Race and ethnicity  (Page 17/22)

The dred scott decision

In 1857, a slave named Dred Scott was owned by a physician (Dr. Scott) who was a civilian contractor to the United States Army. Dr. Scott accepted a contract in territory that would enter the union as a free, non-slave state. The abolitionist movement filed suit on behalf of Dred Scott claiming that, because he was residing in free territory, he should no longer be a slave. The Supreme Court of the United States determined that slaves are not human, but are property and thus may be treated like property, meaning that ownership existed regardless of the location of the property.

After the Civil War, a period of marital law existed in the South in the states that had seceded from the Union and joined the Confederate States of America. There were approximately ten million slaves who were freed by the Civil War, most of whom were illiterate—it was illegal to teach a slave to read or write, and a slave caught reading or writing could be killed at once—trained only for work in the fields, had never been more than ten miles from where they were born, and had no concept of money management. Ten million in a nation of 35 million! Ten million people, one-third of the population of the country without the most basic economic skills! Reconstruction was a political process meant to bring the freed slaves up to the same socioeconomic condition of poor whites in order to make them economically self-sufficient. However, Reconstruction became a way to crush the South, grind it down, and pillage what remained after the war. The government did very little to help the newly freed blacks, but Northern abolitionists and religious organizations began to send people into the South to provide an academic education, (reading, writing, arithmetic), and job skill training. A series of schools were established across the South and when the “white, Quaker, school marms,” as W.E.B. DuBois called them, left, they had trained young African Americans to teach the basic skills so that the schools continued long after Reconstruction ended. Unfortunately, the death of Reconstruction gave birth to the segregation laws that later came to be called Jim Crow laws. Jim Crow was a racist, enormously troped, portrayal of American Blacks by a British music hall performer. These segregation laws remained in effect until the mid-to-late 1960s and early 1970s. In fact, in 1896, the Supreme Court of the United States, in a ground-breaking case titled Plessy v. Ferguson , declared that segregation was Constitutional establishing the legal separation and unequal treatment of people based on race! It wasn’t until 1955, nearly sixty years later and ninety years after the end of the Civil War, in another ground-breaking case titled Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas that the Supreme Court decided, unanimously, that segregation was inherently discriminatory and thus unConstitutional.

Chinese/asian exclusion

Many Chinese men had been recruited by the railroad companies to work on the Transcontinental Railroad—a vast, complex, engineering feat to span the continent and link the entire expanse of the middle of North America, from the Atlantic to the Pacific ocean. By 1887, the project was complete and many of the Chinese workers, having saved the majority of their pay, returned home, or, conversely, began to send for their families—parents, siblings, wives and children, sweethearts, cousins—beginning a steady migration stream from China to the United States. Many of these former railroad workers settled along the West Coast and began to compete, economically, with the white population of the region. Feeling serious economic pressure from the Chinese immigrants, whites on the West Coast petitioned Congress to stop migration from China. Congress complied and passed a bill titled the “Asian Exclusionary Act.”