonies long before the need for outside support was necessary. “Unquestionably it was a demand for labor which dragged the Negro to American shores, but the status which he acquired here cannot be explained by reference to that economic motive. Long before black labor was as economically important as unfree white labor, the Negro had been consigned to a special discriminatory status which mirrored the social discrimination Englishmen practiced against him” (Degler, 1959: 62). Investigating the practice of slavery as it became practiced in the North American continental society reveals a deep discrimination combined with a complicated philosophy based upon fear and economic necessity. To prove discrimination played a significant part in the inhuman enslavement of Africans practiced in the United States, Degler (1959) points to the difference of skin color as being used to denote inferior status. This may have originally started as a form of religious discrimination. The Indians found on the North American continent were ignorant of the Protestant beliefs of those arriving from Europe as were the Africans being shipped over. For these reasons and more, the Indians and the Africans were held to be on relatively equal status with each other, which was considerably lower than those who were intimately familiar with the one true God. “The Commissioners of the United Colonies recommended that in order to spare the colonies the cost of imprisoning contumacious Indians, they should be given over to the Englishmen whom they had damaged or ‘be shipped out and exchanged for Negroes as the cause will justly serve’. Negroes were being equated with Indians who were being bound out as prisoners” (Degler, 1959: 63). The ignorance of the ‘colored’ peoples was used as justification for the need to ‘protect’ these innocent peoples by taking them into possession and putting them to ‘honest’ work since it was obvious they weren’t capable of living ‘civilized’ lives. At the same time, the need for passive workers was recognized and provided for by separating tribal members far from each other. However, there was also a fear, particularly in those areas where black people tended to become more numerous than Europeans, that these suppressed peoples might take up aggressions against their owners. The conception that the black men would overrun places like Providence created a general distrust of them and a further effort to subjugate them through the concept of lifetime servitude. This was economically more effective than hiring other Englishmen, but it also reduced the influx of people who would have balanced the racial mix. “As early as 1623 the Assembly passed an ‘Act to restrayne the insolencies of Negroes’. The blacks were accused of stealing and of carrying ‘secretly cudgels, and other weapons and working tools’. Such weapons, it was said, were ‘very dangerous and not meete to be suffered to be carried by such Vassals.’ Already, in other words, Negroes were treated as a class apart” (Degler, 1959: 55). The ability to apply different rules to persons of color led to yet further laws that would restrict their actions and keep them obedient. Morgan (2003) suggests that the reasons for slavery go deeper than simple discrimination into the philosophy of people like Thomas Jefferson, who felt that any man dependent upon another man for his own well-being could not be considered a free man. By this conception, slavery was a ready cure for those individuals who would otherwise sit in idleness and irreligious activity. It was through the presence of large proportions of poor laborers left without work thanks to a surplus of such workers that led to high rates of crime and threat to the property of more responsible individuals. It was the fear of this threat occurring that presumably led men such as Jefferson and Madison to refrain from including the African slaves in their considerations of the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as much as it was the new nation’s dependence upon slave labor to purchase and retain the support of other nations (Morgan, 2003). “It seems probable that the Revolutionary champions of liberty who acquiesced in the continued slavery of black labor did so not only because of racial prejudice but also because they shared with Tucker a distrust of the poor that was inherent in eighteenth-century conceptions of republican liberty” (Morgan, 2003: 13). From the Revolutionary War through the Civil War and even beyond, the condition of black people in America wasn’t much higher than that of any common beast of burden. In many ways, their condition was much, much lower as mistreatment of them was actually written into the legal code. Inter-War Issues Between 1880 and 1930, political rights and social privileges were changing dramatically in the United States. This age of increases for women’s access to education, wage labor and public activism eventually led to all women in this country gaining full suffrage in 1919. But even while African American women in urban settings were gaining access to real education and expanded opportunities in civic life, they also faced a lot of the same racial problems African Americans were facing throughout the country, particularly in the south, with lynching, Southern disenfranchisement and Jim Crow segregation. “In 