The Struggle for Racial Equality

Dustin Gill

Hist 111

Professor Sutton

The Struggle for Racial Equality

African Americans have struggled since arriving on slave ships in the 1600s. For two centuries slaves were forced to work in plantations under the watchful eye of their white owner. They were not educated and had poor living conditions. Not until the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 did African Americans gain freedom to be true Americans. Though they were free, African Americans struggled for equality and prosperity because of the color of their skin and past as slaves in the late 19th through the 20th century. Through those eras blacks biggest struggles were finding work, owning property, and escaping Jim Crow Laws.

After gaining new freedom, African Americans struggled to find work. They had little education or skills because they only knew how to do physical labor on plantations. Whites in the south did not want to hire them because of their race and lack of knowledge. This forced them into the same jobs they had once done as slaves, but with a small wage. To help blacks get educated and find better jobs, Booker T. Washington set up the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama in 1881. Washington believed that “[Blacks] greatest danger is that in the great leap from slavery to freedom we may overlook the fact that the masses of us are to live by the proportion as we learn to dignify and glorify common labor and put brains and skill into the common occupations of life”. In the institute, he taught many vocational skills that would help African Americans get jobs on the railroads and other booming industries. Washington also told blacks to “put aside political issues and social equality” and focus on education and economic progress. For black women it was even harder to find jobs. They found jobs as domestic servants throughout the south. With the turn of the century though, African Americans gained more opportunities in industries.

African Americans continued to struggle to find...