Blacks in the United-States (1865 - today)

Résumé du document

Before the 1940s, there were two schools of thought: the integrationists, who favored the economic and civic equality of the Whites and the separatists, advocating separation of the Blacks from the White community, and even suggesting a return to Africa. The Civil Rights movement that took place between 1955 and 1963 was represented by several integrationist organizations like the CORE (Congress of Racial Equality), founded 1943 and the SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference), founded 1957 with Martin Luther King. Between 1963 and 1970 separatist groups opted for revolutionary violence and self-defense. These included the SNCC (the Student Non-violent Coordination Committee), the Black Power, the Black Panthers (with Huey P Newton, Bobby Seale, Eldridge Cleaver). Today, there are still many movements like the Rainbow coalition (with Jesse Jackson) to include all oppressed minorities and the racist Islam groups and the anti-Semitic group who organized the One-Million-Man March in October 1995.

Extraits

[...] Where laws failed to keep blacks in their place, another technique was resorted to: lynching. 1909: The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is founded, dominated by whites : The black exodus to the Northern towns and found themselves shut up in ghettoes. 1955: On a bus in Montgomery, Rosa Parks refuses to move to the Negro section. She is arrested. A young minister, Martin Luther King urges blacks to boycott the buses. The Supreme Court ordered an end to Montgomery's bus segregation. [...]

[...] And young blacks overwhelmingly support school vouchers; those over 65 are strongly against. Blacks in the US nowadays, how things evolve Forty years after the Voting Rights Act (1965 under President Lyndon Johnson), African-Americans are freer, richer and more influential. But hardly anyone is happy about the state of Black America Political life Remember, Blacks had to pass “literacy tests” to vote (for example: how many bubbles are there in a bar of soap?)_ that's the way Southern whites got round the American constitution's 15th amendment, ratified in 1870, which promised that no citizen should be denied a vote on account of race or colour. [...]

[...] King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. Late 1960s and early 1970s: Creation of the Black Panther movement, committed to building self-governed, independent black communities ('Black is beautiful'; 'Afro' hairdos) /1988: Rev Jesse Jackson runned for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination. 2000: There is a not-guilty verdict for the policemen who shot Amadou Diallo, shot by 4 policemen in the hall of his building as he was looking for his identity papers. II) Black movements Before the 1940s, there were two tendencies: the integrationists, who were favouring economic and civic equality with the Whites (cf the NAACP) and the separatists, advocating separation of the Blacks from the White community, some even suggesting a return to Africa. [...]

[...] But jobless black youths did not turn up to take these new jobs. Such opportunities were seized by immigrants. Their excuse was that such jobs did not offer a living wage though this proved to be irrelevant because these workers acquired basic work skills and later transferred to better jobs. There is a real gap between black men and women in education: women often graduate and go on to college; black men don't. One of the major reasons for such a discrepancy is the “cool-pose culture”: it is cool to take drugs, to hang out on the street after school, to shop and dress sharply, to make sexual conquests, to have parties with drugs, to listen to hip-hop music and to develop this culture. [...]

[...] *Blacks at school do worse than whites or Asians. Black men, on average, earn less than white men do, a disparity often blamed on discrimination in the job market. But a study shows that if one compares black men with white with similar scores on standardised tests, the blacks earn slightly more. The gap in reading score between blacks and whites is shrinking, from 44 points in 1971 to 26 points in 2004. Black children who get good grades are sometimes accused by their peers of “acting white” and are ostracised; this can happen in mixed-race public schools but is unlikely to be the case of blacks who attend private schools and of those in schools virtually all- black. [...]