The economy started collapsing promptly after the Civil War ended, however former slaves were the cause and effect of a growing nation. Though the nation was starting to boom, former slaves didn’t get their equality in their share, if they were lucky enough to have one. African Americans that made their money in sharecropping lived a rough life and faced many family hardships. Sharecropping was a system by white southerners where freed slaves were allowed to work on cotton farms and gain money for the owner with a little share for themselves, in return for a place to live, food, and medical aid. In spite of the hospitality, the freemen were required to pay for all of the equipment at the end of the year, but most sharecroppers didn’t gain enough
Levine noted, “The richest 5 percent of northern adults held more than half the regions total property.” In the South “the chasm separating the average slaveholder and the average farm-operating nonslaverholder in the cotton kingdom was huge.” The southern economy was based heavily on slavery and slave labor, but even with production increasing, the percentage of southerners who owner slaves had been declining. Levine indicated, “a shrinking portion if the southern whites owned slaves: 36 percent in 1830…and only 26 percent by 1860.” The class divisions in each economy were very similar. The northern economic system produced a struggle between worker and capitalist, while it was between rich whites and poor whites in the South. In fact, prior to the war, poor northerners were often attracted to the platform of Democrats from the South. However, the split during the Civil War did reflect these economic imbalances, as one might expect. The poor did not unite against the rich; instead they joined both the Union and Confederate armies voluntarily in great numbers. Holt pointed out, “[T]he rank and file of each army was overwhelmingly composed of farmers, skilled workers, and urban and rural laborers.” The poor non-slaveholding whites were increasingly receiving a disproportionate piece of the southern slave economy and had “to compete with slaves as well as poorly
Coates author of the article “Case for Reparations” says, “In the seven cotton states, on-third of all white income was derived from slavery. Also, slaves were used as a tool, plus all of the large projects were built in the country by African American people. He states that homeownership and slave ownership stayed similar because they were both properties, and black home owners struggled in the real estate market. Although, slavery was abolished white Americans found new ways to keep black African American population in poverty.
The population of African Americans from 1865 to 1900 had limited social freedom. Social limitations are limitations that relate “…to society and the way people interact with each other,” as defined by the lesson. One example of a social limitation African Americans experienced at the time is the white supremacy terrorist group, the Ku Klux Klan or the KKK. The KKK started as a social club formed by former confederate soldiers, which rapidly became a domestic terrorist organization. The KKK members were white supremacists who’s objective was to ward off African Americans from using their new political power. In an attempts to achieve their objective, Klansmen would burn African American schools, scare and threaten voters, destroy the homes of African Americans and also the homes of whites who supported African American rights. The greatest terror the KKK imposed was that of lynching. Lynching may be defined via the lesson as, “…public hanging for an alleged offense without benefit of trial.” As one can imagine these tactics struck fear into African Americans and the KKK was achiev...
Within the economy a great development had been achieved when the upper south handed its power to the lower south all due to the rise of an agricultural production. This expansion was led by the excessive growth of cotton in the southern areas. It spread rapidly throughout America and especially in the South. During these times it gave another reason to keep the slavery at its all time high. Many wealthy planters started a ‘business’ by having their slaves work the cotton plantations, which this was one of a few ways slavery was still in full effect. Not only were there wealthy planters, at this time even if you were a small slave-holder you were still making money. While all of this had been put into the works, Americans had approximately 410,000 slaves move from the upper south to the ‘cotton states’. This in turn created a sale of slaves in the economy to boom throughout the Southwest. If there is a question as to ‘why’, then lets break it d...
Many blacks would rent land from their former masters, thus keeping them indebted to the white landowners. Henry Black recounts his days as a slave as well as a sharecropper in Henry Black & the Federal Writer’s Project. (Doc. F) He tells of rules still
Capitalism has always been a double-edged sword for the United States. It began as the driving force in pushing along economic growth, but it came at the price of the African society. It was implied, and enforced, that Africans were of a lesser class through the means in which they were "used" by the slave owners to promote their wealth and stature. The larger their plantation, the wealthier and more successful people were seen. But in order to do this, the plantation owners needed workers, but if they had to pay workers reasonable wages, they could not yield a profit.
Would the system of sharecropping have worked out to be more effective, had they been able to take advantage of what the government had offered them? The lives of southern sharecroppers were the result of a greedy and corrupt system. The sharecroppers lives were subjected to substandard clothing, insufficient food supplies, and rising health issues due to a lack of respect and care for the hardworking man.
After the Civil War, the situation of the black people was not good; it was a semi-free, semi-slave situation. An example of this is tenancy, where the Blacks have control of the work process and work schedule but ultimately had to give up the fruits...
