23. Post war america

23. Post war America

profile: A history of Black America

state: McCarthyism, Cold War, Vietnam, the Sixties

• 1526 – first use of African slaves in present day US by the Spanish

• racial science (scientific racism)

• 16th century to 1808 – the transatlantic slave trade (majority of slaves were traded in the 18th and early 19th centuries continuing after it was outlawed (nezákonyý) by the British and Americans)

• 1850 Eugenics (set of beliefs that aim to improve genetic quality of human population), part of Victorian period

• 1607 first colony James Town (first Africans in Jamestown)

1640s onwards

• at first slavery was mixed with indentured servitude and African slaves had some rights and an uncertain (nejasný) legal status

• indentured (to have contract, legal obligation)

• servitude put you in special program and for 7 years you work, you have legal rights, you can’t be killed, tortured but you can’t run away (work without a pay of the indenture for a period time) if you run you are punished, if you don’t work you don’t get food

• for Irish it would be punishment they had harder conditions

• 1619 first African at indentured servitude

• John Punch

• an African indentured servant who ran away and was then sentenced to life long slavery

• for the first time, Africans are treated different

• this case started to set the pattern and Africans in America started to be deemed outside of English common law and so have no rights, for example a child of a female slave would no longer have the status of his/her father but that of the mother which was handy for male slave owners

• Elizabeth Key

• one of the first black people of North American colonies

• she was putted for her safety in indentured servitude

• because she is black the family didn’t want to realise her when it was time

• she was daughter of Englishman so it was illegal

• she was also a baptized Christian

• because of these two factors her husband William Grinstead argued successfully that she should be freed (common-law)

• they were through several courts they had different ideas about this situation but the highest court said that she has her rights (she got paid from the family cloths, corn, …)

• some Africans managed to gain free status starting the northern tradition of freemen hereditary indentured servitude (children of indentured servants were born free / slaves children were property of owners)

• meanwhile, as Britain’s economy improved fewer British people opted to go into indentured servitude and the states especially in the south needed more and more slaves for cheap labour

• surprisingly only about 350,000 Africans were taken to the actual United States as slaves but with little chance of being freed and children having the status of their mother the majority of black Americans were slaves (today 50 million Afro-Americans live in the USA)

• living standards of UK went up

• 1644 slavery became the main source of labour in the southern colonies

• the North is looking for industrial future

• the South they wanted to keep slave economy

• 1860s declaration of independence end of slavery

• the deep South (how to keep power? ) violence or systematic laws of race Jim Crow laws

• underground railway (secret routs and safe houses in United States and used by enslaved African American to escape into free states and Canada)

• bounty hunters were allowed to pursue them but often simply kidnapped free blacks, especially children, and took them south

• in we have Britain antislavery movement

• Abolition movement (movement to end slavery)

• who escaped to UK was free

• idea that black man is sexual threat

• violence and intimidation

• sharecropping (is a form of agricultural in which a landowner allows a tenant (nájemce) to use the land in return for a share of the crops produced on the land)

• great movement 1840s Harlem, NY, Detroit, Chicago (black nation is migrating to north)

• that means you have voters

• you can see social economic segregation (white flight – large scale migration of white people from areas becoming more racially or ethnoculturally diverse)