Consolidation Of Democracy In America; The Rights Of Caucasians Compared To The Ones Of The Afro Americans

Introductory notes

The concept of democracy emerged for the first time in the ancient Greece, where, in order to eliminate the abuses and corruption of some rulers, the power was given to the regular people, power that was transposed into a voting system. In 1863, US President Abraham Lincoln stated the importance of democracy in the country by stressing that “government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth”. Nowadays, the modern definition of democracy refers to the fact that it is a form of government, where a constitution guarantees basic personal and political rights, fair and free elections, and independent courts of law. A democratic system must be characterized by: the guarantee of basic human rights to every individual person; separation of powers between the institutions of the state; freedom of opinion, speech, press and mass-media; religious liberty; general and equal right to vote; good governance (focus on public interest and absence of corruption).

If we take a quick look at the American history, we can see that, even if the concept of democracy was embraced at an early stage by the American forefathers and the leaders that came after them, the building of a true democratic nation, where every citizen regardless of skin color, race, gender, religion and sexual orientation has the same rights as any other person, has been a long journey, with many obstacles on the path, mainly because of the fact that Caucasians refused for quite a long time to provide equal rights to Afro-Americans, considering them an inferior race.

In the following pages, I will be addressing the issue at hand – consolidation of democracy in America; the rights of Caucasians compared to the ones of the Afro-Americans – both from a historical perspective and a social and political point of view. Our journey starts with the moment when the first Africans where captured in their native countries and brought to the North American continent to serve as slaves on different plantations, it takes us to the point where freedom became a goal that needed to be achieved at any costs, up to the moment when the identity of the Afro-Americans needed to be clarified and defined, from a individual point of view, but also from the civil rights perspective, and up to the present times when an African American became for the first time the President of the United States of America.

Chapter 1

Afro-Americans – from slavery to freedom

1.1. From free Africans to American slaves

1.1.1. Definitions of slavery

Slavery, from a legal point of view, can be defined as the situation in which a person (called master) has absolute power over another (called slave) including life and liberty. The slave has no freedom of action except within limits set by the master.

Another definition of slavery, particularly the one in the United States, is given by Frederick Douglass, according to which ‘Slavery in the United States is the granting of that power by which one man exercises and enforces a right of property in the body and soul of another. The condition of a slave is simply that of the brute beast. He is a piece of property – a marketable commodity, in the language of the law, to be bought or sold at the will and caprice of the master who claims him to be his property; he is spoken of, thought of, and treated as property. His own good, his conscience, his intellect, his affections, are all set aside by the master. The will and the wishes of the master are the law of the slave. He is as much a piece of property as a horse. If he is fed, he is fed because he is property. If he is clothed, it is with a view to the increase of his value as property. Whatever of comfort is necessary to him for this body or soul that is inconsistent with his being property is carefully wrested from him, not only by public opinion, but by the law of the country. He is carefully deprived of everything that tends in the slightest degree to detract from his value as property’.

1.1.2. Why, when, how and where slavery appeared in the Americas

The ignorance of the white man helped him to justify and encourage his actions towards stealing another man’s freedom, transforming the African man into a slave by invoking every possible argument in his favor, by misinterpreting the teachings of the Bible or by saying that ‘Negros’ are not even humans, instead they were seen as apes, being thus an inferior race. It goes without saying that when one person keeps another person in darkness, not allowing that other person to learn, to think, to dream, to search for answers, to be free, to have any kind of rights, that person will never have the chance to evolve, on a spiritual and intellectual level, because the sole role of that person is to blindly obey the orders one receives and to silently suffer the abuses of one’s master. The only real justification for which another person takes by force another’s freedom is the want for quick enrichment at the expense of another man’s hard labor and work. Thus, the greed, laziness and lack of humanity of the Europeans that colonized the North American continent became the driving force for the hunt of black men and women from the African continent in order to use them as slaves on their various plantations (cotton, tobacco, etc.) or as domestic help.

The slave-trade with African people began early in the sixteenth century, when Spanish and Portuguese traders started transporting slaves to their American colonies. This phenomenon was triggered by the ill treatment applied by these colonizers to the Native American Indians that has almost determined the extermination of the local people, reducing the number of Indians from one million to less than sixty thousand. Thus, in order to save the Native American Indians from total annihilation, Bartolomes de las Casas advised Charles V to send African slaves to take the place of the Indians, advice that was quickly put into practice afterwards. But also other Europeans began to gain interest in the slave trade and, in the seventeenth century, the Dutch brought the first Africans to the Jamestown colony in British North America in 1619. Afterwards, by the beginning of the eighteenth century, the slave-trade was monopolized by the Brits. The number of Africans brought to British North America rose from 1,600 between 1626 and 1650, to over 50,000 between 1721 and 1740, and to over 100,000 during the peak period between 1741 and 1760. While the number of Africans imported decreased slightly to a little over 91,000 between 1781 and 1810, the total number reached almost 380,000 for this entire period.

According to Eric Williams (1970), ‘the Negro slave trade became one of the most important business enterprises of the seventeenth century. In accordance with sixteenth-century precedents its Organization was entrusted to a company which was given the sole right by a particular nation to trade in slaves on the coast of West Africa, erect and maintain the forts necessary for the protection of the trade, and transport and sell the slaves in the West Indies. Individuals, free traders or 'interlopers,' as they were called, were excluded. Thus the British incorporated the Company of Royal Adventurers trading to Africa, in 1663, and later replaced this company by the Royal African Company, in 1672, the royal patronage and participation reflecting the importance of the trade and continuing the fashion set by the Spanish monarchy of increasing its revenues thereby. The monopoly of the French slave trade was at first-assigned to the French West India Company in 1664, and then transferred, in 1673, to the Senegal Company. The monopoly of the Dutch slave trade was given to the Dutch West India Company, incorporated in 1621. Sweden organized a Guinea Company in 1647. The Danish West India Company, chartered in 1671, with the royal family among its shareholders, was allowed in 1674 to extend its activities to, Guinea. Brandenburg established a Brandenburg African Company, and established its first trading post on the coast of West Africa in 1682. The Negro slave trade, begun about 1450 as a Portuguese monopoly, had, by the end of the seventeenth century, become an international free-for-all’

There was a wide range of ways by which Africans became slaves, a few of these were:

the prisoners that were captured during the wars that took place between African peoples were sold to the slave traders; some of these wars were deliberately instigated by the Europeans solely for this purpose;

some African boys lost their freedom because of gambling by using themselves as stakes, loosing first an arm, then a leg, and finally their freedom;

some stronger Africans would use brute force against a weaker one or a woman and then kidnap their own peers and sell them to the slave traders;

there were even kings that sold their own subjects to the slave traders because their wealth and revenue depended on the slave-trade;

some Africans even sold their own children in order to gain money or to put themselves away form the danger of becoming slaves;

but, the largest number of slaves was obtained by an organized wholesale system of kidnaping. In the midst of the night, the slave-traders would surround a village and burn down the huts of the villagers and then would seize the men and women that looked healthy and strong, and then left the small children, the elders and the disabled individuals to burn in their homes. If anyone managed to escape into the woods or to the mountains, they were hunted and tracked down by their pursuers and put into chains. The cruelty with which the Africans were stripped of their freedom and with which they were simply killed if they couldn’t be sold was tremendous.

1.1.3. The extent of the slave trade in numbers

According to one statistic, the total number of Africans that were brought to the two American continents during the colonization period and the transatlantic slave trade raised up to 11 million individuals. By the mid-nineteenth century the slave population in the U.S. had risen to more than four million. According to another statistic, around 40 million Africans have been enslaved or murdered in the process of reaching their final destination, the American continents; only one third of the individuals taken from their native lands managed to survive the journey on the sea, because either committed suicide, either were throw over board, either died because of the unsanitary conditions in which they were kept on the ships. So, there is no wonder why white men were perceived by the Africans as evil and even as cannibals. Many of the captive Africans believed, on being shipped in slave vessels, that the white men were cannibals who had almost eaten up their country men and now came back to fetch black men to gratify their taste for human flesh, mainly because of the fact that the ones that were taken away never returned to their home lands; therefore, the ones that were not yet captured, on seeing the white men, were instantaneously shivering of fright and some even fainting.

1.1.4. The role of slaves in the Southern and Northern American colonies

The slave trade became a very lucrative activity for many; thus, the economic significance of the slave trade grew in the northern urban centers of New England and the middle colonies. There, slaveholding was less economically important than slave trading. Whereas, in the southern colonies, the large tobacco plantations of the Chesapeake region and of the South Carolina were in great need of labor force, this is why the slaveholding planter was the dominant figure of the region. In South Carolina, for example, but also in many other southern colonies, many of the Africans imported, mainly due to their large number, managed to preserve in a greater extent their African culture, having a significant impact on the developing culture of the new nations. Before the year 1700, in some American states, such as Pennsylvania, the status of the Africans was quite ambiguous because some slaveholders were calling them servants and were even given back their freedom after a long time of service, some receiving land as compensation; but after 1700, the Pennsylvania legislature passed a law that established life service for black slaves and created a special court in order to deal with the problems caused by the disobedient black slaves.

But not all American colonizers saw slavery in a positive light. In 1684, Germantown’s Dutch-speaking Quakers made an official opposition to slavery saying that the existence of slavery violated the right to freedom from a religious point of view. In 1696, the Quaker community from Philadelphia urged the government authorities not to allow slavery and slave trading, but their response was, at the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, that it was agreed not to ‘encourage’ slave importation. But still slave trade continued to develop itself and slaves became an important source of labor, providing great profits for both slave merchants and farmers. By 1767, the Quakers’ opposition towards slavery became more serious, and as a result the members of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting who were engaged in slave trading were barred from full participation. In consequence, slaveholding drastically declined among the leaders of the Philadelphia Meeting, and some members convinced of slavery's immorality helped to support their former slaves. Another opposition was made by the Puritans, who objected slavery on both theological and practical grounds, advocating equality of rights and unity.

A more flexible type of slavery, by which African slaves and their families benefited of some rights, was the one established by the Dutch, which was called ‘half freedom’, being the middle way between slavery and servitude. According to this system, slaves paid a yearly tax and performed labor for their owners; in return, they were allowed to live independently, to support themselves and their families and enjoyed the rights of the many free individuals. In 1644, the Council of New Netherlands freed a number of slaves who had served half free for almost twenty years. This less-restrictive slave system provided a measure of independence and allowed the slaves to have their own homes and families, even though their children didn’t inherit their parents’ status. But this system was disintegrated in 1712 by the Brits which passed a restrictive law which made it very difficult for the slave owners to free their slaves. In 1702, in New York, a law was passed that forbade any commercial relations with black slaves; groups with more than three slaves were not allowed to be formed, under the penalty of severe physical punishment or even jail time; and the restrictions continued when in 1710, an ordinance stated that slaves that appeared in the streets after dark without a lighted lantern would be imprisoned and freed only if their masters paid a fine, but not before receiving fifty lashes.

