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African Americans in the reconstruction era
African americans experience during reconstruction essay
Reconstruction and African Americans
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Recommended: African Americans in the reconstruction era
In the era of Reconstruction, African Americans were living in a state of limbo, unsure of their place in society. De jure, they were freedmen, but de facto they were still being socially oppressed by white Americans because of their race. Wanting to take advantage of any opportunity to better their lives and increase their financial situations, many African Americans, most of them agricultural workers, started the search for reliable incomes.
One especially enticing opportunity in 1879, put forth by the Kansas state governor, provided southern blacks the chance to settle on readily available farmland in Kansas. With the dream of becoming a yeoman farmer finally in reach, African Americans flocked to Kansas to escape from their dependency upon white Americans for employment, marking the start of the Black Exodus of 1879. Harper’s Weekly published, “few [Exodusters] turned their faces in any other direction” than Kansas because “it ha[d] been more thoroughly advertised than any other.” African Americans looking for a new home turned to Kansas, and “nearly every day there [were] fresh arrivals.”
But even with Kansas Governor John P. St. John, presiding as President of the Kansas Freedmen’s Relief Association of Kansas and promising “to relieve as far as possible, the wants and necessities of destitute freedmen, refugees and immigrants coming into [Kansas],” the Exodusters did not find significant success in establishing stable lives for themselves. Nell I. Painter points out that African Americans did find limited success in Kansas by achieving higher social status than their counterparts in other states and established a successful independent black settlement in Nicodemus, Kansas. However, other social factors prevented them...
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... Kansas Memory.
St. John, John P. Governor John P. St. John to Horatio N. Rust, January 16, 1880, Kansas Historical Society. Kansas Memory.
_____________. “Magnitude of the Black Exodus.” New York Times, August 11, 1879. Proquest Historical Newspapers.
"The Great Negro Exodus." Harper's Weekly, May 17, 1879, 386, Kansas Historical Society.
Worrall, Henry. “Exodusters in Floral Hall, Topeka.” Illustration, Harper’s Weekly, July 5, 1879, 532, E185.1879*8. Newsbank.
William Reynolds v. The Board of Education of the City of Topeka, LXVI Thomas
Emmett Dewey 2 (1903).
Secondary Sources:
Johnson, Daniel M., and Rex R. Campbell. Black Migration in America: A social demographic history. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1981.
Painter, Nell I. Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction. New York: Random House, Inc., 1976.
This historical document, The Frontier as a Place of Conquest and Conflict, focuses on the 19th Century in which a large portion of society faced discrimination based on race, ethnicity, and religion. Its author, Patricia N. Limerick, describes the differences seen between the group of Anglo Americans and the minority groups of Native Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanics Americans and African Americans. It is noted that through this document, Limerick exposes us to the laws and restrictions imposed in addition to the men and women who endured and fought against the oppression in many different ways. Overall, the author, Limerick, exposes the readers to the effects that the growth and over flow of people from the Eastern on to the Western states
Eibling, Harold H., et al., eds. History of Our United States. 2nd edition. River Forest, Ill: Laidlaw Brothers, 1968.
4. Excerpt from Senate Report 693, 46th Congress, 2nd Session (1880). Posted on PBS.org December 19, 2003. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/reconstruction/sharecrop/ps_adams.html
Walens, Susann. A. United States History Since 1877. Western Connecticut State University, Danbury, CT. September 2007.
"SUPPLEMENT to the Pennsylvania Gazette. No. 2106." Copy of a letter from Governor Bernard to the Earl fo Hillsborough. The Pennsylvania Gazette, May 1769.
Progress and individualism are very much celebrated in American culture. Many people migrate to urban cities in the search of economic prosperity and to achieve the elusive “American Dream.” City life can often come as a shock to individuals not accustomed to a fast-paced lifestyle; conversely it can change a person. Such change can transform a person to lose the values and beliefs they were raised with which consequently attribute to losing the bonds that they once held with their families. This is not the case with the families portrayed in Carol Stack’s ethnography Call to Home. The book depicts Southern African-American families living in rural, North and South Carolina’s towns – which migrate to northern urban cities for economic opportunities – known as the Great Migration, and ultimately decide to return home. This essay explores the motives that caused Reverse Migration which include kin ties, structural and environmental violence endured, the role of the children, and the novel philosophies the diaspora brings with them upon returning home.
From 1878 to 1880, there was a massive exodus of blacks from southern states to Kansas; the...
