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400 years since slavery - Coggle Diagram
400 years since slavery
The 17th century
1619
The majority of the country remained white and relied mainly on the labor of Native American slaves and white European indentured servants.
A ship with 20 captives landed at Point Comfort in Virginia, ushering in the era of American slavery.
1661
The first anti-miscegenation statute – prohibiting marriage between races – was written into law in Maryland.
The 18th century
1776
The Declaration of Independence, which embraced in its first lines “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights”, did not extend that right to slaves, Africans or African Americans.
1790 US Census
At the time of the first US Census, non-white slaves accounted for a sizable portion of the population of southern states.
Georgia : Rice, indigo, cotton
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North Carolina : Tobacco, cotton
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South Carolina : Rice, indigo, cotton
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The 19th century
1860
The British-operated slave trade across the Atlantic was one of the biggest businesses of the 18th century. Approximately 600,000 of 10 million African slaves made their way into the American colonies before the slave trade – not slavery – was banned by Congress in 1808.
Proponents of slavery supported the efforts of groups like the American Colonization Society, who “sent back” tens of thousands of free black people – most of them American-born – to Liberia in the 19th century to prevent disruption caused by free descendants of slaves.
1868
Some experts have argued that Reconstruction laid the foundation for “the organization of new segregated institutions, white supremacist ideologies, legal rationalizations, extra-legal violence and everyday racial terror” – further widening the racial divide among blacks and whites.
But eventually, under the 14th amendment, African American men were granted the right to vote. Also, African Americans were extended birthright citizenship: that extends to descendants of freed black slaves and immigrants to present day.
1877
The Jim Crow era of segregation forbade African Americans from drinking from the same water fountains, eating at the same restaurants or attending the same schools as white Americans – all lasting until, and sometimes well past, the 1960s.
1898
The recession of the late 19th century hit the US. Knight riders went out in the dark, burning the homes of African Americans who bought their own land. They rode up to Washington to demand change as southern white Democrats rolled back many of the albeit limited freedoms from Reconstruction just a couple of decades before.
1865
According to Abraham Lincoln, the civil war was fought to keep America whole, and not for the abolition of slavery – at least initially. Lincoln took on the fight for the freedom of slaves, some historians have suggested, because he was worried the British would support the south in its self-declared self-determination and recognize the south as a separate entity.
The 20th century
1964
President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law. Bussing African American children to white schools in white neighborhoods was deemed constitutional.
1965
“Slavery was gone but Jim Crow was alive. Almost all southern African Americans were shut out of the ballot box and the political power it could yield,” wrote Edward E Baptist in The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 attempted to correct this, prohibiting racial discrimination in voting and placing restrictions on a number of southern states if they tried to change voting rights laws. Those restrictions were recently overturned in a 2013 supreme court ruling.
1926
As African Americans were shut out of jobs and opportunities during Jim Crow, and as more jobs became available in the north and midwest, more than 2 million southern African Americans migrated after the first world war.
1954
in the Brown v Board of Education ruling, the supreme court ruled that segregation was unconstitutional and schools would have to integrate.