In the eastern and western regions of North America, by the year 1725, Africans became agricultural workers, domestic servants, skilled craftsmen, iron workers, municipal maintenance workers, and a major part of the harbor labor force in the colony's port cities. In order to distinguish slavery from servitude, in New Jersey were passed a series of regulations that imposed more control over slave movements and gatherings and provided more severe punishments for crimes committed by slaves. Slave restrictions were irregularly enforced but, whenever the colonial authorities felt more threatened by the growing number of slaves, these restrictions were more rigorously applied. However, the European travelers described an unexpected ease in master-slave relationships, even claiming that slaves enjoyed equal treatment with white servants. According to some accounts, in New Jersey, free ‘Negroes’ were even enlisted in the military companies of this colony.

But agriculture was not the sole field of activity for slaves; therefore, slaves who were under the patronage of artisans became skilled workers that were assisting their masters. Woodworkers, metalworkers, sail makers, gold and silversmiths, bakers and caterers all worked shoulder to shoulder with slaves hose skilled hands molded the materials and created many of the finished products that supported their masters and enhanced their reputations as craftsmen. Slave skills were as varied as the work to be performed in colonial society. The large number of slaves owned by mariners suggests that slaves were often taken to sea and performed labor for which the master was paid. Other slaves were used for maintaining the offices and storage facilities of their owners, they loaded, unloaded and transported goods; a small number of slaves, the ones that were more intelligent, provided more technical business services such as accounting or sales. In exceptional cases, some slaves were even the teachers of their white masters. In other cases, runaway slaves were employed as music tutors for different instruments like flute and violin. According to one statistic, more than 10 percent of the slaves in Philadelphia and nine percent of the New York City slaves were held by highly appreciated professional such as doctors, lawyers, teachers and ministers; thus giving the slaves the opportunity to learn from their masters and enabling them to help their fellow slaves by practicing the same services as their masters. Some more fortunate slaves even managed to gain a sufficient amount of money that helped them pay the price for their freedom.

1.1.5. Few rights for the free blacks

In order to continue the discussion about the rights and role of the free ‘Negroes’, we are analyzing their status in a southern state, Louisiana, which, according to Alice Dunbar-Nelson in her series of articles called People of color in Louisiana – published in October 1916 and January 1917 – imposed certain restrictions, in accordance to the provisions of the Code Noir, a set of regulations published in 1724, on the free people of color such as: paying a capitation (head) tax, that the free white population did not; freed or free-born Negroes who harbored fugitive slaves had to pay 30 livres for each day the fugitive was under their protection, while the withes who did the same paid only a fine of 10 livres a day; if the black person was unable to pay the fine, he or she risked being sold into slavery; neither free-born blacks nor slaves were allowed to receive gifts from whites. Another author, Leon F. Litwack, in North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790–1860, published in 1961, reinforces the statement according to which, as compared to the white population, the free blacks faced certain restrictions, but that ‘northern free blacks, because of their freedom, could use the tools of free people – the ability to organize, petition the government, and publish the facts of their situation – to improve their position in society. In the middle of the civil rights era, this was an important reminder that the struggle was not new but a legacy from ancestors who had worked hard to attain, preserve, and advance their free status in the nation.’

1.1.6. Few or no rights for the enslaved blacks

In New England and other northern colonies, slaves were seen as human property that could be bought, sold, rented out, mortgaged or gambled away. And as any other merchandise, there were insurance policies for the cargo of a ship that consisted in slaves. A consequence of this kind of insurance, many ship owners or commanders preferred to get rid of the merchandise by throwing it over board; meaning that whenever the ship was in trouble such as storm or if it was stuck in shallow waters, in order to cash in the money from the insurance policies, the slaves were thrown in the waters of the ocean, even if there was a chance of salvation for them. If the slaves died of famine while on board, the owner of the cargo lost the insurance money and therefore, whenever the food supplies were scarce, the suffering slaves that looked weaker than the rest were thrown over board.

In contradiction with the southern courts of justice, the northern ones recognized the right of slaves to hold and dispose of some forms of property; they were allowed jury trials, legal counsel and a measure of legal protection. But New York and New Jersey restricted slaves from ownership of real property; still these limitations did not generally extend to personal property. Slaves had the right to inherit the personal possessions of their masters if a will was drafted to that end, even when the slave was bought by a new person. Moreover, slaves had the right to protect their assets by bringing their problems to court, even though that rarely happened in practice and seldom with positive results for the plaintiff. However, in Virginia, the slaves had no personal rights and were not allowed to leave the plantation to which they belonged without the written permission of their owners.

As a result of an investigation conducted by British officials, that uncovered real evidence of the atrocities that the African slaves underwent from the moment they were taken by force from their home lands, an example of such a inhuman behavior was the fact that women that had small children and were fit for work often lost their babies because they were killed by the slave traders before boarding the slave ships, the infants were considered a ‘plague’, up to the moment when they were put to sale on the American continent and if rejected by the potential buyers, the unfortunate slave was either left to die of starvation or was directly killed, in 1807, because of the public opposition towards slavery, the British Parliament decided to abolish this cruel way of disposing of the lives of the Africans.

In the colonial North, as compared to the South regions, slaves lived primarily in the white community as part of the household of a white family. Very often, the number of slaves per household was limited to just only two, and because of the nearness of the family members and their slaves, much emphasis was put by the slaveholders on the character of their slaves as a measure of precaution. But the attitude towards slaves differed from owner to owner, some being stricter; while others permitted some privileges that were not generally granted to slaves in the South. Due to the fact that slaves were living under the same roof as their masters and that they had to behave in a certain way in accordance to the etiquette of a social event, Northern blacks underwent a process of rapid acculturation by learning: English, how to read and write, how to interpret the Bible; and some were even converted to Christianity by their masters. Some of the black children, starting with the year 1636, were educated, due to the integrated system established by the Dutch officials in New Amsterdam (New York), in the same school as the white ones, but this situation changed when the Brits took over the colony. However, even with the opposition of their masters, during the British ruling in the North, some slaves received some education from the church due to the significant influence of the Society of the Propagation of the Gospel in the Foreign Parts, organization that was carrying out the missionary works of England in the New World. The first school for blacks was opened by this society in 1704 in New York City, offering a strictly religious education, but this project wasn’t a success because most blacks had to work hard and put in long hours and rarely found the time to attend this kind of classes, even when they had the permission of their masters. Even with all the efforts of the clerical educators, the vast majority of the white population made a strong opposition towards education of blacks out of fear that, as soon as becoming baptized under the Christian religion, blacks would demand to be freed because the general impression among the Caucasians was that the Bible advocated the equality between humans, irrespective of race. In order to remove these fears, in 1706, a new law was drafted to the effect of not modifying the status of the slaves that were baptized. In New England, education for slaves or free blacks was strongly promoted by a few clergymen such as John Elliot, a Puritan minister, and Cotton Mather, which took in the mission of convincing as many masters as possible to allow theirs slaves to learn how to read and write, the starting point being to read the Bible, but afterwards the goal switched into learning to read the Bible and any other ‘good’ books. Slaves could not be taught critical thinking, for the dangers of such thought were far too great, but they could learn reading and writing without harmful effect. In the first half of the eighteenth century, several schools for blacks opened throughout New England, teaching reading and writing and providing religious instruction. Even though the general belief among the slaveholders was that educated slaves are harder to control and more prone to violent actions and rebellion, in reality, just a small number of educated slaves were suspected of such activities by the authorities.

During the mid-eighteenth century, both on the South and North American continents, in order to exercise an indirect control, the slaveholders made efforts to influence the political structure of the slave societies by encouraging slaves to participate in elections of a local ‘governor’ or ‘king’ which, though not having official powers, were generally the leaders of that slave community. In the larger towns and cities a variety of officials were often elected to act as an informal governing body among blacks. In some colonies like Rhode Island, blacks maintained a parallel court system which was allowed to function so long as whites were convinced that it operated in their best interest.

Marriage between slaves that belonged to different masters, in those regions of the American continent where there was a great distance between farms or households, was quite problematic for all concerned because their masters didn’t always agree with an arrangement of this kind that meant time spent by the slaves in between farms, only in the more rare cases a master would buy the spouse of his slave in order to facilitate their relationship. However, in the more urban areas, having a family was much simpler for slaves considering the fact that they were harder to control and that they had greater chances to socialize on a wider scale both with fellow slaves, but also with withes and free blacks.

In 1702 in Connecticut, as a result of a wide spread practice amongst the masters according to which they would worn out their slaves until they become decrepit and unable to work anymore and then throw them into the street to become beggars or to die out of starvation, a law was passed that compelled the owners of such slaves or their heirs to take care of them in their old age even if they have freed them; and this law was actually quite rigidly enforced. In the same state, in 1774, a law was enacted that forbade the slave trade, thus: ‘No Indian, Negro or mulatto shall at any time hereafter be brought or imported into this state, by sea or land, from any place or places whatsoever, to be disposed of, left or sold, within this state.’, but it did not mean that slaves where from now on free people, just that no new slaves were accepted in the state. In another state, Rhode Island, by a law issued in 1652, slavery was reduced to a strict period of ten years (the same period of service for the white servants); after this time the slave owners were obliged to free their slaves and were not allowed to sell them to anyone else, under the penalty of a heavy fine; but still slavery managed to flourish here and to increase in importance.

