African American Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

African American - Essay Example nds to look into the history of anti-black oppression for the period from 1865 to 1941, that is, Reconstruction and the time of Jim Crow, and identify how blacks adopted various strategies to resist the onslaught. The Civil War was disastrous for the South. Lasting from 1861 until 1865, it killed a considerable number of people, and devastated the Southern aristocracy in all means. As the Thirteenth Amendment was accepted, the blacks became a freed lot instantaneously. They eagerly started pursuing everything the free people did. For example, they started political actions, opened churches and schools, bought arms, drank liquor, and owned dogs. Though there was the call for a New South, there was no significant improvement in the condition of the African-Americans. Many of them were forced to continue as sharecroppers and tenant farmers because the textile, iron, and steel factories preferred white women instead of blacks (Gao, 2000, pp. 59-60). This kind of discrimination is evidenced in the story of Frances, the black daughter of a white man, Emmanuel Driggus. Though Emmanuel tried his best to save the girl from slavery, the judicial system did not allow that. Though she approached a court of law alleging her master of fathering her child, she was punished for fornication but the person she accused was set free as the court was not ready to take a black woman’s word against a white man (Aurora, 2013). Though the Civil Rights Act of 1875 abolished discrimination in public places, there was a flood of court cases against the Act, resulting in the infamous Jim Crow laws (Morrison, 2003, p. 71). This created an atmosphere promoting white racial superiority, and violence and lynching of blacks rose sharply (Hine, Hine & Harold, 2011, p. 97). Another serious trouble faced by the blacks was the attempts to deny their voting rights. Though the Fifteenth Amendment offered them the right to vote, many southern states attempted to deny their rights through various