Race, Slavery and the Civil rights movement

1. Race, Slavery and the Civil rights movement Black culture and African American literature

2. Do you know? • Jim Crow Law? • Segregation • Emancipation • Non violence action • Black English • African-American writers?

3. Becoming African American • New economic opportunities discovered by Christopher Columbus. • The development of the Americas’ riches required a large and relatively cheap labor force.

4. Becoming African American From 1501 to 1870 about 12 million Africans were forcibly loaded aboard ships on the West African coast and taken to the Americas. • Jamestown beginning. August 1619. From indentured servants to slaves. The slave deck of the bark “Wildfire”, brought into Key West (Florida) on April 30, 1860.

6. A Slave Market in Atlanta Georgia in 1864

7. 1857 Map Showing Free and Slave States

8. The beginning of the new distinct African American culture • 3 overlapping processes: • Hundreds of African societies represented in the Middle Passage merged their languages, religions. Folktales, music into generalized African cultural forms

9. The beginning of the new distinct African American culture 2. Contact with European colonists (and, to a lesser extent, Native Americans) supplied additional cultural influences. 3.The experience of bondage prompted African slaves to shape their culture to meet the day-to-day needs of an oppressed people.

10. Forms of the status of black people in the US • Slavery – the complete ownership of one person by another person. • Indentured service – the ownership of a person’s labor for a period of time by another person or a group of people.

11. Expansion of slavery • slaves – house servants, artisans, most – fiels hands on the farms and plantations of the antebellum South. • Cruel existence – labored from dawn until dusk, planting, cultivating, or harvesting cotton, tobacco, sugar. Ate monotonous and often inadequate diet of corn and pork, ill fitting clothes, dark, poorly heated cabins.

12. Religion – a key element of culture • Whites used Christianity to socialize slaves to work hard, to be obedient. They created their own Christianity to help them survive. (Roy Finkenbine) • Spirituals created to worship services. (Spiritual song – from the Bible)

13. Go down, Moses • When Israel was in Egypt's land, Let my people go, Oppressed so hard they could not stand, Let my people go. Go down, Moses, Way down in Egypt land, Tell ole Pharaoh, Let my people go.

14. Abolitionists • Abolitionism – organized opposition to slavery – first emerged among free blacks and fugitive slaves in the 1820s.

15. Emancipation process • The emancipation process began in April 1861 with the outbreak of the American Civil War between the Free states of the North and the slave states of the South. • January 1, 1863 President Abraham Lincoln – the Emancipation Proclamation.

16. Emancipation during Reconstruction • 1865 13th Amendment to Constitution completely abolished slavery • 14th Amendment to Constitution gave blacks full citizenship rights.

17. The Color Line in the Era of Segregation • Segregation laws established a strict color line between the races in school, public water fountains, parks, streetcars or railroad car, hospitals, cemeteries. • This system is known as Jim Crow law. • Jim Crow – an antebellum minstrel caricature of African Americans

18. Jim Crow caricature

19. Segregation forms • Racial Etiquette – among whites – bowing, removing their hats, greeting them as “Mister” or “Miz”. • Punishment for violation of the Jim Crow laws. Lynching – the illegal killing (hanging, burning) of black people for real or imagined crimes. • The Ku Klux Klan, White League

20. The Harlem Renaissance • Black talent in the arts and music flowered during the 1920s,’30s, ‘40s. • The role of black people in World War II. “We want to be soldiers not servants”.

21. Civil Rights Movement. • Rosa Parks arrested in Montgomery, Alabama on December 1, 1955 for refusing to give up her seat to a white person on a city bus. Boycott. • Martin Luther King, Jr. the idea of nonviolent direct action. The Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. Assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4, 1968. • August 28, 1963 250 000 people – a march on Washington. “I have a dream…” (Quotation p. 121).

22. Rosa Parks

23. Bus Boycott

24. Martin Luther King

25. Tony Morrison

26. Toni Morrison • Toni Morrison (born on February 18, 1931), is a Nobel Prize-winning American author, editor, and professor. Her novels are known for their epic themes, vivid dialogue, and richly detailed black characters; among the best known are her novels The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, and Beloved, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988. In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante listed Toni Morrison on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans

27. Beloved. • The book begins in 1873, in the aftermath of slavery and the Civil War. The story begins just before Paul D comes to stay with Sethe and Denver at 124. Much of the information that weaves the story together, however, is told with the memories of these three characters.

28. Alice Walker

29. Alice Walker • (born February 9, 1944) self-declared feminist and womanist—the latter a term she herself coined to make special distinction for the experiences of women of color. She has written at length on issues of race and gender, and is most famous for the critically acclaimed novel The Color Purple, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

30. Alice Walker. Quotations. • Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender. • In search of my mother’s garden I found my own. • Ignorance, arrogance and racism have bloomed as Superior knowledge in all too many universities.

31. The Color Purple. • The story is told through a series of diary entries and letters. Celie is a poor and uneducated young woman who, at fourteen, is raped and impregnated twice by a man she believes to be her father. He sold both of her children to a pastor and his wife and later sold Celie to a man who originally wanted to marry her sister. After some time of living there, she is joined in her new home by her younger sister, Nettie, whom Celie's new husband had originally wanted to marry. After Celie's husband tries to seduce Nettie and fails he forces her to leave and she goes to the home of a pastor, promising to write to Celie. As time passes, no such letters appear to arrive and so Celie assumes that Nettie is dead.

32. Black English • Ebonics • African American variant of English • (Dialect)