1.1.7. The American Revolution, the Declaration of Independence and the black soldiers

Besides the laws of different states that regulated the slave business, even in the Declaration of Independence, which was drafted in 1776, because of the fact that New England slave-trading merchants joined with southern slave-owners to delete a passage condemning slave trading, despite the opening assertion that ‘all men are created equal’, slave trade has not been abolished nor settled as immoral on an nation wide level. Similarly, the U.S. Constitution, drawn up in 1788, upheld the institution of slavery, thereby reflecting the interest of slave traders and slave-owners: 1) the importation of slaves was legalized for at least twenty more years, after which Congress could, if it wished, pass a law prohibiting it; 2) fugitive slaves had to be turned over to slave owners who claimed them; 3) Blacks in slavery were to be regarded as three-fifths of a person. The Congress, the President, the Supreme Court, and governmental bodies at the state and local levels all served the interest of slave-owners. The Supreme Court, which was dominated by southerners, was particularly useful to slave-owners in the pre-Civil War period when their power was being challenged. In 1859, for example, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the Dred Scott decision that Black individuals ‘had no rights that the white man was bound to respect’. This decision ruled that slaves who managed to get to one of the non-slave states were not free, but should be returned to the slave master. It also deprived free Blacks (both in non-slave and slave states) of citizenship rights under the U.S. Constitution. This decision led to attempts to enslave free Blacks and resulted in increased resistance to slavery.

Even though the black soldiers have played a significant part in the American Revolutionary War against the British rule, as Norman Barton Wood describes with names and dates in his book from 1897 – The White Side of a Black Subject: Enlarged and Brought Down to Date: a Vindication of the Afro-American Race: from the Landing of Slaves at St. Augustine, Florida, in 1565, to the Present Time, their involvement in this war was greatly reduced by fear that putting arms in the hands of the free or enslaved blacks might lead to unwanted and serious repercussions for the white colonists. As James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton portray in their book In hope of liberty – ‘White southerners were especially uneasy about arming black soldiers to fight for the freedom of slaveholders. North Carolinians warned that arming slaves would invite violence against masters. Throughout the South there were similar warnings, and rumors circulated that the British were encouraging slave uprisings. These fears discouraged the recruitment of black soldiers in the southern states. (…) In the North, where the black presence was less intimidating to whites and where blacks with local militia had already engaged the British, there were fewer objections to black soldiers. (…) But, in July of 1775 General Washington ordered that no blacks be enlisted, although those already in service were allowed to remain. Coming just a few weeks after the celebrated heroism of the patriots at the Battle of Bunker Hill near Boston, this order must have been both mystifying and maddening to African Americans and their friends.’

As a consequence of the American Revolution, many of the black soldiers that fought in the war and their families gained freedom. A great part of those that found freedom in such a way chose to leave the North American continent and left in different parts of the world. By the 1790s some of these blacks were among the early settlers of the British West African colony of Sierra Leone. Others took up residence in parts of Europe (even England), Latin America, Nova Scotia, or the British Isles where some found the success they would have been unlikely to achieve in America. But those who have served on the British side remained slaves and were merely relocated to other American colonies.

An interesting effect of the American Revolution for the black slaves, even though the Declaration of Independence nor the American Constitution initially did not abolish slavery, due to the fact that state constitutions commonly used the language of these documents, mainly the sentence ‘all men are created free and equal’, some of the smarter slaves managed to gain their freedom by suing their masters on this very basis. This is the case of Quok Walker, the slave of Nathaniel Jennison, who, in 1781, because of the fact that the Massachusetts state constitution incorporated the sentence previously mentioned, had successfully sued Jennison on the grounds that Jennison had failed to make good on his promise of freedom to Walker. And, even though the promise of freedom was not fulfilled by the new federal authorities immediately after the end of the war, another positive effect of the participation of slave black soldiers on the side of the American cause was that some masters had carried the principles of freedom into their personal lives and either freed their slaves or made provisions for their freedom in their wills.

1.1.8. A personal conclusion on slavery

The conclusion that can be drawn from all the above is that, in the beginning of the slave trade, the status of the slaves was not very clearly defined by the colonial authorities, some states favored a more relaxed approach where slaves were partially free and even enjoyed some kind of rights similar to the regular white servants, whereas other American states made very strict regulations that were quite oppressive towards the African slaves. But, as time passed, the slave trade continued to flourish and the number of slaves in some regions continued to rise, sometimes surpassing the number of the colonizers, and accordingly slaves were seen more and more as a threat to their masters and not only, the fear of riots and crimes against the white population became more alarming, so that, slaves lost a major part of the rights that they have previously obtained. Another observation is that, between the South and North colonies, there were great differences as to the role of slaves in every day life, in North, slaves were just another merchandise and rarely were used for work on plantations, mainly because of the climate and soil conditions that were not proper for agriculture, being used more as domestic help or as practitioners of different trades; while in South, because of the large tobacco, cotton, sugar and other types of plantations, work force was much needed and therefore the main occupation of the African slaves was as agricultural workers.

1.2. The abolition of slavery in the North and the fight for freedom in the South – the American Civil War

The first prohibition of slavery took place in the Northern state of Vermont, which separated from New York in 1777, and abolished slavery on a permanent basis by its constitution. However, Pennsylvania was the first of the original thirteen colonies that abolished slavery in 1780 by the means of a gradual emancipation system. Later the same year, the state of Massachusetts abolished slavery by its Constitution. In January 1784 Connecticut passed gradual emancipation legislation, manumitting slaves born after March 1 of that year and requiring them to serve as indentured servants until they reached the age of twenty-five. Thus, within a few years of Revolution, there was a massive change of direction of the New England states towards the abolition of slavery and, by the first decade of the 19th century, only a small number of blacks remained slaves. This phenomenon that covered the North had as side effect the isolation of slavery to the Southern colonies.

Table 1 – Slave population in the North, 1775 – 1790

Source: James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, 1997, p. 81

According to Frederick C. Knight in his article Labor in the Slave Community, 1700–1860, published in Blackwell companions to American history: A companion to African American history (2005, p. 165) «The American Revolution ushered in a number of changes on the mainland, transformations which had important implications for the enslaved. Pushed by the petitions of slaves, protests by antislavery activists, and the demands of free white labor, the North began a process of emancipation, with some states mandating the immediate end of slavery while most others opted for a gradual approach. Although the new southern states never considered abolishing slavery, the institution underwent significant change during the Revolutionary era. In particular, before the Revolution, figures such as Thomas Jefferson and George Washington financed their opulent lifestyles off slave labor. Ironically, “It was Virginia slaves,” colonial historian Edmund Morgan avows, “who grew most of the tobacco that helped to buy American independence”».

However, the central-northern states that managed or planned to free their slaves, out of fear of ex-slaves becoming a heavy burden to the welfare system, imposed a series of restrictions and adopted a set of laws to the end of discouraging immigration to their territory by the blacks from other states. Moreover, these states imposed limitations on black political rights. In 1802, the Ohio state constitution denied black residents the right to vote, hold public office, or testify against a white person in court, and in 1803 blacks were barred from service in the state militia. In 1831 jury eligibility was changed so that only qualified electors could be considered, effectively excluding blacks from such service. These laws were not repealed until 1849. Other states went so far as to ban black individuals from entering their territory. But, with all the restrictions, the black population continued to grow rapidly on the western frontier during the 1820s.

Table 2 – Black Population in Western States 1810 – 1840

Source: James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, 1997, p. 104

In the Northern states, between 1822 and 1842, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Rhode Island revised their state laws to exclude black voters technically previously allowed to vote. In New York State blacks voted on an equal footing with whites until 1821. Liberalized property requirements for white voters in New York during the 1820s established separate racial standards for voting and effectively barred most black men from the franchise.

Table 3 – Black Rights to Vote by state

Restrictions: New York—property requirements for black voters; none for white voters. Ohio 1860—only mulattoes could vote (defined as more than half white); Cincinnati blacks could vote in school board elections for black schools. Michigan 1860—blacks could vote in school board elections; there was some other voting at the discretion of election judges.

Source: James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, 1997, p. 169.

Even though the justification of imposing this kind of restrictions on the black ex-slaves was to reduce the impact of their poverty on the local economy, ironically, the racially restricted system of employment practically guaranteed that many free blacks would become poor, dependent and, perhaps, criminal. In most cases, African Americans were excluded from all but the most undesirable, lowest paid jobs in society, although the specific employment open to them depended on the local economy. From two thirds to three quarters of African Americans who were employed in antebellum northern cities worked at jobs requiring little skill or education. Many of the job openings were available in port cities as sailors, boatman, dock workers, etc., i.e. jobs with little stability, lots of hard work and very poorly paid.

Besides the restrictions on the rights to vote or the non-existence of this right, African Americans faced numerous other problems in their society in every day life such as being excluded from public education and segregated in public entertainment, accommodations, and transportation. Most railroad cars, steamships, and stage coaches were racially segregated. In eating houses, in public parks, at public gatherings of all descriptions black Americans were turned away or relegated to the most undesirable places.

Starting in the 1830s, the growth among Northern whites of a movement that demanded immediate abolition of slavery inspired increasingly heated debates over slavery and black capacities. In 1831, William Lloyd Garrison, a journalist and leader of a small group of white Northerners that advocated emancipation, founded the first white abolitionist newspaper, called the Liberator, being basically a forum for the opinions of white abolitionists and black people. Along with other white abolitionists, Garrison also formed a new organization called the American Antislavery Society (AAS) in 1833. The AAS members promoted and publicized the abolition of slavery by distributing antislavery literature, organizing affiliates, and circulating antislavery petitions. Meanwhile, as a reaction to the more vehement Northern anti-slavery front, the Sothern supporters of this institution came up with all sorts of elaborate racist justifications in their support. However, outside abolitionist circles, white Northerners shared their Southern counterparts’ conviction that blacks were a grossly inferior race that could never hope to interact with white people on equal terms; and even some organizations that claimed to fight for the abolition of slavery closed their doors to black participants, an example of such an organization is the Ladies’ New York Antislavery Society established in 1835. Thus, the whites that demanded abolition were not necessarily ready to accept blacks in their every day life as equal human beings; they just supported the anti-slavery cause without expressing fraternal sentiment towards the black population; many of them engaged in this movement simply because it was a fashionable trend.

And, with all the agitation concerning the setting free of slaves, relatively few whites believed that blacks would be able to find their own place in the new democratic society, a society considered very vulnerable to social disorder. Without the restraints imposed by the monarchy, the orderly progress of the society depended, in very large extent, on the internalized values and the personal abilities of its citizens. Even the supporters of anti-slavery assumed that free blacks were incapable of fulfilling the responsibilities of citizenship.

Even though, as previously mentioned, the American Constitution failed to state the abolition of slavery, considered by some to be somewhat ambiguous on this issue, the outbreak of the Civil War managed to put an end to this calamity to human rights that slavery was. Because the interests of the Southern colonies were very different from those of the Northern ones, not being able to reach a mutual agreement on freeing the black population and treating them as individuals with full rights, the war was the only way of settling forever this matter and this conflict between South and North.

