The Historical Progression of African American Essay Example for Free

The Historical Progression of African American EssayIn Unit One, purport for African Americans was transformed by Lincolns proclamation of emancipation. The amicable/cultural electric receptacle they approach was without frugal dependence, effective freedom would never be had. In reaction to that issue they chose to gain literacy, bod dispirited churches, and remain working for white-hot land owners. The outcome of that was the establishment of black churches controlled by freed staves, blacks were expert to be teachers, and sh arcropping agreements were made between white land owners and African Americans. In Unit Two, life for African Americans was plagued by violence and bullying. The political issue they approach was reform for the support of white supremacy. In response to that issue they chose to protest against segregation, discrimination, and disfranchisement. The outcome was the establishment of the organization National Association for the Advancement of Colo red citizenry (NAACP) which rallied for the equal rights and privileges of African Americans. In Unit Three, life for African Americans was leaning toward financial independence.The economic issue they faced was securing conk out paying jobs. In response to this issue they sought employment in the coerce and automobile industries. The outcome was the black owned businesses, Pullman porters, and fruit in the entertainment industry by air of the Harlem Renaissance. In Unit Four, African Americans became influential in the television and film industry. The literary issue that they faced was unbiased portrayal of their culture. In response to that issue African Americans became freelance writers and photographers.The outcome was the showcase of the able African American writers and photographers who achieved rose above the achievements of their peers. In Unit Five, the life of African Americans was ridiculed by the development in juvenile pregnancies. The religious issue they fa ced is abstinence is more spiritually moral than endure control. In response to that issue they choose use the methods that they saw fit to counter act jejune pregnancies. The outcome of that was a decrease in the incidents of puerile pregnancies.The historical progression of African Americans was accompanied by new found freedom, racism, and struggle for equal rights and opportunities. The Civil War was supposed to be justification of social and political freedom for all American born race. The end of the Civil War bought freedom to en slaved African Americans but the change in social status did not provide much relief for them be social movement they lacked economic dependence. The stopover from 1865-1876 was the most transforming period in history for African Americans.Emancipation freed slaves from whippings, the breakup of families, sexual exploitation, and invariable confinement. For African Americans freedom meant the right to travel without the permission of their whit e captors. The south witnessed a massive migration of freedmen as they traveled to reunite families and establish permanent homes. Politically, it became evident that emancipation and equality were not synonymous and that onerousness arose in a variety of forms. Political actions influenced an economic situation that was already bleak (Meacham, 2003).Prominent African American leaders fought the National Republican Party to secure rights promised by the Equal Rights Amendments and to glide by those rights into square independence for the freed tribe. However this would be difficult because of the numbers of newly freed slaves who were largely uneducated, highly migratory plot of ground searching for family or employment, and largely disorganized by centuries of oppression (Meacham, 2003). After the Civil War, the newly freed southerly blacks true many methods to obtain the freedom and equality that they had expected from emancipation. One much(prenominal)(prenominal) effort w as the Exoduster thrust.The Exoduster exercise was an attempt by Benjamin Pap Singleton, a former slave and new(prenominal)s to encourage migration of African Americans from the doddering south to Kansas. Singleton worked towards this goal within the black community in a variety of ways and developed support in the dominant societys institutions. Singleton saw the need to improve the material status of freedmen. In 1880, he told the Senate, My people want land we need land for our children and our disadvantages that caused my heart to grieve and sorrow pity for my race, sir, that was orgasm down, instead of going up that caused me to go to work for them. Because of the freedmen history of agricultural labor, land seemed the most advantageous need for their economic development (Meacham, 2003). Blacks remaining in the South after the war had few choices, so they had to continue to work for white landowners. Although they paid close to wages, whites wished to continue the o ld system of labor consisting of adjacent supervision, gang labor, and physical punishment. African Americans refusal to work under these conditions or live in the old slave quarters near the masters house, afforded