Historical Article on African Americans
Christopher J. Chisholm
ETH/125
August 26, 2012
Tamara Mouras

Imagine you are an African just doing your daily duties for your tribe. Hunting wild game or fishing in the nearby lake or river. Making tools for your fellow tribes’ people and then all the sudden you see the gigantic boat coming to land in the area where you are at. Some form of person that looks different than you come off this boat and they start chasing you. You have never seen a white individual that talks different than you do; they have different cloths, armor and weapons far superior than your own. You are captured, restrained and then forced to get on the boat. Many days have passed since you were traveling at sea in till you reach land. Taken of the boat and sold to another white individual that takes you to a place and makes you do things that you don’t want to do.
This is what the first African Americans had to go through when they first got to the Colonies. They didn’t immigrate to the new land. They were forced or tricked into coming and when they arrived to the Colonies they were sold as slaves. They were treated as if they were not people because of the color of their skin. Even after the Revolutionary War and Civil War, African Americans had no rights. They were discriminated against for centuries until the mid-1900’s. It took many marches, fights, hate crimes and enough people of a given race to change the way a society viewed their lives as people. To make them feel as an American, a free American that had a choice. It took fearless leaders like Martian Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X to change the discrimination that plagued our nation for many years. Taking away the different sides in everything where people would go. The white and black bathrooms, different seating in restaurants, blacks not allowed into to certain places just because of their skin color.
Political, social and cultural issues that have been plaguing African American is the battle with the “white” people of the United States. The battle between the two races has been going on ever since America first started as a country. Whites before the mid- 1900 and laws that were created to protect blacks viewed them as stupid, lazy and incompetent people that would never learn or amount to anything. In the new factories that were being created in the industrial age, black Americans could work in the textile mills because they felt that women and children could do a better job. They were never allowed to be into politics because they had no rights as a free individual. The jobs that the majority of black Americans would work were sharecroppers and tenant farmers. On a social stand point they were looked at as a lower race than the whites so the public made them live in separate areas, limited their education and give them almost no choice to go where they pleased. Measures were even taken not to allow blacks to even live near Whites.
African Americans wouldn’t gain any rights until the late 1800’s when President Lincoln passed the emancipation proclamation essentially freeing all slaves of