In the spring of 1861, decades of simmering tensions between the northern and southern United States over issues including states' rights versus federal authority, westward expansion and slavery exploded into the American Civil War (1861-65). The election of the anti-slavery Republican Abraham Lincoln as president in 1860 caused seven southern states to secede from the Union to form the Confederate States of America; four more joined them after the first shots of the Civil War were fired. From the standpoint of free blacks, the removal of federal protection from the slave South was the first step to abolition. Despite Lincoln's contentions that the war was not about slavery, and that he was simply concerned with the preservation of the Union, northern free blacks believed from the beginning that the conflict would bring freedom for their enslaved peers. As the US went to war to preserve its union, and the South went to war to preserve slavery, Afro-Americans again went to war in hope of liberty.

According to Abdul Alikamat, who describes these times of turmoil as the rural period – the struggle for civil rights, ‘emancipating the slaves was an historical and political necessity, the only way in which the northern capitalists could defeat their slaveholder enemies in the Civil War. (…) While emancipation gave the North important Black allies in beating the South, it also upset the labor system in the South and unleashed a powerful movement to establish full democratic rights. Genuine democracy (not bourgeois or capitalist democracy where everyone can vote but the rich continue to rule) would have restricted some of the activities of the wealthy northern capitalists. Thus, reestablishing a system of labor in the South became one immediate aim of government during the Reconstruction period. Reconstructing a political system under the firm control of the northern capitalists became the other.’

1.3. Freedom achieved – And now what? The Reconstruction era.

On January 1, 1863, Abraham Lincoln declared that four million slaves were free. Even so, in the Southern states, many of the slaves that served on plantations, for a period of two years, had no knowledge of they newly found freedom mainly because their masters have not told them that they were free to go, or claimed that their slaves did not want to leave them, or some, even if they knew, preferred to remain slaves because they had nowhere to go. By 1865, the laws of the land demanded that all slaves be set free. Many of the landowners that accepted the emancipation allowed their slaves to remain and work on their plantations and paid them in crop shares as wages.

Even though the Civil War was over in 1865 and blacks managed to obtain a whole range of new rights, in the average American’s eye, the image of the Afro-American people has not improved greatly from the one that existed before slavery was abolished, meaning that he was still perceived as ‘less than a man, more than a brute’, mainly because of his lack of education that he had no real access to until now. Therefore, right after the war, the American educational system underwent a series of deep transformations by which new schools of elementary and higher education were built, first in Hampton, then the phenomenon rapidly spread throughout the US, in order to provide a proper education for the ex-slaves and their children, not only from a religious point of view, but the same kind of instruction that the white population received. This was one of the greatest achievements of the freedom gained by war, meaning that now Afro-Americans had access to information, to the opportunities of evolving on an intellectual and cultural level and of developing a new identity for themselves. Thus, the first brick for the foundation of the Reconstruction was put by the educational system, and the enthusiasm with which large numbers of children as well as adults attended the classes of their schools was supported by the great financial investments made into this system.

From a political and economic point of view, in the Southern states, an exploitative labor system was established by creating the so-called Black Codes which were no far cry from the old slavery system. For example, a provision of the Black Codes stated that even if they wanted to make the best labor contracts, Negroes that left their old plantations in search for better conditions were punished by being whipped or sold into slavery if they were caught wandering on the roads because this was considered vagrancy. Negroes could come into court as witnesses only in cases in which Negroes were involved. And even then, they must make their appeal to a jury and judge who would believe the word of any white man in preference to that of any Negro on pain of losing office and caste. The Negro's access to the land was hindered and limited; his right to work was curtailed; his right of self-defense was taken away, when his right to bear arms was stopped; and his employment was virtually reduced to contract labor with penal servitude as a punishment for leaving his job.

Meanwhile, northerners were busy trying to consolidate their political victory by changing the US Constitution. The Black Codes have been invalidated by the Republicans in a period of four years, 1866 – 1870, by the enactment of a series of laws and by passing the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, which extended citizenship and suffrage to black men; and imposed military rule through most of the South. The importance of the ex-slaves to the North's strategy was reflected in the fact that these amendments abolished – slavery (the 13th), put the federal government behind the rights of the freed slaves (the 14th), and guaranteed Black males the right to vote (the 15th). A close reading of these amendments – for example, section 3 and, 4 of the 14th amendment – reveals that the amendments were also aimed at consolidating the defeat of the slave owners by disfranchising and barring from office the leaders of the Confederacy or anyone who had voluntarily aided the Confederacy and by refusing to pay any of the debts the South had incurred during the war. During the Reconstruction period, Black people fought for and won many democratic rights. Blacks voted and were elected to federal, state, and local political offices. Laws creating the first tax-supported public education system and other progressive measures were passed in legislation where Black people were in a majority (South Carolina) or played a leading role. The next stage of the relationship of Black people to the U.S. government during the rural period was based on the changing interests of northern capitalists. The North had used their alliance with the ex-slaves to consolidate their victory over the southern slave owners. The main problem now facing them was the disruption of the smooth and peaceful operation of capitalist exploitation by the newly enfranchised Blacks and a growing radical movement among workers, farmers, and small manufacturers. Thus, northern capitalists ended their alliance with Black people in the Hayes-Tilden Sellout of 1877. Federal troops were withdrawn from the South and political power was given back to the former slave owners. This time northern capitalists were overseeing the entire process. Thus, the Reconstruction era has ended violently and the African Americans faced from now on a new wave of discrimination.

Chapter 2: Post-liberation era: white versus black – between hate and acceptance

2.1. Building an identity for the Afro-Americans and race discrimination

The American Civil War managed to bring about freedom for those enslaved, but did not manage to eradicate racial discrimination, to find a place for the black people in the white American society and to be the starting point for a real egalitarianism and democracy. The search for an identity, as nation and as African Americans, the struggle for full civil and political rights, and the fight against race discrimination continued long after the end of the Civil War up to the black movement for civil rights from the 1960s.

The process of building an identity for the African Americans, of integrating their values and visions into the bigger American picture and of evolving from a cultural, educational and social point of view has been very difficult and with many obstacles on the way mainly because of the fact that the white people needed to change their mentality from treating their black peers as inferior beings to full acceptance as equals from all points of view. On the path to gaining recognition as full rights citizens, African Americans have suffered many prejudices, offences and insults, many restrictions and limitations arbitrarily imposed on them and many opportunities that the whites denied them access to, and at times they even had to deal with hate crimes.

From 1880s to 1930, many hate crimes have been concealed behind the justification of punishing the black law breakers, thus thousands of African American men and women were lynched throughout the South (black men most often being the victims). They were killed for minor infractions – or even merely being accused of stealing, say – though many times no trial was held to determine their guilt or innocence. The charge of raping or assaulting a white woman would almost invariably lead to lynching. For many, the accusation alone became a death sentence.

Between 1865 and 1870 the American Constitution was amended three times. The Thirteenth Amendment forbade slavery everywhere except as a punishment for crime. The Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed all persons born in the United States the privileges and immunities of citizenship and prohibited states from making or enforcing any law abridging these. It also prohibited states from depriving any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, or denying any persons the equal protection of the laws. The Fifteenth Amendment denied any government, state or federal, the power to deprive U.S. citizens of the right to vote on account of race, color, or previous servitude. The powers of Congress were enlarged to enforce these guarantees, and Congress passed a number of important civil rights laws to do so. The federal courts, became the pillars of constitutional change, and received the mission of explaining the meaning of the amendments, what their limitations were intended to be, what was legitimate to build out of them, and if and how they respected the direction of the Constitution.

After 1877, the three Constitutional Amendments mentioned above became the central focus of the debates on the scope and content of the civil rights, thus being a basis for a number of cases about the violation of different rights before the American courts. Between 1877 and 1954 victories won for individual rights in federal courts were few and far between. Over the course of these eighty years or so the prevailing orthodoxies in constitutional law pared the rights guaranteed in the three constitutional amendments and their legislative offspring right down to the barest meanings consistent with the English language and the interests of the post-Reconstruction governing elites.

Meanwhile white people who had believed that constitutional change included all Americans were disappointed. Women were not to benefit. The Framers intended no change in their legal status or that of Chinese Americans or aliens. Indians and rights were mutually exclusive. With respect to the rights of black citizens, it was only occasionally that the courts after 1877 handed down decisions that echoed the intentions of the Framers. The Constitution was not a machine which “would go of itself,” even freshly dedicated to freedom and citizenship, and with the expansion of federal jurisdiction.

Whereas the Constitution regulated the status of citizens regardless of race and color; and prohibited states from violating the individual rights it protected, there was a great need for a legislative framework that would regulate the conduct of individuals towards the rights of their peers. Thus, 1875, the Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, considered the most radical piece of legislation up to that time because made racial discrimination unlawful in public accommodations such as inns and places of amusement. But it was struck down as unconstitutional in the Civil Rights Cases in 1883. The anti-discrimination principle of the Civil Rights Act and the Constitution has been applied since then to challenge race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, age, disability, and other classifications of traditionally disadvantaged people.

After the 1880s, the status of blacks had deteriorated rapidly, not benefiting of the real support of the American Constitution or of the different federal laws that were passed in their aid, but the positive result of this phenomenon was the emergence of a broad spectrum of national ideologies, ranging from the advocacy of race unity as a prerequisite to effective protest activity, through a stress upon black support of black business, to proposals for colonization abroad. However, the most prominent of all these ideologies was the encouragement of the race pride and racial solidarity. A number of black leaders had a big contribution to the process of building a new identity for the African Americans after the liberation period and in the post-Reconstruction era. These leaders, among them Alexander Crummell, Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey and W.E.B. Du Bois, believed that the college-educated elite are bound to have a special role in elevating the black race and bringing it to a position of power. In 1897, the American Negro Academy, an organization of 40 black intellectuals, was established in order to stimulate black cultural development as part of a program of racial cooperation and solidarity, and also advocated for separate institutions (churches, schools, colleges, etc.). This organization, along other prolific black leaders, claimed that there was a need for a grater control of the black higher educational institutions, and the main motivation for this is the fact that few blacks were professors or on the Board of Administration in the colleges for black students. Some black schools, such as Congregational and Presbyterian institutions, because they were in general financed by white philanthropist, failed to employ black faculty members until the 1920s or even the 1930s.

