Every February, the United States honors Black History Month along with Canada and Germany. This month was chosen to honor abolitionist and President Abraham Lincoln and activist and former slave Frederick Douglass’ birthdays; these are men who were important in advocating for black rights. The tradition started in 1926 and remains in practice nearly 100 years later. This month we honor the black people who came before us starting back from those who were enslaved to the people who live in the U.S. today.
With the discovery of the new world, the trading of goods was in high demand. However, the issue with cumulating the goods in the Americas was that the work was extraneous, so the European settlers placed the work on others instead. The Natives were poor candidates for this slave labor however since they knew the land better and a majority of them had died from infectious European diseases. Because of this, slaves exported from Africa were the chosen people to carry out the labor in North and South America. Between 1517 and 1867 approximately 12.5 million slaves were seized from Africa to endure the long Middle Passage across seas. The Middle Passage took months of travel across 5,000 miles of the Atlantic; the people aboard the ships were chained in 6ft by 3ft boxes, fed poorly, and subjugated to abuse and disease. The mortality rate was 15-28% with only 10.7 million surviving the trip. The deaths were so common that sharks commonly followed the ships’ journeys.
Although 10.7 million survived the voyage, only 388 thousand were sent to North America. The slaves farmed tobacco, rice, indigo, sugar, and wheat in the north and south of North America. There were approximately 50 slaves per plantation under the slave owners, with the conditions on these farms being nothing short of horrific. The slaves were not allowed to marry and if they had families, the owners would not hesitate to separate them. They were denied literacy, and could not speak their native languages. They were exploited, sexually and physically abused, and put against one another in hierarchical systems so they could not revolt. Frederick Douglass, a freed slave, had learned to read and write secretly. He wrote in his memoir Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas: an American Slave about his experience in slavery. Some anecdotes of his are: “White men have been known to encourage slaves to escape, and then, to get the reward, catch them and return them to their masters” and “by far the larger part of the slaves know as little as their ages as horses know of theirs, and it is the wish of most masters to keep their slaves thus ignorant.”
During the 17th and 18th centuries, Enlightenment ideas from Europe had given a resurgence of liberalism and natural rights to the citizens living in America. These ideas led to the Revolutionary War, in which 5,000 black soldiers fought in, against the British King and eventually led to the success and establishment of the United States of America. Although the natural rights beliefs applied to the white population, these ideas were not extended to the black populace, instead one slave was considered equivalent to 3/5th of a person. Yet, the northern states abolished most slavery from 1777 to 1804. In 1808 there was an act prohibiting the importation of slaves from Africa, but with the invention of the cotton gin in 1793, slavery was at a high in the south of the U.S., with slaves making up 1/3 of the population. The country was growing and the arguments about whether new states should be slave states led to the secession of the southern states and the start of the civil war. By 1860, four million slaves were in the U.S., and over half of them were in the South. The war was won by the Union in which 186,000 black soldiers fought against the South. In 1863 Abraham Lincoln created the Emancipation Proclamation which freed most of the slaves and in 1865 the 13th amendment freed them all. Still, it was difficult for the black citizens to make a living once they were freed since they were poor, uneducated, and discriminated against. Shortly after the slaves were freed in 1865, Jim Crow laws and Black codes were in place to segregate the blacks from the whites and to control every aspect of their lives. Also at this time came the white supremacist group the Ku Klux Klan who intimidated and murdered thousands of black people and anyone who supported reconstruction across the South. The Jim Crow Laws and segregation were in place for 100 years until the civil rights movement in the 1960s.
Under Jim Crow Laws, black people were not allowed to share parks, bathrooms, neighborhoods, churches, hospitals, and other locations with white people. This era was titled “separate but equal” under the 1896 Supreme Court case Plessy v Ferguson. In bigger cities, however, the Jim Crow Laws were not as strict a practice, so between the 192os and 1970s, many black people migrated to cities such as Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia. This was known as The Great Migration. Lynchings and other attacks were still very common against the black community even after many black soldiers had fought with the United States in World War II. After World War II, however, the increase in the civil rights movement allowed for change and the diminishment of the Jim Crow Laws in 1964 under the Civil Rights Act. In 1948 President Harry Truman integrated the military, in 1954 schools were integrated under the Supreme Court case Brown vs the Board of Education, and in 1965 the Voting Rights Act was created to stop the blocks placed to adhibit blacks from voting.
These results did not come by easily. It took many years during the civil rights movement for change to occur and it was under the work of many activists that this happened. In December 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus and was arrested. This sparked a movement to boycott public transportation which lasted almost a year before segregated seating on transportation was deemed unconstitutional. In 1957, nine black students called the Little Rock Nine attempted twice to join the white high school nearby but were pursued by violence in and out of the classroom even with escorts given to them by President Eisenhower. In 1961, Freedom Riders were a group of black and white citizens who sat together on public transportation. They journeyed around the south where they were beaten and arrested until the Kennedy administration deemed it unconstitutional for bus terminals to be segregated. In 1964, four college students sat down at a segregated restaurant counter and refused to leave before being served. These sit-ins became known as Greensboro sit-ins as hundreds of people joined in until the original four eventually were served food. Arguably the most infamous form of protest during this era was the March on Washington in 1963 where 200,000 people peacefully marched for equality and where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream…” speech.
Now in the 21st century, rights are more at an equilibrium between blacks, whites, and other minorities, but that does not eliminate discrimination and racism. In 2013 Black Lives Matter became a social movement to combat the violence against black citizens and to protest against police brutality against black people. The movement started when an unarmed teenager, Trayvon Martin, was shot and killed in Florida. Brutality against blacks persisted even after the attack on Trayvon, but most recently in 2020 when unarmed black man George Floyd was killed after a white police officer knelt on his neck for nine minutes. This is when the movement became more widespread. This murder brought to light the other unjust killings of black people. Despite these efforts, bigotry and racism are still prominent against black people in the United States. Still, February is the month when we honor those accomplishments of black people and bring to light the hardships that many of them have endured since the 16th and 17th centuries til today. We thank those who fought for rights and equality that allowed for change not only in the U.S. but around the world.
Sources:
The Transatlantic Slave Trade and the Middle Passage
Middle Passage | Definition, Conditions, Significance, & Facts
U.S. Slavery: Timeline, Figures & Abolition
Segregation in the United States
Narrative Life of Frederick Douglass Significant Quotes