The Great Migration was the movement of two million blacks out of the Southern United States to the Midwest, Northeast and West between 1910 and 1940. In 1900, about ninety percent of African Americans resided in formed slave holding states in the South. Beginning in 1910, the African American population increased by nearly twenty percent in Northern states, mostly in the biggest cities such as Chicago, Detroit, New York, and Cleveland. African Americans left the rural south because they believed they could escape the discrimination and racial segregation of Jim Crow laws by seeking refuge in the North. Some examples of Jim Crow laws include the segregation of public schools, public places and public transportation, and the segregation of restrooms, restaurants and drinking fountains for whites and blacks (“The History of Jim Crow). In addition, economic depression due to the boll weevil infestation of Southern cotton fields in the late 1910s and the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 forced many sharecroppers to look for other emplo...
Many African American men and women have been characterized as a group of significant individuals who help to exemplify the importance of the black community. They have illustrated their optimistic views and aspects in a various amount of ways contributing to the reconstruction of African Americans with desire and integrity. Though many allegations may have derived against a large amount of these individuals, Crystal Bird Fauset, Jacob Lawrence, and Mary Lucinda Dawson opportunistic actions conveys their demonstration to improve not only themselves but also their ancestors too. Throughout their marvelous journeys, they intend to garnish economic, political, and social conditions with dignity and devotion while witnessing the rise of African Americans. The objective of this research paper is to demonstrate the lives of a selected group of African American people and their attributions to the black community.
When the newcomers came to the north and west Starling, Gladney, and Foster it wasn’t a warm welcome. Wilkerson says that often when immigrants from the southern states came to the north or west mostly people closed the door on them and didn’t want to help. It a long time for them to find there place in major cities of the North and West, but southerners who stayed end up finding their way using elements of the old culture with the new opportunities in the north. Also traveling to the newer states wasn’t easy for African Americans. They usually traveling by train, boat or bus. And it was very dangerous to travel because of the gas station your able to stop at and even stop to get food. Also the long trips ahead. You would never know what troubles would be head of the journey. Typically once the black citizens arrived in the state it was hard to settle and to find a job with leak of skills. Like Ida Mae husband George ended up hauling ice up flights of stairs in cold Chicago and Ida Mae did domestic jobs before finding a decent job. Wilkerson also states that it took them a long time before really get settled in an affordable home in south side of Chicago. Then the journey to south was not cheap to make it far so many African Americans took in mind that having money before leaving would be the
The motivations of both the East Bay African-Americans and the Los Angeles Native-Americans in relocating to California were very much the same. For Native-Americans, the motivation was one of economic opportunity, where during WWII, there existed significant prejudice, discrimination and racism, and where reservation life, offered very little to no upward social or economic mobility. The reservation provided very little hope of obtaining economic or social freedom, and was plagued with alcoholism, poverty, and limitation, all issues that were very well known to those Na...
The typical African-American experience with migration is seen through my family’s migration experience. Their experience was typical, reflected in most freed slave’s stories. This story starts off with a freed slave; this was due to the Emancipation Proclamation. “During the Civil War in 1863, a huge step was made in the favor of enslaved African-Americans. The President at the time, Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing slaves in the southern states at war with the North. The Emancipation Proclamation was so important because it gave enslaved black people the chance to leave their owners, move north, and finds jobs or start new lives with their families.” (Boundless)
Analyzing the narrative of Harriet Jacobs through the lens of The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du bois provides an insight into two periods of 19th century American history--the peak of slavery in the South and Reconstruction--and how the former influenced the attitudes present in the latter. The Reconstruction period features Negro men and women desperately trying to distance themselves from a past of brutal hardships that tainted their souls and livelihoods. W.E.B. Du bois addresses the black man 's hesitating, powerless, and self-deprecating nature and the narrative of Harriet Jacobs demonstrates that the institution of slavery was instrumental in fostering this attitude.
Writing around the same time period as Phillips, though from the obverse vantage, was Richard Wright. Wright’s essay, “The Inheritors of Slavery,” was not presented at the American Historical Society’s annual meeting. His piece is not festooned with foot-notes or carefully sourced. It was written only about a decade after Phillips’s, and meant to be published as a complement to a series of Farm Credit Administration photographs of black Americans. Wright was not an academic writing for an audience of his peers; he was a novelist acceding to a request from a publisher. His essay is naturally of a more literary bent than Phillips’s, and, because he was a black man writing ...
It wasn’t easy being an African American, back then they had to fight in order to achieve where they are today, from slavery and discrimination, there was a very slim chance of hope for freedom or even citizenship. This longing for hope began to shift around the 1950’s. During the Civil Rights Movement, where discrimination still took place, it was the time when African Americans started to defend their rights and honor to become freemen like every other citizen of the United States. African Americans were beginning to gain recognition after the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868, which declared all people born natural in the United States and included the slaves that were previously declared free. However, this didn’t prevent the people from disputing against the constitutional law, especially the people in the South who continued to retaliate against African Americans and the idea of integration in white schools....