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American Civil War - North (the Union) vs South (the Confederates)
MapBefore the civil war, the slave states of the south, especially those where cotton was grown, relied on slave labour imported from Africa. In 1850, 3.5 million blacks lived in the slave states. Fought 1861-1865, the American Civil War was the result of decades of tensions between the North and South. -
Slavery Abolished
The Union army (the North) gains ground in the Civil War. Slavery is officially abolished. -
Confederate Army surrenders and the Civil War Ends.
One of the outcomes of this was that all black slaves were made free men, but this didn’t change the way that most southern whites reacted to them. They still despised them as though they were still slaves. -
Civil Rights Act
The Civil Rights Act of 1866 is a federal law in the United States declaring that everyone born in the U.S. is a citizen, without regard to race, color, or previous condition of slavery. As citizens they had legal rights and could own property. -
Ku Klux Klan (KKK) founded in the South
Objective was to prevent the blacks enjoying their new-found freedom.
Used violent means to achieve this mission
In 1871, 153 blacks were murdered in a single Florida county and over 300 in the parishes outside New Orleans.
Members wear long white cloaks and hoods which cover their faces. -
Segregation made legal in the South
Racial segregation is the physical separation of blacks and whites and use of separate facilities such as housing, hospitals, schools and transport, even the Armed Forces along racial lines. -
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World War One
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The Great Depression - many African-Americans are out of work and racial tensions grow.
Black Friday - the stockmarket crashes and The Great Depression begins. The depression hit African Americans hard. While many African Americans were already living in poverty, white employers still fired their black workers first. By 1932 more than half of African Americans were out of jobs.
Blacks started to rebel against being regarded as third-class citizens. Racial tensions grew as economic tensions mounted, lynchings in the south saw a huge resurgence. Start WW2 = depression ends. -
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World War Two
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School segregation outlawed
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Rosa Parks challenges segregation on buses by refusing to give up her seat for a white man
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James Meredith - first African American to enrol University of Mississippi
Violence and riots surrounding the incident cause President Kennedy to send 5,000 federal troops. -
Freedom Riders - civil rights activists - ride buses into the segregated southern United States to test federal anti-segregation laws.
Over several months, 1000 student volunteers begin taking bus trips through the South to test out new laws that prohibit segregation in interstate travel facilities, which includes bus and railway stations. Several of the groups of "freedom riders," as they are called, are attacked by angry mobs along the way. -
Bodies of 3 murdered civil rights workers found - this is the murder case around which the plot of Mississippi Burning is based.
(Neshoba Country, Miss.) The bodies of three civil-rights workers—two white, one black—are found in an earthen dam, six weeks into a federal investigation. James E. Chaney, 21; Andrew Goodman, 21; and Michael Schwerner, 24, had been working to register black voters in Mississippi. They were arrested by the police on speeding charges, incarcerated for several hours, and then released after dark into the hands of the KKK who murdered them. -
MLK assassinated
Escaped convict and committed racist James Earl Ray is convicted of the crime.