1870, 60 percent of all female workers were engaged in some aspect of domestic service and another 25 percent earned their livings in factories and workshops. Except for janitorial work, factory jobs were off-limits to black women. As late as 1900, when the proportion of white women in domestic service had dropped below 50 percent, most women of color supported themselves and their families with various forms of domestic service. Others participated in the agricultural work that continued to sustain the majority of black families (Kessler-Harris, 2006). Coming out of the slave culture, there are numerous examples of how it was considered a part of an African American woman’s responsibilities to contribute to the economic stability of the home. Throughout the shifting of the country’s economic base, African American women retained an economic responsibility to contribute to the independence of their families and communities. This provided them with a sense of racial pride and uplift. Patricia Schechter (2001) indicates “middle-class African American women of [Ida B.] Wells-Barnett’s generation sustained their intense religious and political commitments at the same time they, like educated white women, moved into teaching, journalism, social work, nursing, and civil service.” Part of the reason why it had been perceived that the majority of African American women retired from the workforce along with the white women was because of their shift from employment within the white sector to more service positions within the black community. Jones (1985) indicates a large part of the reason for this was to avoid some of the hostility and violence that had erupted following emancipation as well as the effects of the Jim Crow laws which required them to remain in the confinement of their smaller community. Despite the ability for families to own land and their diligent work to pull everyone together following the abolition of slavery, African American women in the south frequently found themselves being forced to raise their children alone. Because their husbands were finding it more and more difficult to find work moving into the 1900s, there were soon entire migration patterns established as men followed the harvest season. It was one of the more consistent means of providing economic stability to the family. The wives and children left behind found it necessary to move in with family and friends to help support each other and to take on lower paying positions in menial labor positions to supplement their husband’s income. Jones (1985) discusses how African American men in the 1920s south would leave Georgia just after the cotton harvest to travel to Florida in time to work the bean harvest, often completing that job in just enough time to return to Georgia in time for the planting season. Even when families were able to find work within the general vicinity of the family, Jones indicates acceptable housing was usually far enough away from the workplace that the walk and the hours of business typically ensured the man used his house as little more than sleeping quarters. As the effects of the Great Depression in the 1930s began to clamp down, these restrictions were felt throughout the country as well as in the city. “Black men experienced even higher rates of joblessness, causing their wives to cling more desperately to the positions they already had, despite declining wages and deteriorating working conditions. During the Great Depression, most black women maintained only a precarious hold on gainful employment” (Jones 1985). With the great demand for work in a country full of individuals of both races and genders seeking any kind of available employment, the types of work available to women of color again declined in number of jobs available, types of work black women could expect to attain, level of wages and types of working conditions. “Just as significantly, the relatively high rate of black females’ participation in the labor force obscures the highly temporary and degrading nature of their work experiences. Specifically, most of these women could find only seasonal or part-time employment; racial and sexual discrimination deprived them of a living wage no matter how hard they labored; and they endured a degree and type of workplace exploitation for which the mere fact of having a job could not compensate” (Jones 1985). Although the white community did everything it could to ensure that the African American community remained the subservient culture, it was the necessity of the female to contribute to the family economy as well as the strength of family and community ties that enabled women of color to both maintain paying positions and to take natural leadership positions to bring about social change. This is not to say that the journey was easy, however. Just as women were beginning to enjoy a new freedom and recognition within the public sphere, the Great Depression made it more difficult for any individual to maintain a living wage, forcing African American women to once again accept lower wages and deplorable working conditions in an attempt to support their families. Even as the country again went to war and then experienced a great deal of economic revival as they helped to rebuild European allies, African Americans remained in a largely depressed