W.E.B. Du Bois, an African American scholar, essayist and activist, is generally recognized as a central figure in the history of Afro-American politics, a major contributor to more than half-century’s debate over the condition of and proper goals and strategies for blacks in the United States. This prolific author, born in 1868, was the first African American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard University, and became a leading force in the five major Pan-African Congresses held to develop a world-wide movement for African liberation. He was also the leading figure in the Atlanta University Conferences held between 1898 and 1930 to summarize research and public policy regarding the conditions of life for Black people in the U.S.A. during the early decades of the 20th century. In 1905, W.E.B. Dubois, John Hope, Monroe Trotter and 27 others met secretly in the home of Mary B. Talbert, a prominent member of Buffalo's Michigan Street Baptist Church, to adopt the resolutions which lead to the founding of the Niagara Movement. The Niagara Movement's manifesto is, in the words of Du Bois, ‘We want full manhood suffrage and we want it now…. We are men! We want to be treated as men. And we shall win.’ Despite the establishment of 30 branches and the achievement of a few scattered civil-rights victories at the local level, the group suffered from organizational weakness and lack of funds, and it never managed to attract mass support. After the Springfield Race Riot of 1908, however, white liberals joined with the nucleus of Niagara ‘militants’ and founded the NAACP the following year, 1909. The Niagara Movement disbanded in 1910, with the leadership of Du Bois forming the main continuity between the two organizations.

In 1899, W.E.B. Du Bois published his study called The Philadelphia Negro in which he identifies the main causes for which the average African Americans have not succeeded in building an identity and a better life for themselves, thus: ‘Here then we have two great causes for the present condition of the Negro: Slavery and emancipation with their attendant phenomena of ignorance, lack of discipline, and moral weakness; immigration with its increased competition and moral influence. To this must be added a third as great – possibly even greater in influence than the other two, namely the environment in which a Negro finds himself – the world of custom and thought in which he must live and work, the physical surrounding of house and home and yard, the moral encouragements and discouragements which he encounters’.

During the half century that followed after the end of the Reconstruction era, many of the black leaders of those times were advocating territorial separatism and emigration. Many attempts, some failed, but some were successful, were made in order to relocate black masses from different parts of the US to other parts where blacks were seen on less discriminatory note or where there would be established black only communities. The post-Reconstruction era did not end well with black America. It was during this period that the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ became the law of the land, in the case of Plessy versus Ferguson, in 1896. Yet, it was during the same period that black America perhaps made its greatest impact on American political leadership.

In Plessy versus Ferguson, a black man who was 7/8 white was arrested in June 7, 1892, for riding on a Louisiana train in a section reserved for whites only. Homer Plessy, the man in question, became the symbol of a turning point in the African American history. The Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution protected only on paper the rights of blacks, but in every day life their liberties were limited in a discretionary way by local authorities, private companies and white individuals. In 1896, seven justices (with one not voting) from the Supreme Court of the United States upheld the Louisiana conviction of Plessy and further ruled that segregation could be practiced if the facilities were ‘separate but equal’. Thus, the doctrine of separate but equal became the law of the land for the next sixty-eight years and paved the way for the "color line" and the epidemic of race riots that characterized the early part of the twentieth century in American history.

In response to this repressive system instituted by Jim Crow, African Americans did not lethargically wait for the doors of white social and cultural institutions to open. Instead, they created their own institutions, which allowed them to live a ‘parallel’ existence. According to the historian Darlene Clark Hine: ‘Without the parallel institutions that the black professional class created, successful challenges to white supremacy would not have been possible. The formation of parallel organizations (…) proved to be far more radical, far more capable of nurturing resistance, than anyone could have anticipated in the closing decade of the nineteenth century and opening decades of the twentieth. Segregation provided blacks the chance, indeed, the imperative, to develop a range of distinct institutions they controlled.’

In beginning of the twentieth century, the fight against racial discrimination and the struggle for gaining real rights and not just on paper manifested itself by the means of establishing organizations and publishing of books, articles, studies and manifests in the support of the average African American and with the aim of improving his current austere condition, both economically and socially. But, all the struggle of the black intellectual leaders was violently counterattacked by the white racists that organized a series of riots in order to bring to silence the voices of those who demanded equality and fair treatment for the black people, both as individuals and as communities.

Many of the most violent racial riots in American history took place during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Beginning with the New Orleans riot of 1900, racial confrontations followed in Springfield, Ohio (1904 and 1906), Atlanta (1906), Springfield, Illinois (1908) and East St. Louis (1917). The East St. Louis riot was of particular significance in that forty-four blacks were killed, many of whom died when they were blockaded and burned alive in their houses. Property damage was estimated at $500,000, while nearly 6,000 blacks were driven from their houses.

The black response to all the racism in the United States came at a much later date, more than a decade after the end of the World War II, in the 1960s, which was a time of revolution among blacks in America.

2.2. The African Americans during the world wars period

Black soldiers were marginalized in both the First and Second World Wars. In neither war were black servicemen accorded the attention, fairness, and respect paid to their white counterparts. Rather, the armed forces only grudgingly allowed their participation. When given the opportunity, African American soldiers, sailors, and aviators fought bravely and well, but in both wars the prevailing doctrine in the military was racial segregation and exclusion. According to the high commands of the Armed Forces, African Americans were too lazy, stupid, and cowardly to make good soldiers, sailors or aviators. If they were good for anything it was to load, unload, and move cargo, and cook and serve food to white officers and enlisted personnel. Combat for blacks was out of the question, except perhaps in racially segregated units and squadrons. Therefore, Blacks fought these wars on two fronts. One front was the war against the enemy, be it the Germans in the First World War or the Germans, Italians, and Japanese in the Second World War. The other front was a war against the racism that infested America and its armed forces in the first half of the twentieth century.

2.3. The real democracy – obtaining civil rights for Afro-Americans in the 1960s

The fight for civil rights is a struggle for the democratic rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. Civil rights are politically defined freedoms, laws that stipulate what groups and individuals can do to fully participate in the society. The Civil Rights Movement is made up of individuals and groups who fight for just laws that in both principal and practice serve to maximize full participation for all people. The Civil Rights Movement thus focuses its attention on the government. It keys in on the contradiction between what the government says in theory (as put forth in documents like the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, etc.) and what the government actually does in practice.

The civil rights movement from the 1960s was born out of the need of fighting back racial discrimination, segregation, hate crimes and lack of civil rights. In the following few pages I will make a brief review of the main organizations, the atmosphere during the black protests and of some of the major leaders and their vision that have inspired, animated and set the trajectories in the struggle for civil rights.

2.3.1. Organizations

2.3.1.1. NAACP – The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People – founded in 1909 by white liberals and some of the Niagara militants, exists even today and is the oldest and largest civil rights organization in the United States. Its mission is to ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of rights of all persons and to eliminate racial hatred and racial discrimination.

In 1909, the NAACP commenced what has become its legacy of fighting legal battles to win social justice for African-Americans and for all Americans. The most significant of these battles were fought and won under the leadership of Charles Hamilton Houston and his student and protégée, Thurgood Marshall.

After training the first generation of Civil Rights lawyers during his years as Dean of Howard University's Law School, Houston was appointed in 1935 to be the first Special Counsel of the NAACP. Often referred to as the ‘Moses of the civil rights movement’, Houston was the architect and chief strategist of the NAACP’s legal campaign to end segregation.

In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court endorsed segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson, which established the ‘separate but equal’ principle. In a study commissioned by the NAACP in the 1930s, Nathan Margold found that under segregation, the facilities provided for blacks were always separate, but never equal to those maintained for whites.

After joining the NAACP, Charles Hamilton Houston refined Margold’s recommendations, developed a strategy, and implemented a battle plan. Under Houston’s ‘equalization strategy’, lawsuits were filed demanding that the facilities provided for black students be made equal to those available to white students, carefully stopping short of a direct challenge to Plessy. Houston predicted that the states that practiced segregation could not afford to maintain black schools that were actually equal to those reserved for whites. From 1935 to 1940, Houston successfully argued several cases using this strategy, including Murray v. Maryland, (1936) which resulted in the desegregation of the University of Maryland’s Law School and State ex rel. Gaines v. Canada, in which the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the admission of a black student to the Law School at the University of Missouri (1938).

When Thurgood Marshall succeeded Houston as NAACP’s Special Counsel, he continued the Association’s legal campaign. During the mid-1940s, in Smith v. Allwright, Marshall successfully challenged ‘white primaries’, which prevented African Americans from voting in several southern states. In Morgan v. Virginia (1946), Marshall won a case in which the Supreme Court struck down a state law that enforced segregation on buses and trains that were interstate carriers. In 1948, Marshall and other associate attorneys won an important victory in Shelley v. Kraemer, which ended the enforcement of racially restrictive covenants, a practice that barred blacks from purchasing homes in white neighborhoods. In 1950, Marshall won cases that struck down Texas and Oklahoma laws requiring segregated graduate schools in Sweatt v. Painter and McLaurin v. Oklahoma. In those cases, a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court held that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment required those states to admit black students to their graduate and professional schools.

These decisions paved the way for one of the NAACP’s greatest legal victories. In 1954, Thurgood Marshall and a team of NAACP attorneys won Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. In this landmark decision, the Supreme Court held that segregation in public education violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Brown consisted of six separate cases in five jurisdictions; Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, the District of Columbia and Delaware. These cases are remembered as ‘Brown’ because Oliver Brown was one of several plaintiffs in the Kansas case whose name appeared first in the court filings.

The Brown decision inspired the marches and demonstrations of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ‘60s. These wide-spread protests ultimately led to the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. During this period, the Association represented civil rights workers and fought to implement Brown in numerous desegregation cases across the nation. Cases were filed that successfully challenged discrimination in public accommodations, housing, employment, voting.

Nowadays, NAACP is still challenging racial discrimination whether it appears in the guise of corporate hotel policies that discriminate against African-American college students, voting disenfranchisement during national presidential elections or state sponsored symbols of white supremacy, such as the confederate battle flag.

2.3.1.2. NUL – The National Urban League – formerly known as the National League on Urban Conditions Among Negroes, was founded in 1910 in New York City by Ruth Standish Baldwin and Dr. George Edmund Haynes, among others. Its mission is to enable African Americans to secure economic self-reliance, parity, power and civil rights.

The interracial character of the League’s board was set from its first days. Professor Edwin R. A. Seligman of Columbia University, one of the leaders in progressive social service activities in New York City, served as chairman from 1911 to 1913. Mrs. Baldwin took the post until 1915. By the end of World War I the organization had 81 staff members working in 30 cities.