them the task of erecting cabins on plantation land locate far away from the main house.Wages were at $5 or $6 a calendar month but in the year 1867 wages increased to $10 a month. Because African Americans fireed were able to farm separate sections of land, a rise in sharecropping developed. African Americans would tend the crops and split them with the white landowner at the end of the planting season (Davidson, Gienapp, et al, 2008). After the Civil War, educational activity became the main source of release from the psychical chains of slavery. During this cartridge clip there were many who had never experienced basic education due to the constraints of slavery.However, those who had been clear to formal as well as informal education established what was call ed Sabbath schools which were operated in churches on Sundays and by dint of the week. Religious denominations such as African Methodist apostolical, Colored Methodist Episcopal, and Black Baptist helped to educate freedmen because they knew that education was a form of eradicating illiteracy, poverty, and the degradation of slavery. Education was not just a strike against discrimination, but a means of gaining remark and dignity ( Butner, 2005).The anti-freedom gallery progressed and grew stronger. During the period from 1877 to 1920, the situation hardly changed for better. The discrimination of African Americans was ongoing. The 1890s was one of the lowest points for African Americans. Lynching increased, black voting suffered drastic restrictions, and special facilities were used to separate whites from blacks. This segregation was represented by signs painted with the words For Whites Only. African Americans from all walks of life began to fight tail against such discrim inations.Booker T. Washington tried to influence blacks to accept segregation but W. E. B. Du Bois believed that intellectual growth would be damaged if they settled for vocational training. Du Bois, not accepting of the discriminatory caste system incorporate by whites, also believe that blacks could achieve a better future if they fought politics to gain ballot and equal rights. As a result of protest against segregation, disfranchisement, and discrimination the Niagra Movement was formed in 1905.This movement sought political and economic equality for colored people. However, in 1909 a coalition of black and white reformers came together and changed the movement into the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) which challenged the legality of the Jim-Crow system of superstition and segregation (Davidson, Gienapp, et al, 2008). Black professionals identified the Achilles heel of white supremacy. Segregation provided blacks the chance, indeed, the imp erative, to develop a range of trenchant institutions that they controlled.Maneuvering through their organizations and institutions, they exploited that fundamental weakness in the separate but equal system permitted by the U. S. Supreme Courts 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson. For all their violence, lynching, prejudice, and hatred, white supremacists could not exterminate black people. The white supremacists major(ip) goal, after all, was to maintain an exploitable labor force that would remain in a inferior place (Hine, 2003). However, in 1921-1945, the situation started to improve and the well-behaved right movement of African Americans had started to grow stronger.The 1920s were the period cognise as the Harlem Renaissance. As a result of the Great Migration of African Americans from South to North, their number of blacks in Federal states increased steadily. They had more opportunity to exercise their rights because oppression in the North was not as wicked as in the S outh. The cultural movement, known as the Harlem Renaissance, spread nationwide and became a powerful movement which proved that African American communities had the power and strength to achieve success in the US (Tolnay, 2003).Since the time of Emancipation in the 1860s, economic circumstance handicapped Baltimores Afro-Americans. They understood that advances in economic opportunities were crucial to other gains in social coming and civil rights. During the 1930s workplaces across Baltimore begin to yield such access and opportunity. Increased access and opportunities came in a wide array of industries. The strength behind the change be on the expanding black population. Ariving by bus, train, and by car, African Americans came to Baltimore in search of higher wages and to operate from the hedged-in experience of the deeper South.They came in search of greater job variety and greater political freedom. By the mid-1940s, Baltimore-bound blacks averaged lambert people each da y and as many as 300 per week. Drawn to Baltimore for the chance at something better, they more than doubled the citys African-American population in the forty years following 1910. Union goals and civil rights aims largely paralleled each other. Amid the talk of labor reform, a rights consciousness developed among blacks, supplying working-class militance with a powerful, moral foundation.War-time protests, such of the 1942 March On Annapolis, also emphasized the need