state. The Jim Crow laws that disenfranchised black voters ensured that only white opinions mattered in the political process. An overwhelming majority of the white voters was not needed to mandate racial segregation. The motivations of politics conflicted with incentives of the economic system. Private owners of Southern transportation companies lobbied in opposition to the Jim Crow laws while they were being created, made several court challenges following the passage of these laws and utilized delaying strategies while attempting to ignore the enforcement of segregation laws for many years in some locations. Employees of these transportation companies were arrested for failing to enforce these laws and at least one president of a streetcar company was threatened with prison time if he continued this non-compliance with the law. The owners were hardly motivated by racial equality and the ideals of justice for all. This resistance “was based on a fear of losing money if racial segregation caused black customers to use public transportation less often than they would have in the absence of this affront” (Sowell, 2005). Segregation, during the Jim Crow era, was not limited to transportation mediums. In Alabama, hospitals, whether public or private, could not require a white nurse to care for blacks. In Mississippi, a law stifled freedom of the press by stating, “Any person who shall be guilty of printing, publishing or circulating printed, typewritten or written matter urging or presenting for public acceptance or general information, arguments or suggestions in favor of social equality or of intermarriage between whites and negroes, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and subject to fine not exceeding $500 or imprisonment not exceeding six months or both” (“Jim Crow Laws”, 1998). Thus, evidence exists that demonstrates the economic motivation of the commercial companies was sufficient to transfer a less discriminatory attitude to their employees, the political system ensured hateful practices would continue. The subject of segregation became a much discussed topic during World War II. The nation that hailed itself as the symbol of freedom sent its young men to fight and die in a war to make the world safe for democracy. An embarrassing aspect of this high idealistic struggle was that U.S. blacks were subjugated within the very armed forces that were supposed to stand for freedom of all nations. The black soldiers, of course, very much resented this lower class distinction as they bled the same color red as the white soldiers. The heroic actions by many black soldiers during the war began a change of direction in the attitude of whites throughout the country regarding race relations. “The NAACP’s strategy for attacking segregation through the Legal Defense Fund was revitalized and extended after World War II. Eventually it led to the Supreme Court decision in the Brown case in 1954” (Hampton, 1980). The Brown decision “appeared to remove the constitutional underpinnings of the whole segregation system and strike at the foundations of Jim Crow laws. It was the most momentous and far-reaching decision of the century in civil rights” (Woodward, 1986, p. 84). All over the country, even in the South, there were examples of blacks increasingly empowering themselves during the war era as there was a “ feeling of discontent and a growing consciousness of exclusion from social, economic, and political participation” (Daniel, 1990, p. 893). Black churches of the South had begun to encourage their congregations to begin a spiritually inspired quest for equality. The first step in this process started with the education of their flocks by preachers, educated blacks and whites as many members of the black community did not realize their lawful rights as U.S. citizens. Civil Rights Movement Rosa Parks has a special place in U.S. history as the mother of the civil rights movement. In 1955, the black woman refused to relinquish her seat on a bus to a white man in Montgomery Alabama in direct violation of existing Jim Crow laws. This act of civil disobedience became the spark that ignited the masses during the 1950’s and 1960’s in protesting the racial inequalities. When Parks was arrested for refusing the driver’s request to give up her seat to the white man, a group of area ministers formed the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) which coordinated what would become a 382-day boycott of the bus company by the entire black community. After discussion amongst the MIA leadership, twenty-six-year-old Martin Luther King Jr., a minister who had moved to town but a year earlier, was unanimously selected to head the MIA. King had no previous experience in the civil rights movement, recently refused the presidency of the city chapter of the NAACP and he had not met Miss Parks (Garrow, 1987, pp. 45-6). King’s inspiring leadership during the Montgomery bus boycott, and the subsequent events in the years to follow, elevated him to becoming the most recognized and beloved leader of the civil rights movement in America. His continued message of non-violent protest was of major significance in the social equality gains for blacks during these years. The original objective of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) was to build upon