In 1918, Dr. Haynes was succeeded by Eugene Kinckle Jones who would direct the agency until his retirement in 1941. Under his direction, the League significantly expanded its multifaceted campaign to crack the barriers to black employment, spurred first by the boom years of the 1920s, and then, by the desperate years of the Great Depression. Efforts at reasoned persuasion were buttressed by boycotts against firms that refused to employ blacks, pressures on schools to expand vocational opportunities for young people, constant prodding of Washington officials to include blacks in New Deal recovery programs and a drive to get blacks into previously segregated labor unions.

Outspoken in his commitment to advancing opportunity for blacks, Lester Granger, Jones’ successor, pushed tirelessly to integrate the racist trade unions and led the League’s effort to support A. Philip Randolph's March on Washington Movement to fight discrimination in defense work and in the armed services. Under Granger, the League, through its own Industrial Relations Laboratory, had notable success in cracking the color bar in numerous defense plants. The nation’s demand for civilian labor during the war also helped the organization press ahead with greater urgency its programs to train black youths for meaningful blue-collar employment. After the war those efforts expanded to persuading Fortune 500 companies to hold career conferences on the campuses of Negro colleges and place blacks in upper-echelon jobs.

The explosion of the civil rights movement provoked a change for the League, one personified by its new leader, Whitney M. Young, Jr., who became executive director in 1961. A social worker like his predecessors, he substantially expanded the League’s fund-raising ability and, most critically, made the League a full partner in the civil rights movement. Although the League’s tax-exempt status barred it from protest activities, it hosted at its New York headquarters the planning meetings of A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King, Jr., and other civil rights leaders for the 1963 March on Washington. Young was also a forceful advocate for greater government and private-sector efforts to eradicate poverty. His call for a domestic Marshall Plan, a ten-point program designed to close the huge social and economic gap between black and white Americans, significantly influenced the discussion of the Johnson Administration’s War on Poverty legislation.

Young’s tragic death in 1971 in a drowning incident off the coast of Lagos, Nigeria brought another change in leadership. Vernon E. Jordan, Jr., formerly Executive Director of the United Negro College Fund, became the new Executive Director in 1972 and oversaw a major expansion of its social service efforts, as the League became a significant conduit for the federal government to establish programs and deliver services to aid urban communities, and brokered fresh initiatives in such League programs as housing, health, education and minority business development. Jordan also instituted a citizenship education program that helped increase the black vote and brought new programs to such areas as energy, the environment, and non-traditional jobs for women of color-and he developed The State of Black America report.

Other important leaders of this organization, with significant results in the fight against racial discrimination and the civil rights struggle, have been: John E. Jacob (1982); Hugh B. Price (1994), who intensified the organization’s work in three broad areas: in education and youth development, individual and community-wide economic empowerment, affirmative action and the promotion of inclusion as a critical foundation for securing America's future as a multi-ethnic democracy; Marc H. Morial (2003), former New Orleans Mayor.

2.3.2. Some of the leaders of the civil rights movement

2.3.2.1. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Martin Luther King, Jr., (1929 – 1968) born Michael Luther King, was a civil rights leader came from a African American family with deep involvement in the activism for obtaining civil rights for men and women of color; his maternal grandfather Reverend Alfred Daniel Williams was one of the founding members of the Atlanta chapter of the NAACP, while his father, Reverend M.L. King, Sr., was a leader in the struggle for the equalization of salaries for black teachers in Georgia. Martin Luther King, Jr., attended Booker T. Washington High School in Atlanta and after graduation decided to become a ministry, which happened in 1947, even though initially wanted to become a doctor, after graduating from several other higher education institutions in the field of theology, King chose to continue his study with two years of philosophy courses at Harvard and earned the doctor of philosophy degree from Boston University in 1955.

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, a seamstress exhausted from a long day's work, refused to surrender her seat on a bus to a white man, as the laws of Alabama required at that time and was arrested for this very reason. The black community decided to call a bus boycott and turned to a young twenty-seven-year-old clergyman, Martin Luther King, Jr., for leadership. Within five days, the Montgomery Improvement Association was formed, with King as its president. The boycott lasted 381 days, and King, using nonviolent and passive resistance. In doing so, as a consequence of this boycott and the ones that followed, King and his disciples had faced a raging storm of white abuse. They had been beaten, arrested, jailed, and spat upon. They had had their homes and churches burned, their families threatened, their friends and allies murdered. They had felt the pain of police billy clubs, high-pressure water hoses, and snarling attack dogs. But all that never stopped them, they marched; they staged boycotts and sit-ins; they broke unjust laws; and, in the end, they awakened the nation and the world to the shame of American racial persecution.

King was interested in revolutionizing the status of the southern black, and with that in mind, in 1957, he led a group of Atlanta ministers to form an organization that later became the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). In 1959, he moved to Atlanta to serve with his father at the Ebenezer Baptist Church, and continued to work for the SCLC. King was also involved in organizing the [anonimizat] Committee (SNCC) in 1960, when a sit-in movement was begun by black college students. His crusade for equal rights and first-class citizenship for his people continued with the protests in Birmingham in 1963, which resulted in the major civil rights legislation of 1964 and 1965.

In 1958, during a visit to Harlem to promote his book Stride Toward Freedom, he was stabbed in the chest by a middle-aged black woman, who was later declared insane, but fortunately the letter opener used as a weapon did not section his aorta and thus he managed to fully recover in a short time.

At the age of thirty-five, on December 10, 1964, Martin Luther King, Jr., was the youngest man to have received the Nobel Peace Prize. When notified of his selection, he announced that he would turn over the prize money of $54,123 to the furtherance of the civil rights movement.

In July 1966, Martin Luther King, Jr. conducted open housing campaigns in Chicago, and later traveled to New York and Cleveland in support of equal rights for his people. On December 4, 1967, he planned for a massive civil disobedience campaign to be staged in Washington in 1968 to apply pressure on the Johnson administration to end poverty by providing jobs for all citizens, regardless of color.

In the eleven-year period between 1957 and 1968, King traveled over six million miles and spoke over twenty-five hundred times, appearing wherever there was injustice, protest, and action; and meanwhile he wrote five books as well as numerous articles. In these years, he led a massive protest in Birmingham, Alabama, that caught the attention of the entire world, providing what he called a coalition of conscience. and inspiring his ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail’, a manifesto of the Negro revolution; he planned the drives in Alabama for the registration of Negroes as voters; he directed the peaceful march on Washington, D.C., of 250,000 people to whom he delivered his address, ‘l Have a Dream’, he conferred with President John F. Kennedy and campaigned for President Lyndon B. Johnson; he was arrested upwards of twenty times and assaulted at least four times; he was awarded five honorary degrees; was named Man of the Year by Time magazine in 1963; and became not only the symbolic leader of American blacks but also a world figure.

By 1968, the years of demonstrations and confrontations were beginning to wear on Martin Luther King Jr. He had grown tired of marches, going to jail, and living under the constant threat of death. He was becoming discouraged at the slow progress civil rights in America and the increasing criticism from other African-American leaders. Plans were in the works for another march on Washington to revive his movement and bring attention to a widening range of issues. In the spring of 1968, a labor strike by Memphis sanitation workers drew King to one last crusade. On April 3, in what proved to be an eerily prophetic speech, he told supporters, «I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the promised land». The next day, while standing on a balcony outside his room at the Lorraine Motel, Martin Luther King Jr. was struck by a sniper’s bullet. The shooter, a malcontent drifter and former convict named James Earl Ray, was eventually apprehended after a two-month, international manhunt. The killing sparked riots and demonstrations in more than 100 cities across the country. In 1969, Ray pleaded guilty to assassinating King and was sentenced to 99 years in prison. He died in prison on April 23, 1998.

2.3.2.2. James Meredith

Meredith was born in Kosciusko, Mississippi, on June 25th, 1933. From 1951 to 1960 he served in the American Air Force. After this, Meredith studied at Jackson State College for two years. Following this, he applied to start a course at the University of Mississippi. He was rejected twice. Meredith filed a complaint with the courts that he had been rejected by the university simply because he was black. His complaint was rejected by a district court, but on appeal, the Fifth Judicial Circuit Court supported him and ruled against the district court stating that the University of Mississippi was indeed maintaining a policy of segregation in its admissions policy. Death threats were made against Meredith and Robert Kennedy, the Attorney-General, sent federal marshals to protect Meredith. Riots followed and 160 marshals were wounded (28 by gun shots) and 2 bystanders were killed on the Oxford campus.

Regardless of this, Meredith attended the university and graduated in 1964. However, being the focal point of such racism seemed to ignite a passion in Meredith. In early June 1966, James Meredith began his March Against Fear, a 220-mile hike down Highway 51 from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi. This route would take the lone marcher through some of the most doggedly segregationist counties in the South. Meredith hoped that this courageous act against one of the last bastions of Jim Crow segregation would inspire others to take progressive action. On the second day of the march, however, he was shot in an ambush. Following his shooting, Meredith’s procession was taken up by a mix of activists, including the more moderate, clergy-based wing of the civil rights movement as personified by Martin Luther King Jr. as well as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the younger, more militant cadre of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the [anonimizat] Committee (SNCC). Although Meredith’s injuries were not life threatening, the hegemony of liberal integrationism within the civil rights movement was not so fortunate. The march quickly became the setting where smoldering tensions over strategies and aims ignited. While Meredith was hospitalized, the march was continued by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young, Floyd McKissick, the Rev. James Lawson and other prominent civil rights leaders. It was during this march that the term ‘Black Power’ was born.

After the march, He went on to receive a master's degree in economics from the University of Ibadan in Nigeria, and a law degree from Columbia University in 1968. Becoming active in the Republican Party in the 1960s, Meredith unsuccessfully ran for Adam Clayton Powell Jr.’s seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1967. Several years later, in 1972, he ran for a seat in the Senate, losing to Democratic incumbent James Eastland. Following his unsuccessful congressional bids, from 1989 to 1991, Meredith served as a domestic adviser to U.S. Senator Jesse Helms.

