Racial segregation in the United States was not legally prohibited until 100 years after slavery was abolished. That's the whole answer to this question. In modern times, black people in the United States also experience harassment. They live in bad areas, they are poor. And they often remain slaves of their past. But why did not people who were slaves and subjected to cruel humiliation learn from history? Why do many African Americans become criminals and gangsters?
But first things first.
World history is full of myths that form around real events, and often interpret them in a completely different way than it really was. From the lessons of world history, students can learn that the American Civil War of 1861-1865 broke out over the problem of slavery, and President Abraham Lincoln was an ardent supporter of the abolition of slavery in the United States.
In reality, the reasons for the conflict between North and South lay in the economic sphere. For example, the parties approached the issue of taxes on imported goods radically differently - the industrialized North advocated the imposition of high taxes, and the South sought freedom of trade with the rest of the world. In fact, the northerners pushed through laws that were beneficial to them, and shifted the cost of industrialization onto the shoulders of the southerners, who were threatened with ruin by such a policy.
New US President Abraham Lincoln, elected in 1860, announced that all new states within the country would be free from slavery. Such a prospect promised a stable preponderance of the northerners in Congress and in power structures, which would allow them to pass any laws convenient for them without taking into account the opinion of the South. This is what prompted the southerners to take active steps to protect their own interests.
The views of Abraham Lincoln, with whom he went to the presidential elections, were far from the views of the fighter against inequality - he opposed the granting of voting rights to blacks, and also opposed interracial marriage, believing that "the supremacy of the white race will always be evident."
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Raising the question of the abolition of slavery in the southern states of Lincoln made the war unsuccessful for the North. The US President told reporters: "If I could save the union without freeing a single slave, I would do it." In 1862, Lincoln became convinced that he would have to go to extremes. On September 22, 1862, the first of two decrees, constituting the Emancipation Proclamation, was issued. According to the decree, all slaves were declared free in any state that did not return to the United States before January 1, 1863.
A second decree, issued on January 1, 1863, named 10 separate states that would be subject to the abolition of slavery. For this document, Lincoln was criticized by supporters of the abolition of slavery. The fact is that it extended to states where the federal government had no control. But the four slave states that fought on the side of the North - Delaware, Kentucky, Missouri and Maryland - were not affected by this measure. Nevertheless, the Emancipation Proclamation played a role in turning the tide of the war in favor of the northerners.
On January 31, 1865, the US Congress voted to pass the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, which outlawed slavery throughout the country. By December 6, 1865, it had been ratified by a sufficient number of states for final approval, and entered into force on December 18. Abraham Lincoln by that time was no longer alive - in April 1865, just a week after the final surrender of the South, he was shot by a supporter of the losers, John Booth.
The Thirteenth Amendment was not enthusiastic in many states. Suffice it to say that the state of Kentucky only ratified the document in 1976, and the last document of ratification was sent to the US Federal Register from Mississippi on January 30, 2013. Still, slavery was abolished, and yesterday's slaves gained personal freedom. The other side of this freedom is much less readily discussed. The fate of tens of thousands of liberated blacks was tragic.
As already mentioned, most American politicians at that time, including the anti-slavery fighters, proceeded from the postulate of the superiority of the white race over blacks. Therefore, personal freedom for slaves did not mean their acquisition of civil rights. Immediately after the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment, the southern states adopted the so-called "Black Codes", which determined the order of life of the black population.
For example, in Mississippi, blacks on pain of life imprisonment were denied the right to marry whites, it was forbidden to carry weapons, and their right to own land was restricted. The Apprentice Law stipulated that all blacks - teenagers under 18 without parents, or children of poor parents, were given into the service of whites, who could forcibly keep them in service, return them in case of escape, and subject them to corporal punishment. Separately, it should be said about the "Laws on vagrancy" that were included in the "Black Codes".
Since the liberation of former slaves took place without land allotment, yesterday's masters threw free people out into the street, leaving them without a piece of bread and a roof over their heads. Here they fell under the law of vagrancy. According to him, blacks who did not have a permanent job were declared vagrants, imprisoned and sent to hard labor brigades, or they ended up on the plantations of the previous owners. The alternative was to pay a fine for vagrancy, but the unfortunates simply did not have money. At the same time, the exploitation of "vagabonds" was sometimes even more cruel than before the abolition of slavery.
Thrown into the streets, blacks without a livelihood began to commit theft and robbery. This, in turn, became the reason for the creation of various associations of the white population to fight the blacks. The most famous such organization was the Ku Klux Klan, whose members launched terror against blacks, as well as white supporters of racial equality.
The federal government strongly disliked these trends. In the period from 1865 to 1877, the so-called Reconstruction of the South took place. In the territories of the southern states, a military administration was introduced, which was supposed to bring the laws of the South to federal norms.
In 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was adopted, which granted citizenship to anyone born in the United States, regardless of skin color. In 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment was adopted, prohibiting the authorities at the state or individual state level to restrict citizens of the country in active suffrage on the basis of "race, color, or in connection with being in slavery in the past."
Thanks to these documents, the first black parliamentarians appeared in the legislatures of the southern states. The federal government, worried about the growing popularity of the Ku Klux Klan, issued a special law in 1871 giving the president the authority to use force against the activists of this organization. After hundreds of activists were arrested, the Ku Klux Klan was formally disbanded. However, in fact, acts of terror continued on the ground.
The so-called "lynching courts" have become especially popular - the murder of a person suspected of a crime or violation of public customs, without trial or investigation. After the American Civil War, African Americans became the main victims of the "lynching" courts. The favorite method of murderers on such ships was to hang the unfortunate or even burn them.