the success of the Montgomery bus demonstration by launching similar boycotts in other cities, but this effort had few successes. At this time in Montgomery, the MIA was fundamentally unproductive in rebelling against other manners of discrimination. The movement seemed stalled until 1960 when a ‘sit-in’ movement initiated a novel and more aggressive yet still non-violent chapter of the civil rights battle. The now famous first sit-in occurred at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina when four black students sat down at a ‘whites only’ establishment and requested service (Colaiaco, 1988). The strategy quickly spread to ‘wade-ins’ at segregated city swimming pools and beaches, ‘pray-ins’ at segregated churches and ‘stand-ins’ at all-white theatres. These activists that braved the threat of being beaten and jailed in order to advance their cause of racial justice were inspired by the illustration of courage by those who participated in the Montgomery bus boycott. The SCLC had no part in organizing the sit-in protests but theses actions had an influence King and others. Another movement that had an impact on how the Civil Rights movement progressed was the Freedom Rides. “The Freedom Rides supplied an important strategic lesson for King and the SCLC: in order to arouse public sympathy sufficient to pressure the federal government to enforce civil rights in the states and localities, white racists had to be provoked to use violence against non-violent protestors” (Colaiaco, 1988, p. 39). Actions taken by the SCLC, an ever-growing political power, as well as other demonstrative events throughout the South convinced the Kennedy administration of the need for civil rights legislation. A more active violent element in the movement had its roots in 1962 when James Meredith gained fame by becoming the first black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi. The rioting on the campus upon Meredith’s decision to attend the then all-white university resulted in the deaths of two people and injured 375 more including 160 Federal Marshals. In 1966, Meredith decided to walk alone from Memphis, Tennessee to Jackson, Mississippi in his ‘March Against Fear’ during a primary election week to establish that, if he could walk this distance without being harmed, then blacks should not fear walking shorter distances to the polling booths. Soon after beginning the walk, Meredith was shot and wounded by a white sniper (Cruse, 1967). Upon hearing the news, King joined with Stokely Carmichael in Greenwood, Mississippi where Carmichael gave his famous ‘Black Power’ speech. He used Meredith’s example of empowering himself to apply, attend and graduate from school under the harshest of circumstances to characterize the importance of independent political action (Viorst, 1979, p. 374). King publicly declared opposition to this slogan because of its implications of racial separatism and the civil rights movement’s apparent approval of violence. He later wrote, “I pleaded with the group to abandon the Black Power slogan. It was my contention that a leader has to be concerned about problems of semantics. Each word, I said, has a denotative meaning – its explicit and recognized sense – and a connotative meaning – its suggestive sense. While the concept of black power might be denotatively sound, the slogan ‘Black Power’ carried the wrong connotations. I mentioned the implications of violence that the press had already attached to the phrase” (Cruse, 1967). Malcolm X (Little) became a powerful speaker in the movement and became more important to the cause by his death than he was in life. As blacks in the south were working to eradicate segregation, blacks in places such Chicago, Detroit and Oakland were engaged their own fight for equal treatment. As King had secured the character of the Southern black, Malcolm had become the messiah of city slums in the North, Midwest and West. The semi-militant organization he headed, the Nation, grew quickly under his leadership. Malcolm was most remembered for his passionate anti-white speeches and this was the idea that was emulated by other pro-autonomy organizations. He was the target of many death threats, one of which, in 1965, was successful. Soon after Malcolm’s death, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale began forming the Black Panthers (Hollaway, 1998). Newton and Seale founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in October 1966. The pair had been intensely influenced by the teachings of Malcolm X and structured the organization similar to the Black Muslim program with the exception of any kind of religious practice. In contrast to Martin Luther King’s methods and teachings of nonviolent protest, the Black Panther Party claimed that they needed to equip themselves with weapons for use as self-defense against police brutality. Conclusion Nonviolent or violent, these actions did have a long-term effect on the nation. Jim Crow segregation laws were banned by the 1964 Civil Rights Act causing segregation to become a thing of the dark past. Blacks now had social equality, at least in legal terms. The Civil Rights Act also prohibited discrimination in employment practices and the 1965 Voting Rights Act made the process to register to vote more accessible for blacks. In the South, ‘literacy