for opportunities. For example, when white workers walked take away their jobs at Western Electric in 1943, in protest of the absence of worksite segregation, in pique of racial tensions many blacks progressed economically and occupationally. Beyond industrial work, blacks struggled through the 1940s. All of the 800 employees in the citys post worked as custodians or mail handlers. The municipal governing as well as many other city departments prohibit African-Americans from employment.By the early 1950s, most mu nicipal entities dropped their color bar, including the Baltimore City Fire Department, which appointed ten black firelighters in 1953. In the private sector, several important companies offered semi-skilled positions to blacks for the first time, including the Yellow Cab Company, which opened driver opportunities in 1951(Terry, 2004). In the post-World War II period, from 1946 to 1974, African Americans became major contributors in the television and film industry. African American actors and actresses were forced to accept demeaning roles or have no roles.However in spite of these demeaning portrayals, African Americans starved to see folks who looked like themselves in films and on television. During the 1970s, several African American families were introduced on American television with series such as The Jeffersons (George and Louise) and Good Times (James and Florida Evans). twain shows were spin-offs of Norman Lear programs The Jeffersons hailed from All in the Family and G ood Times from Maude. Two important components regarding these programs addressed are their overall societal harm and/or good and the different way, in which blacks and whites processed the programs contents.The widely popular Cosby try arrived in the 1980s, providing a stark contrast to the ghetto based comedies of the 1970s (Mastin, 2006). In 1964, Sidney Poiters acting endowment fund and skill earned him an Oscar, making him the first African American male to win this prestigious honor. Finally, teenage pregnancy has plagued the African American community for many years. The high rate of teen pregnancy among African-American adolescents and damaging consequences of premature parenting make it imperative that strategies be developed to address these problems.This oversight is tragic minded(p) that an early adolescent pregnancy often predicts the beginning of a rapid succession of unwanted conducts and that such repeat pregnancies have adverse consequences for the infants hea lth as well as for the mothers developmental, educational, and occupational well-being (Okwumabau, Okwumabau, Elliott, 1998) The period from 1976-present, several attempts have been made throughout the African-American community to provide programs and services to prevent this problem.However, some scholars and practitioners argue that such ginmill programs and services are doomed to failure when African-American communities lack the ability to name or build on the cultural integrity of that community. The continued high rate of adolescent pregnancy among African-Americans, despite extensive intervention and prevention efforts, brings to the forefront the issue of cultural consistency as a key ingredient in providing prevention programs (Okwumabau, Okwumabau, Elliott, 1998).The Let the Circle Be Unbroken Rites of transit program is a translation of the theoretical underpinnings of an Afrocentric conceptual model into a prevention program. It influences adaptation of socialisat ion processes observed in African cultures, which acknowledge that it is necessary to assist adolescents in the transition or enactment from childhood into adulthood. Rites of passage is a cultural experience which requires that ideology, education, training, and culture be taught prior to an activity or celebration marking the successful transition from one stage of development (adolescence) to another (adulthood).For example, young people in many African societies are involved in initiation and training experiences that can extend from a few days or weeks to several years. More often than not, the training is conducted by elders in the society and includes a period of total separation from ones family and community during which the young person lives alone or together (communally) with others who are also in training. The young persons return from the separation-back to her family or community-signifies the successful completion of a developmental process and the earning of the r espect of the community for having done so.This is the time that new responsibilities and privileges are given to the callowness The Rites of Passage program began in 1991 as a pilot project of the Memphis City Schools Adolescent Parenting Program. It initially targeted pregnant and parenting adolescents and was offered as an after-school program at the Comprehensive Pupil Services Educational total (CPSEC), home to the systems special program for pregnant and parenting students.The subjects that are covered in the Rites of Passage program are Knowing Africa increases awareness of global Africa, her geography, people, culture, beliefs, community, and family. Knowing Self and Others introduces participants, adult