2.3.2.3. Malcolm X

Civil Rights Activist, Malcolm X was born as Malcolm Little on May 19, 1925 in Omaha, Nebraska, the fourth of eight children born to Louise and Earl Little. Louise was a homemaker and Earl was a preacher who was also an active member of the local chapter of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and avid supporter of the black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey. Because of Earl Little’s civil rights activism, the family faced frequent harassment from white supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and one of its splinter factions, the Black Legion. The harassment continued; when Malcolm X was four years old, local Klan members smashed all of the family's windows, causing Earl Little to decide to move the family from Omaha to East Lansing, Michigan. However, the racism the family encountered in East Lansing proved even greater than in Omaha. Shortly after the Littles moved in, in 1929, a racist mob set their house on fire, and the town’s all-white emergency responders refused to do anything. Two years later, in 1931, Earl Little’s dead body was discovered laid out on the municipal streetcar tracks. Although Malcolm X’s father was very likely murdered by white supremacists, from whom he had received frequent death threats, the police officially ruled his death a suicide, thereby voiding the large life insurance policy he had purchased in order to provide for his family in the event of his death. Malcolm X’s mother never recovered from the shock and grief of her husband's death. In 1937, she was committed to a mental institution and Malcolm X left home to live with family friends.

After a very troubled youth, in the 1960s, Malcolm X became the most important ideologue of nationalism of his time. Malcolm went through important personal and political changes that paralleled the growth and development of the Black liberation struggle. From a hustling pimp and drug dealer, he was transformed in prison by the teachings of the Nation of Islam (though he later broke with the stand-on-the-sidelines policies of Elijah Muhammad). He was attempting to organize a non-sectarian Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAU) when he was assassinated in 1965. Malcolm provided insistent opposition to the nonviolent, passive resistance philosophy of Martin Luther King. He proposed armed self-defense as the alternative. Until the last year of his life, he was an articulate spokesman for the view that all white people were the enemies of Black people.

During his seven-year prison term, Malcolm Little heard the message of Elijah Muhammad and was saved, replacing his slave name with an ‘X’. Muhammad’s message wasn’t complex: blacks should live a disciplined and moral life, eschew drugs and alcohol, and establish a separate nation. They should build separate schools and businesses in the meantime. His call for a separate state partly reflected Muhammad’s predictions of apocalypse. He argued that American society was inherently and unchangeably racist, morally bankrupt, and destined to fall. Why, then, should blacks seek integration? Drawing on the jeremiadic tradition common to many thinkers in U.S. history, Muhammad insisted that ‘America is falling; she is a habitation of devils and every uncleanness and hateful people of the righteous. Forsake her…before it is too late.’

In sermons, on street corners, and in lecture halls, Malcolm X effectively and eloquently explained his black Islamic nationalism. His appeal stemmed partly from his ability to present himself as an “authentic” voice of the black urban community, in contrast to a seemingly more detached middle-class leadership. Malcolm X had unprecedented success recruiting people into the NOI (Nation of Islam), transforming the group into a thriving national organization; and with his input in the late 1950s and early 1960s the NOI became the largest, and wealthiest, black nationalist organization of the postwar era.

Perhaps Malcolm X’s greatest contribution to society was underscoring the value of a truly free populace by demonstrating the great lengths to which human beings will go to secure their freedom. ‘Power in defense of freedom is greater than power in behalf of tyranny and oppression, because power, real power, comes from our conviction which produces action, uncompromising action.’

Malcolm was opposed to capitalism and imperialism, and he set the pace for the development of revolutionary nationalism among young Black people. His complete identification with and commitment to serving the needs and aspirations of Black people provided a positive model that many Black people sought to emulate.

Malcolm X’s legacy was the Black Panther Party (BPP), which was founded shortly after his death, in October 1966 at the beginning of the Black Power movement by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, in order to continue Malcolm’s work towards Black Nationalism. The BPP’s career was marked by heated revolutionary rhetoric, social service programs, international diplomacy, clashes with the police, and internal conflicts.

2.3.3. The main events of the struggle for civil rights

2.3.3.1. Non-violent protests

The sequence of the events of the civil rights movement started on December 1, 1955, when Rosa Parks, a black working lady, decided to say NO. She was arrested when she violated the bus segregation ordinance in Montgomery, Alabama, because she refused to surrender her seat in the bus to a white man. As she explained: ‘I had had problems with bus drivers over the years, because I didn’t see fit to pay my money into the front and then go around to the back. Sometimes bus drivers wouldn’t permit me to get on the bus, and I had been evicted from the bus (…) One of the things that made this get so much publicity was the fact the police were called in and I was placed under arrest. See, if I had just been evicted from the bus and he hadn’t placed me under arrest or had any charges brought against me, it probably could have been just another incident.’

This was the beginning of a new era in the black struggle for freedom in America: blacks moved to became more widely organized and mounted protests through mass meetings, boycotts, marches, and acts of civil disobedience such as sit-in and sit-down demonstrations.

After the Rosa Parks incident, the Montgomery bus boycott began, and Martin Luther King, Jr. (then only twenty-six) was elected the president of the Montgomery Improvement Association. Within slightly more than a year, the buses were integrated.

New abolitionists appeared in Nashville, Tennessee; Atlanta and Albany, Georgia; Durham and Charlotte, North Carolina; Orangeburg, South Carolina; Richmond, Virginia; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; and Tallahassee, Florida. All over the South a conscious awakening rapidly overtook young black Americans. In order to make this new movement more effective, the students organized the [anonimizat]-violent [anonimizat] (SNCC) on the campus of Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, during Spring Break, April 15–17, 1960. The spirit of the Brown decision was now starting to have its full effect and there was no turning back. SNCC took its place alongside the major civil rights organizations – the NAACP, Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), National Urban League (NUL), and SCLC – and became one of the vanguard in the black struggle for freedom in the first half of the 1960s.

Over 700 people were arrested in a demonstration held in Albany, Georgia in December of l961 to protest the segregation of the city's public facilities. In April of 1963, the SCLC launched protests of segregated lunch counters and restrooms in Birmingham, Alabama. On the heels of Birmingham came the March on Washington in August of 1963, and it was there that Martin Luther King delivered his now famous ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.

However, less than a month after the March on Washington, four Black children died in the bombing of a Birmingham church. In February of 1964, SNCC sent out a call for Black and white students throughout the nation to come to work in Mississippi for the summer. Nearly 1,000 volunteers worked in Mississippi that summer. During those months, 6 people, were killed, 80 beaten, 35 churches burned, and 30 other buildings bombed. But the nation was forced to look at Mississippi, a state dripping with the venom of racism. On March 7, 1965 (what was to became known as ‘Bloody Sunday’) state troopers and Dallas county deputies beat and gassed demonstrators marching for voting rights in Selma, Alabama. The following week, President Johnson announced that he was sending a voting rights bill to Congress, but the marches continued. So did the violence against civil rights marchers.

2.3.3.1. Achievements

On July 22, 1963, Robert Kennedy – U.S. Attorney General, signed the Treaty of Cambridge”, committing the local government to desegregate schools and public facilities, provide low-income public housing, open job opportunities in the public sector to blacks, and establish a human rights commission. But this treaty was never effective as city officials claimed that desegregation of public accommodations had to be approved by a referendum.

The 1965 Voting Rights Act outlawed literacy tests and poll taxes as a way of assessing whether anyone was fit or unfit to vote. The impact of this act was dramatic. By the end of 1966, only 4 out of the traditional 13 Southern states had less than 50% of African Americans registered to vote. By 1968, even hardline Mississippi had 59% of African Americans registered. In the longer term, far more African Americans were elected into public office. The Act was the boost that the civil rights cause needed to move it swiftly along and Johnson has to take full credit for this. After the enactment of this law, the number of Afro-Americans registered to vote grew from 1,400,000 to 3,800,000.

The 1968 Civil Rights Act, signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson, provided for equal housing opportunities regardless of race, creed, or national origin. It also contained anti-riot provisions and protected persons exercising specific rights – such as attending school or serving on a jury – as well as civil rights workers urging others to exercise these rights.

Chapter 3

The present time: equal rights and opportunities for all?

3.1. Afro-Americans in politics, education and in the corporate world

Nowadays, thanks to the intense struggle for freedom and equal rights that the African Americans had to go through ever since the first Africans were brought on American land in the fifteenth – early sixteenth century, and up to the late 1960s when democracy was finally established in the United States of America by abolishing segregation and implementing non-discriminatory legislation on federal level.

African Americans’ role in the consolidation of democracy throughout the centuries has been not only significant, but also decisive, by their contribution as soldiers in the so called ‘democratic’ wars in which they fought for freedom, theirs and the one of their new country, U.S.A., but also by they ongoing search and struggle for the same treatment as the one afforded to Caucasians, for being considered human beings with equal intellectual and moral capacities and for being granted the freedom to help build and further consolidate the American democracy and the nation’s future.

In the present times, African Americans are not seen anymore with discriminatory eyes by the federal and local authorities, if they are, they have free access to the courts of laws where they can seek justice, discrimination from any point of view and racism are prohibited and punished in a serious manner. African Americans are not just present, as the Caucasians, in all the American society’s structures and institutions, from schools and universities as professors and prolific researchers, from hospitals and international corporations, from the military to politics, they have also managed to become world wide known as musicians, such as Michael Jackson, as TV producers and actors, such as Oprah Winfrey, and even as politicians, such as Barack Obama – the first black president of the United States of America.

Due to the fact that today African Americans are an integrated part of the American nation, they are a big part of the nation’s prosperity and help maintain the country as the world’s greatest superpower and democracy. However, considering the fact that discrimination is an inherent part of the human nature, which still needs to be controlled and eradicated, the same organizations that had a major role in the civil rights movement back in the 1960s, such as NAACP – The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and NUL – The National Urban League, today continue to put in all the efforts on all possible fronts in order to make racial discrimination an endangered species of the human sins.

3.2. The ultimate achievement – an Afro-American as president

The ultimate achievement was reached in 2008 when Barack Obama was elected the first African American as the President of the United States, and his election is even more important considering the fact that he was initially a civil-rights lawyer and teacher before pursuing a political career.

Barack Hussein Obama was born on August 4, 1961, in Honolulu, Hawaii. His mother, Ann Dunham, grew up in Wichita, Kansas, where her father worked on oil rigs during the Great Depression. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Dunham's father, Stanley, enlisted in the service and marched across Europe in Patton’s army. Dunham's mother, Madelyn, went to work on a bomber assembly line. After the war, the couple studied on the G.I. Bill, bought a house through the Federal Housing Program and, after several moves, landed in Hawaii.

Barack Obama’s father, Barack Obama Sr., was born of Luo ethnicity in Nyanza Province, Kenya. Obama Sr. grew up herding goats in Africa, eventually earning a scholarship that allowed him to leave Kenya and pursue his dreams of college in Hawaii. While studying at the University of Hawaii in Manoa, Obama Sr. met fellow student [anonimizat], and they married on February 2, 1961. Barack was born six months later.