There are no exact statistics on "lynching". Researchers at the University of Missouri, studying this issue, concluded that between 1882 and 1920, about 3,500 African Americans were lynched. Critics believe that in this case we are talking only about the most high-profile public cases, and the total number of blacks killed by racists is measured in tens of thousands. The reconstruction of the South was completed in 1877, but it was unable to resolve issues of equality in the rights of people with different skin colors. The era of the so-called "Jim Crow Laws" began, which established racial segregation in American society.
Formally, the Fifteenth Amendment endowed blacks in the southern states with voting rights, but local legislation was structured in such a way that the vast majority of African Americans remained disenfranchised. For example, in the 1900 elections in Alabama, out of 181,500 blacks, only 3,000 were allowed to vote.
Segregation concerned not only electoral rights, but all spheres of life. The separation of whites and colored people was legalized in educational institutions, hotels, shops, restaurants, hospitals, transport, and toilets. At bus stations, whites and blacks had to wait for their flight in different waiting rooms, and sit in different places on the bus itself. Even the Bible for taking the oath in court was different for them.
Such laws only reinforced racist sentiment among whites in the southern states. Taking part in the lynching of blacks was seen as a very worthy cause.
In fairness, it must be said that at the end of the 19th - the first half of the 20th century, more than 1000 white criminals were lynched. The only difference is that blacks were executed most often for minor crimes, and sometimes without any evidence of guilt.
Today, anyone can easily find on the Internet photographs of smiling Americans against the background of disfigured human remains. Participants in the lynching considered it an honor to be photographed in front of a hanged or burned person. Moreover, such photographs were turned into postcards, with which relatives were congratulated. Send a photo of a black man hanged from a tree with the words "Mom, Merry Christmas!" - a common thing for the USA in the first half of the 20th century.
Several American presidents, including Franklin Roosevelt, tried to pass laws against lynching at once, but their attempts failed. It was not until the 1960s that lynching began to be viewed as an aggravated murder. Only in June 2005, the US Senate adopted a resolution in which it officially apologized for inaction in relation to the lynching of several thousand people, mostly blacks.
As for the laws on racial segregation, their elimination took place in the United States after the Second World War. Moreover, the federal authorities had to apply extraordinary measures for this. In 1954, the US Supreme Court, after a series of state trials, ruled that school segregation deprives black children of “equal protection by law,” contrary to the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution. A court ruling established a legal ban on racial segregation in schools.
But this decision still had to be implemented. So that in 1957 in the city of Little Rock, Arkansas, black students could go to the same school with whites, the 101st Airborne Division was introduced into the village. The paratroopers were ordered to comply with the court's decision despite opposition from local authorities.
US residents will soon stop being white
The outward appearance of the average US citizen may change dramatically in the very near future. For the first time in the country's history, the majority of American children are non-white. If this continues, the image of a typical American in the form of a blond Yankee-Anglo-Saxon can be considered an anachronism.
Kenneth Johnson, a sociology professor at the University of New Hampshire, explained the reasons for the future predominance of non-whites. He pointed out that the same Latin American women give birth to much more children than whites. If so, not only the percentage of the white population will gradually decline, but also the percentage of English speakers. And the Spanish language will gradually crowd out English.
It should be noted that the essence of the change in the racial composition in Europe and the United States is different. Although whites still make up the majority in both cases, this majority has formed in different ways. In the Old World, whites are the indigenous population, while immigrants from Muslim countries and blacks are newcomers. In America, everyone is immigrant: whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians. The indigenous population (Indians, Eskimos and Aleuts of Alaska) is about one percent.
The history of Europe is much longer than that of the United States. However, the Old World is facing such a clear change in the racial composition of its population in our time for the first time. But this cannot be said about North America. And the States to some extent today are going through what they once knew. It's just that there have not been such abrupt transitions throughout the life of the current generation.
It is believed that by the time the Europeans arrived at the turn of the XV-XVI centuries, the territory of the modern United States was inhabited by about 11 million Indians. Accordingly, over the next hundred years, the number of whites increased, and the number of Indians decreased. In 1619, another turn occurred: the first African slaves were brought into the colony of Virginia. Then the slave delivery procedure was put on stream. As a result, the racial composition of the population has changed dramatically.
According to the 2000 census, blacks make up 12.1 percent of the population. But this is by no means the limit. So, in 1790, when the independent United States was only 14 years old, blacks made up 19.3 percent of the population, and in the southern states they were the majority. The year before the outbreak of the Civil War (in 1860) there were 14.1 percent of them. In absolute terms, the number of the Negro population has always grown, but in relative terms it has been falling until 1930. (Then their share was 9.7 percent.)
The reason for the temporary decline in the share of blacks in the US population was massive immigration from Europe in the second half of the 19th - first half of the 20th century. Thanks to them, the proportion of whites in some years reached 80 percent of the population. By the way, the ethnic composition of immigrants from Europe has also changed. There were English, French, Spanish, Dutch, and Swedish colonies on US territory. There were Russian forts on the Pacific coast and, accordingly, Russian settlers.
By the time of the proclamation of independence in 1776, the Anglo-Saxon element prevailed in the country. However, in the middle of the 19th century, mainly Irish and Germans traveled to the United States, to a lesser extent - Dutch and Scandinavians. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the composition of immigrants changed again: among them immigrants from southern Italy, the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires predominated. A significant percentage of the new arrivals were Jews, who were disenfranchised in their homeland.
In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act, which completely eradicated racial segregation in the United States. This happened on the eve of the 100th anniversary of the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery.
Racial unrest, however, remains common in America today. Many African Americans believe that segregation has not gone away even after the first black president. So the fight for the freedom granted by Abraham Lincoln continues.
