Slavery To Black Lives Matter – History Of Racism In USA

Black Lives Matter protests 2020

Protests have broken out all across the USA after the death of George Floyd, an African American, in Minneapolis city.
Police have used tear gas and force against demonstrators and President Donald Trump has threatened to send in the military.
Some acts of Looting and arson have also occurred.

The 13^th Amendment, abolishing slavery except as punishment for a crime, was passed in January 1865 by Congress.
4 million slaves became freemen and freewomen.

The institution of police in modern USA Police started off with systematic racism and violence in the form of ‘slave-patrol’.
The slave states created ‘patrols’ to nip slave revolts and escapes.
The state of South Carolina was the first to create slave patrols in 1704.
By the end of the 1700s, every American slave state had slave patrols
The former southern slave patrols morphed into police departments that technically were different from slave patrols, but were basically still charged with controlling the freed former slaves.
This carried on in the Reconstruction and Jim crow laws era for the next 80 years.

Started at the end of Civil war.
To reconstruct the south and integrate freed black people into society.
Efforts to give some legal rights and economic support to recently freed slaves (Blacks)
Failed to provide any substantial rights.

While the 15th Amendment barred voting rights discrimination on the basis of race, it left the door open for states to determine the specific qualifications for suffrage.
Southern state legislatures used such qualifications—including literacy tests, poll taxes and other discriminatory practices—to disenfranchise a majority of black voters in the decades following Reconstruction.

Jim Crow laws were state and local laws that enforced racial segregationin the Southern United States.
All were enacted in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by white Democratic-dominated state legislatures to disenfranchise and remove political and economic gains made by blacks during the Reconstruction period.
The Jim Crow laws were enforced until 1965.
The Jim crow laws mandated the segregation for whites and blacks in –

1909- Formation of NAACP
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People – a civil rights organization.

The movement was culmination of decades-long struggle by African Americans to end legalizedracial discrimination, disenfranchisement and racial segregation in the United States.
In the 1950s and ‘60s, securing voting rights for African Americans in the South became a central focus of the civil rights movement.
The movement’s philosophy was non –violent resistance.
The methods used were
Civil disobedience
Sit ins
Boycotts
Marches
In 1954, segregation of public schools (state-sponsored) was declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in landmark case Brown v. Board of Education.
In Little rock high school, Arkansas, military had to be sent for black students to attend school.
In some states, it took many years to implement this decision

In 1955, the lynching of Chicago teenager, 14 year old Emmett Till in Mississippi, and the outrage generated by seeing how he had been abused, mobilized the African-American community nationwide.

Montgomery saw a city-wide bus boycott when an African American woman, Rosa Parks, refused to give up her seat for a white man and was arrested for it.
The Montgomery Improvement Association, led by a young priest Martin Luther King Jr, called a boycott of the city’s municipal bus company.
1963- March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom
3 lakh participants

Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) headed by Martin Luther King, Jr..
It largely displaced the old, much more moderate NAACP in taking leadership roles.
King organized massive demonstrations, that seized massive media attention in an era when network television news was an innovative and universally watched phenomenon.
SCLC, student activists and smaller local organizations staged demonstrations across the South

On March 7, 1965, civil rights activists, in response to the police killing of fellow-activist Jimmie Lee Jackson the previous month, were marching from Selma in Alabama to state capital Montgomery when they were attacked by state troopers.
The crackdown came to be famously known as Bloody Sunday in US civil rights annals.

The brutal attacks by state and local law enforcement on hundreds of peaceful marchers led by MLK and other civil rights activists in Selma, Alabama in March 1965 drew unprecedented attention to the movement for voting rights.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned segregation in schools and other public places
The Voting Rights Act 1965 banned literacy tests and other methods used to disenfranchise black voters.

The Black Power movement grew out of the civil rights movement, as black activists experimented with forms of self-advocacy ranging from political lobbying to armed struggle.

On March 3, 1991, Rodney King, a black motorist, was beaten by LAPD officers after a high-speed chase.
A who witnessed the beating from his balcony, videotaped the incident and gave it to a local TV station.
In 1994, The four officers were acquitted, sparking outrage and triggering one of the worst race riots in LA, that lasted six days and left over 50 dead, 2,300 injured.
King was not the first black man to be beaten up by the police, but it was the first time that someone video-recorded the beating.

2012 – George Zimmerman fatally shot an unarmed Trayvon Martin, a 17 year old African-American high school student.
Zimmerman was charged with murder for Martin’s death, but acquitted at trial after claiming self-defense.
It was Zimmerman’s acquittal that gave rise to a hashtag and a movement.
2014 –
The shooting of Michael Brown by a police officer in Ferguson
Officer Acquitted
NYT
There are numerous recent examples of African-American people being killed by law enforcement officers in the US.
High-profile cases from recent years include Philando Castile, Terence Crutcher, Michael Brown and Alton Sterling.
In these cases the officers involved were not convicted of any criminal offence.

In 2019, African Americans made up less than 14% of the population but accounted for more than 23% of the just over 1,000 fatal shootings by the police.