facilitators, leaders, and elders to the Rites of Passage program as a means of socializing youth for adult roles and responsibilities. Family register encourages appreciation of the African-American family, including its role and function from a cultural and historical p erspective.The History of African People increases basic understanding of the history and accomplishments of people of African descent. Family Life Education increases knowledge and awareness about family life matters, including human sexuality and how ones sexuality relates to responsibility, values, and respect for self and others. Spirituality The Journey Within increases understanding and awareness of the splendor of spirituality to well being. fetching Care of Self and Etiquette promotes understanding of the importance of total wellness, including physical, emotional, and spiritual well being and enhances understanding of socially acceptable (appropriate and inappropriate) behaviors. Housekeeping and Finances increases understanding of the overall management of a household, including financial planning, money management, and housewife skills (cleaning, grocery shopping, cooking, sewing, and mending).Values Clarification and Goal Setting develops awareness of the traditional va lue system that direct African people, and explores and begins to clarify individual values and encourages behavior, including life goals, that is consistent with values Conflict Resolution and fierceness Prevention increases awareness and understanding of violence, including the kinds of violence that are destroying AfricanAmerican communities and people as well as the cause and consequences of violence.It also illustrates that violence is preventable and that there are alternatives to violence. Creativity increases basic understanding of the contribution of people of African descent to the inventive arts as well as knowledge and appreciation of the creative arts, particularly those related to the history and culture of African people. X Life Management Time, School, Work, and Leisure develops skills to fitly manage ones life in regard to time spent at school, work, and at leisure.HIV/ support and Other Life-Threatening Conditions increases knowledge and awareness about sexually transmitted diseases and other health conditions (high tear pressure, homicide) that threaten the longevity of people of African descent. Communication increases awareness of the importance of communication skills. Assertiveness and leading increases awareness of the qualities of leadership, including those qualities shown by famous and/or high profile African-Americans, as well as the importance of assertiveness and leadership to ones growth and development.Career Development exposes participants to a variety of line of achievement options and the requirements for each career (Okwumabau, Okwumabau, Elliott, 1998). The Let the Circle Be Unbroken Rites of Passage program helped to decrease the incidents of teenage pregnancy among African American teenagers by providing them with knowledge of ancestrial heritage, self, family values, spirituality, and personal skills that influence them to make effective decision about birth control and sexuality which will not hinder them from s ucceeding in life due to teenage parenthood.Conclusion Lincolns signing of the Emancipation Proclamation in Unit One subjected African Americans to a life where economic dependence was vital in securing true freedom. The assistance of black churches enabled them recognize the importance of education in developing their own communities, securing employment, and gaining respect of white land owners. Although violence and intimidation was a part of the political reform of the Democrats in support of white supremacy, African Americans remained steadfast.Protests of social injustices such as segregation, discrimination, and disfranchisement, influenced the formation of the organization National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) defenders of the equal rights and privileges of African Americans. African Americans achievement of financial independence in Unit Three was dependent on securing better paying jobs. The migration from South to North and the Harlem Renaissa nce afforded them the opportunity of employment as factory workers, postal workers and government employees.The unbiased portrayal of African Americans in television and film in Unit Four support the creation of sitcoms and movies that presented the progression of blacks from demeaning roles to award winning roles that showcased their talents as award winning writers, photographers, actors, and actresses. The development of prevention programs in Unit Five, helped to decreased the incidents of teenage pregnancy by increasing community awareness. References Butner, B. (2005). The Methodist Episcopal Church and the Education of African Americans After the Civil War.Christian Higher Education, 4(4), 265-276. Retrieved July 20, 2009 from http//search. ebscohost. com. Davidson, J. W. , Gienapp, W. E. , et al. (2008). Nation of nations a narrative history of the American Republic (6th ed. , Vol. 2). Boston McGraw Hill. Hayes, J. 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