tests’, poll taxes and other methods were used to restrict black voting. These were made illegal allowing all adult blacks the right and means to vote thereby giving them political equality. All other discriminatory laws were also banned in the 1960’s such as laws prohibiting inter-racial marriages and racist housing practices. By the end of the 1960s, the “Civil Rights Movement had achieved both social, and political, equality for blacks. This was a significant success” (Civil Rights, 1998). President Johnson issued an Executive Order in 1968 which made affirmative action compulsory because he believed that civil rights laws alone would not end discriminatory hiring practices. The Civil Rights Act of 1968 prohibited housing discrimination. In1971, the Supreme Court upheld a lower courts decision that mandated busing as a means for realizing integration of public schools. Though not often well received and sometimes vehemently opposed in local school districts, court-ordered busing continued in cities such as Boston, Charlotte, and Denver until the late 1990’s (Brunner & Haney, 2006). Progress on the front of racial equality has been almost non-existent since the 1960’s. Despite the great strides that were made by many courageous people and the laws that were enacted or changed, there still remains much racial bias against blacks in the U.S. The long history of prejudice and the accompanying oppressive techniques has not yet seen its end. Blacks have still not been able to gain economic equality. Many are caught in a cycle of poverty as they find it more difficult to secure well-paying employment and are much more prone to be sent to prison. It was estimated that 32 percent of all blacks still lived in poverty and 15 percent were unemployed in 1981, a full decade following the Civil Rights Movement era. “Ordinary blacks are relatively better off and less live in poverty. However, on average, blacks are still poorer than whites. Prejudice means blacks are under-represented in professional jobs and key jobs like the police. Therefore, it is difficult for blacks to escape the poverty trap” (Civil Rights, 1998). In spite of these problems, the Civil Rights Movement became a ‘stencil’ for human rights worldwide. As evidence, without the constant protests such as those during the 1960’s, little additional ground has been gained on eliminating racial discrimination in the country since that time. Later generations should be taught the history of the Civil Rights Movement along with the suffering endured by the many generations of blacks from the times of slavery through the mid 1960’s. Unless these lessons are learned by future societies, the mistakes of the past could also be the mistakes of the future. The battles fought and won in the name of human dignity were enjoined by true American heroes who were willing to risk their jobs, homes and even lives to win the rewards of equitable civil liberties for their fellow citizens present and future. To honor these heroes, we must not forget why they are so honored. Works Cited Brunner, Borgna & Haney, Elissa. “Civil Rights Timeline: Milestones in the Modern Civil Rights Movement.” Fact Monster. Pearson Education, 2006. November 20, 2009 “Civil Rights Movement, The.” Theale, Berkshire: Theale Green Community School, December 19, 2001. Colaiaco, James A. Martin Luther King, Jr.: Apostle of Militant Non­violence. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988. Cruse, Harold. The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. New York: W. W. Morrow, 1967: 426-7; 544-5; 547-53. Daniel, Pete. “Going Among Strangers: Southern Reactions to World War II.” Journal of Southern History. Vol. 77, 1990. Degler, Carl. “Slavery and the Genesis of American Race Prejudice.” Comparative Studies in Socity and History. Vol. 2, N. 1, (October 1959): 49-66. Garrow, David J. The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987: 45-6. Hampton, Henry; Fayer, Steve; & Flynn, Sarah (Eds.) Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement From the 1950s Through the 1980s. New York: Bantam Books, 1980: 25, 26. Hollaway, Kevin. “The Legacy of Malcolm.” Documents for the Study of American History. February 1998. “Jim Crow Laws.” Martin Luther King, Jr., National Historic Site. (January 5, 1998). November 20, 2009 < http://www.nps.gov/malu/forteachers/jim_crow_laws.htm> Jones, Jacqueline. Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow. New York: Vintage Press, 1985. Kessler-Harris, Alice. “Women and the Work Force.” The Reader’s Companion to American History. (2006). Houghton Mifflin Company. November 20, 2009 Meyer, Michael C. The Course of Mexican History. (7th Ed.). New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Morgan, Edmund S. American Slavery, American Freedom. W. W. Norton & Company, 2003. Nash, Gary. Forward to Sugar and Slaves by Dunn, Richard. North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Palmer, Colin A. Slaves of the White God: Blacks in Mexico, 1570-1650. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976. Schechter, Patricia. Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform, 1880-1930. University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Sowell, Thomas. “Rosa Parks and History.” The Washington Times. (October 29, 2005). November 20, 2009 Read More