Obama did not have a relationship with his father as a child. When his son was still an infant, Obama Sr. relocated to Massachusetts to attend Harvard University, pursuing a Ph.D. Barack’s parents officially separated several months later and ultimately divorced in March 1964, when their son was 2. In 1965, Obama Sr. returned to Kenya.

In 1965, Dunham married Lolo Soetoro, an East–West Center student from Indonesia. A year later, the family moved to Jakarta, Indonesia, where Barack’s half-sister, Maya Soetoro Ng, was born. Several incidents in Indonesia left Dunham afraid for her son’s safety and education so, at the age of 10, Barack was sent back to Hawaii to live with his maternal grandparents. His mother and sister later joined them.

While living with his grandparents, Obama enrolled in the esteemed Punahou Academy, excelling in basketball and graduating with academic honors in 1979. As one of only three black students at the school, Obama became conscious of racism and what it meant to be African-American. He later described how he struggled to reconcile social perceptions of his multiracial heritage with his own sense of self: ‘I began to notice there was nobody like me in the Sears, Roebuck Christmas catalog … and that Santa was a white man,’ he said.

After high school, Obama studied at Occidental College in Los Angeles for two years. He then transferred to Columbia University in New York, graduating in 1983 with a degree in political science. After working in the business sector for two years, Obama moved to Chicago in 1985. There, he worked on the South Side as a community organizer for low-income residents in the Roseland and the Altgeld Gardens communities.

It was during this time that Barack Obama, who said he ‘was not raised in a religious household,’ joined the Trinity United Church of Christ. He also visited relatives in Kenya, which included an emotional visit to the graves of his biological father and paternal grandfather. Obama returned from Kenya with a sense of renewal, entering Harvard Law School in 1988. The next year, he met Michelle Robinson, his wife to be, an associate at the Chicago law firm of Sidley Austin. She was assigned to be Obama’s adviser during a summer internship at the firm. In February 1990, Obama was elected the first African-American editor of the Harvard Law Review. He graduated from Harvard, magna cum laude, in 1991.

After law school, Obama returned to Chicago to practice as a civil rights lawyer, joining the firm of Miner, Barnhill & Galland. He also taught part time at the University of Chicago Law School (1992 – 2004) – first as a lecturer and then as a professor – and helped organize voter registration drives during Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign.

Obama published an autobiography, Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, in 1995. The work received high praise from literary figures and has since been printed in 10 languages, including Chinese, Swedish and Hebrew. The 2006 audiobook version of Dreams, narrated by Obama, received a Grammy Award (best spoken word album).

Obama’s advocacy work led him to run for a seat in the Illinois State Senate. He ran as a Democrat, and won election in 1996. During these years, Obama worked with both Democrats and Republicans to draft legislation on ethics, and expand health care services and early childhood education programs for the poor. He also created a state earned-income tax credit for the working poor. Obama became chairman of the Illinois Senate’s Health and Human Services Committee as well, and after a number of inmates on death row were found innocent, he worked with law enforcement officials to require the videotaping of interrogations and confessions in all capital cases.

In 2000, Obama made an unsuccessful Democratic primary run for the U.S. House of Representatives seat held by four-term incumbent candidate Bobby Rush. Undeterred, he created a campaign committee in 2002, and began raising funds to run for a seat in the U.S. Senate in 2004.

Following the 9/11 attacks in 2001, Obama was an early opponent of President George W. Bush’s push to go to war with Iraq. Obama was still a state senator when he spoke against a resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq during a rally at Chicago’s Federal Plaza in October 2002. However, despite his protests, the Iraq War began in 2003.

Obama, encouraged by poll numbers, decided to run for the U.S. Senate open seat vacated by Republican Peter Fitzgerald. In the 2004 Democratic primary, he won 52% of the vote, defeating multimillionaire businessman Blair Hull and Illinois Comptroller Daniel Hynes. Obama, in his speech held at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston, emphasized the importance of unity, and made veiled jabs at the Bush Administration and the diversionary use of wedge issues.

After the convention, Obama returned to his U.S. Senate bid in Illinois. His opponent in the general election was supposed to be Republican primary winner Jack Ryan, a wealthy former investment banker. However, Ryan withdrew from the race in June 2004, after a sex scandal.

In August 2004, diplomat and former presidential candidate Alan Keyes accepted the Republican nomination to replace Ryan. In three televised debates, Obama and Keyes expressed opposing views on stem cell research, abortion, gun control, school vouchers and tax cuts. In the November 2004 general election, Obama received 70 percent of the vote to Keyes’ 27 percent, the largest electoral victory in Illinois history. With his win, Barack Obama became only the third African-American elected to the U.S. Senate since the Reconstruction.

Sworn into office January 4, 2005, Obama partnered with Republican Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana on a bill that expanded efforts to destroy weapons of mass destruction in Eastern Europe and Russia. Then, with Republican Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, he created a website to track all federal spending.

His second book, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream, was published in October 2006. The work discussed Obama’s visions for the future of America, many of which became talking points for his eventual presidential campaign and became very fas a bestseller.

In February 2007, Obama made headlines when he announced his candidacy for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. He was locked in a tight battle with former first lady and then-U.S. senator from New York Hillary Rodham Clinton. On June 3, 2008, however, Obama became the presumptive nominee for the Democratic Party, and Senator Clinton delivered her full support to Obama for the duration of his campaign. On November 4, 2008, Barack Obama defeated Republican presidential nominee John McCain, 52.9 % to 45.7%, winning election as the 44th president of the United States – and the first African-American to hold this office. When Obama took office, he inherited a global economic recession, two ongoing foreign wars and the lowest international favorability rating for the United States ever. He campaigned on an ambitious agenda of financial reform, alternative energy, and reinventing education and health care – all while bringing down the national debt. Because these issues were intertwined with the economic well-being of the nation, he believed all would have to be undertaken simultaneously. Between Inauguration Day and April 29, 2009, the Obama Administration took to the field on many fronts. Obama coaxed Congress to expand health care insurance for children and provide legal protection for women seeking equal pay. A $787 billion stimulus bill was passed to promote short-term economic growth. Housing and credit markets were put on life support, with a market-based plan to buy U.S. banks’ toxic assets. Loans were made to the auto industry, and new regulations were proposed for Wall Street. He also cut taxes for working families, small businesses and first-time home buyers. The president also loosened the ban on embryonic stem cell research and moved ahead with a $3.5 trillion budget plan.

Over his first 100 days in office, President Obama also undertook a complete overhaul of America’s foreign policy. He reached out to improve relations with Europe, China and Russia and to open dialogue with Iran, Venezuela and Cuba. He lobbied allies to support a global economic stimulus package. He committed an additional 21,000 troops to Afghanistan and set an August 2010 date for withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. In more dramatic incidents, he took on pirates off the coast of Somalia and prepared the nation for a swine flu attack. For his efforts, he was awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize by the Nobel Committee in Norway.

In the second part of his term as president, Obama has faced a number of obstacles and scored some victories as well. He signed his health-care reform plan, known as the Affordable Care Act, into law in March 2010. Obama’s plan is intended to strengthen consumers’ rights and to provide affordable insurance coverage and greater access to medical care. His opponents, however, claim that "Obamacare," as they have called it, added new costs to the country’s overblown budget and may violate the Constitution with its requirement for individuals to obtain insurance.

On the economic front, Obama has worked hard to steer the country through difficult financial times. He signed the Budget Control Act of 2011 in effort to rein in government spending and prevent the government from defaulting on its financial obligations. The act also called for the creation of a bipartisan committee to seek solutions to the country’s fiscal issues, but the group failed to reach any agreement on how to solve these problems.

Obama has also handled a number of military and security issues during his presidency. In 2011, he helped repeal the military policy known as ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’, which prevented openly gay troops from serving in the U.S. Armed Forces. He also gave the green light to a 2011 covert operation in Pakistan, which led to the killing of infamous al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden by a team of U.S. Navy SEALs.

In the 2012 election, Obama faced Republican opponent Mitt Romney and Romney’s vice-presidential running mate, U.S. Representative Paul Ryan. On the evening of November 6, 2012, Obama was announced the winner of the election, gaining a second four-year term as president. Early election results indicated a close race. By midnight on Election Day, however, Obama had received more than 270 electoral votes – the number of votes required to win a U.S. presidential election; later results showed that the president had won nearly 60 percent of the electoral vote, as well as the popular vote by more than 1 million ballots.

Barack Obama officially began his second term on January 21, 2013. The inauguration was held on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Civil rights activist Myrlie Evers-Williams, the widow of Medgar Evers, gave the invocation. In his inaugural address, Obama called the nation to action on such issues as climate change, health care and marriage equality.

Concluding remarks

The journey of consolidating the American democracy has been a long and very difficult process, characterized by a fierce struggle for freedom and too many human lives lost in the face of greed, discrimination and human ignorance. Even though there were times when the economic interests of the wealthy slaveholders seemed to and actually prevailed over any sense of humanity and any of the values of the Christian religion, much invoked by the white middle or upper class people, in the end, after much pain and sufferings, after much insults and lack of rights, opportunities and true egalitarians, the African Americans, after loosing so many battles, have managed to win the final war against race discrimination and created a true democratic nation in America.

After many centuries from the first forced arrival of the Africans on the North American continent, today, we can say that United States of American is truly the land of all possibilities, where every person, irrespective of race, color, gender, religion, sexual and political orientation, benefits of the real possibility, as an American citizen, of pursuing and fulfilling the American Dream. The African American contribution to the creation and dissemination of this dream has been decisive if we recall all the human sacrifices and human loss, starting with the first Africans that died of starvation and diseases or were killed by the slave traders before they even set foot on the American soil, and the cruel assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. who had a dream about freedom and equality but never came to see his dream coming true.

Nowadays, the American democracy is the most desired type of democracy and is actually a benchmark for freedom and civil rights around the world, while the United States, even though not the most perfect country in the world, is the Promised Land for many people that seek entertainment, fast enrichment, celebrity and the enjoyment of true freedom and equal rights and opportunities, but none of all these could have been possible without the blood shed by the African Americans in their quest for fairness and humanly treatment.

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http://www.math.buffalo.edu/~sww/0history/hwny-dubois.html

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/slavery

http://www.naacp.org/pages/naacp-legal-history

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1964/king-bio.html

http://www.biography.com/people/malcolm-x-9396195

http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/1965_voting_rights_act.htm

http://www.examiner.com/article/civil-rights-act-of-1968

http://www.biography.com/people/barack-obama-12782369?page=7