Lecture 7: Race--African Americans

1
Lecture 7 Race--African Americans

• History of slavery and discrimination
• Civil Rights Movement
• Integration
• Affirmative Action

2
African Americans early history of slavery

• 18th century
• most widespread on coastal plantations of
  Virginia and Carolinas--rice, tobacco, cotton
• Two major technological changes effecting slavery
  in early 19th century
• cotton gin
• industrial revolution
• king cotton

3
Civil War Era

• Dred Scott v Sanford (1857)
• federal govt cannot ban slavery from some states
• blacks cannot be citizens
• Civil War (1861-65)
• Passage of 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments
• Reconstruction (1865-77)
• black voting and office-holding
• Freedmans Bureau 40 acres and a mule
• for most from slavery to cropping shares

4
Retreat Post Reconstruction

• Re-establishing segregation Black codes and
  Jim Crow
• Plessy v Ferguson (1892)
• separate but equal
• Denying the vote
• poll taxes
• literacy tests
• grandfather clauses

5
Great Migration

• WWI--tractors and mechanization beginning
• 1920s Harlem Renaissance
• WWII--work in northern factories
• 1940-60s--mass migration
• from rural to urban population
• language, culture, music, political power

6
Creation of the Ghetto

• de-industrialization from 60s on
• suburbanization/white flight
• block-busting
• Federal govt. red-lining
• urban renewal and public housing policy

7
Civil Rights Mvmt

• Brown v Board of Ed. (1954)
• Overturns Plessey
• Montgomery bus boycott (1955)
• NAACP joined by SCLC then SNCC
• Civil Rights Act 1964
• outlaws discrimination in employment and
  accommodation
• establishes EEOC
• Voting Rights Act 1965
• outlaws poll taxes and literacy tests

8
Effect of Voting Rights on South

• March 1965 November 1988
• Black White Gap Black White Gap
• AL 19.3 69.2 49.9 68.4 75.0
  6.6
• GA 27.4 62.6 35.2 56.8 63.9
  7.1
• LA 31.6 80.5 48.9 77.1 75.1
  -2.0
• MS 6.7 69.9 63.2 74.2 80.5
  6.3

9
Integration

• New Deal programs included blacks, then war
  industries
• Army segregated until Korea (1951)
• Education 10 years after Brown--little to show
• Busing imposed by federal courts (1966-80) amidst
  resistance and flight

10
Changing direction

• Early 70s Supreme Court limits imposed
  integration to remedy only de jure, not de facto
  segregation
• 1991 Oklahoma City case reverses the need to
  continually integrate

11
Integration-- Achievements

• 1968-88 dramatic increase in number of blacks in
  majority white schools

12
Integration--failures

• Re-segregation today over 2/3 of black kids are
  in majority black schools

13
Affirmative Action

• Beginning in 1960s
• preferences for minorities and women for govt
  hiring, contracts, and govt funded education
• voluntary preferences in private sector
• Bakke v Regents of UC (1978)
• no quotas, but as a factor OK
• Californias Prop 209 (1996)
• race-blind admissions, but not quite sweeping the
  country
• recent Michigan case allowed Affirmative Action