Black Status: Post Civil War America. After the emancipation of slaves in 1862, the status of African-Americans in post-civil war America up until the beginning of the twentieth century did not go through a great deal of change. Much legislation was passed to help blacks during this period. The Civil Rights Act of 1875 prohibited segregation in public facilities and various government amendments gave African-Americans even more guaranteed rights.
In American, there is a big problem that is racial discrimination. Because the long-standing institutionalized discrimination results in this problem. So what is institutionalized discrimination? How has discrimination become institutionalized for various ethnic subpopulations in the United States?
Prior to World War I there was much social, economic, and political inequality for African Americans. This made it difficult for African Americans to accept their own ethnicity and integrate with the rest of American society. By the end of World War II however African Americans had made great strides towards reaching complete equality, developing their culture, securing basic rights, and incorporating into American society.
“Until justice is blind to color, until education is unaware of race, until opportunity is unconcerned with the color of men's skins, emancipation will be a proclamation but not a fact.”(Lyndon Johnson). For generations in the United Stated, ethnic minorities have been discriminated against and denied fair opportunity and equal rights. In the beginning there was slavery, and thereafter came an era of racism which directly impacted millions of minorities lives. This period called Jim Crow was the name of the racial caste system up in till mid 1960s. Jim Crow was more than just a series of severe anti-Black laws, it became a way of life. Under Jim Crow, African Americans were positioned to the status of second class citizens. What Jim Crow did is represented the anti-Black racism. Further on, In 1970’s the term “War on Drugs” was coined by President Richard Nixon . Later President Ronald Reagan officially declared the current drug war. In reality the war had little to do with drug crime and a lot to do with racial politics. The drug war was part of a strategy of used by the government. The President identified drug abuse as national threat. Therefore, they called for a national anti-drug policy, the policy began pushing for the involvement of the police force and military in drug prohibition efforts. The government did believe that blacks or minorities were a cause of the drug problem. They concentrated on inner city poor neighborhoods, drug related violence, they wanted to publicize the drug war which lead Congress to devote millions of dollars in additional funding to it. The war on drugs targeted and criminalized disproportionably urban minorities. There for, “War on Drugs” results in the incarceration of one million Americans ...
Social Stratification in the African American community has changed over the years. Social stratification is defined as a rigid subdivision of a society into a hierarchy of layers, differentiated on the basis of power, prestige, and wealth according to Webster’s dictionary. David Newman in Sociology Exploring the Architecture of Everyday Life describes stratification as a ranking system for groups of people that perpetuates unequal rewards and life chances in society. From slavery to the present, the African American community has been seen to have lower status compared to white people. Today, the stratification or hierarchy difference between whites and black are not really noticeable, but it is still present. However, during slavery, the difference in social stratification was noticeable. Whites dominated over the blacks and mulattoes (offspring of a white and black parent). The mulattoes were seen to have a higher stratification than an offspring of black ancestry. Because the mulattoes were related to the whites, they were able to obtain higher education and better occupations than blacks. For example, most slaves of a lighter skin tone worked in the houses and darker slaves worked in the fields. As the people of light skin tone had children, they were able to have advantages too. The advantages have led into the society of today. In this paper I will discuss how stratification has been affected in the African American community over time by skin tone to make mulattoes more privileged than dark skin blacks.
The United States developed the official poverty measures in 1960. It was developed by President Lyndon B. Johnson, who had declared a war on poverty during the Civil Rights era. (The Path of Power- The years of Lyndon B. Johnson, (Caro, 16). The poverty rate of African Americans has been declining for many years. The Census Bureau releases two reports every year that describe who is poor in the United States based on cash resources. There is also the supplemental poverty measure (SPM) which takes account for the cash resources and non cash benefits from government programs aimed at low income families. (www.Census.gov/People and household). In 2012 there were over 46.5 million people in poverty and of those numbers 10 million were African American according to the poverty reports. African Americans have been a major factor since slavery. Since the late 1660s there has been a race on poverty since the marches of the Civil Rights Movement and Dr. Martin Luther King. One of the protests was the call to March on Washington in 1963. Dr. King stated that “on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity”. (MLK speech, March on Washington, 1963)
The fight for equal working rights can be tracked back to the time of reconstruction with the institution of sharecropping. Sharecropping is a type of farm tenancy that developed after the Civil War in which landless workers farmed land in exchange for farm supplies and a share of the crop (Foner A-63). This system seemed like a decent thing to many blacks because now they could own their own land and work without supervision. Not all aspects of sharecropping were good though, blacks had to provide clothing, medicine and pay for medical bills all on their own. Also the working conditions were not the greatest. Blacks were expected to labor ten hours a day on average in the winter and summer and any time that was lost would be at the cost of one dollar per day (“A Sharecropping” 12). This was just the beginning of harsh working conditions and low wages which would continue to be a concern for workers throughout the years.