INTRODUCTION REPERTOIRE CHILDREN LITERATURE

THE AFRICAN AMERICAN EXPERIENCE (Source: Encarta Encyclopedia) "the overwhelming majority of African Americans were brought to North America as slaves between the 1700s and the early 1800s. As slaves, they were considered the property of their owners and had no rights. African slaves could be found in all 13 of the British colonies, as well as the Spanish colony of Florida and the French colony of Louisiana. After the American Revolution (1775-1783), changing economic conditions resulted in the decline of slavery in the North. However, the spread of cotton cultivation encouraged the growth of slavery in the South. By 1860, 4 million slaves accounted for one-third of the total population of the southern states. About 500,000 free blacks lived throughout the United States, slightly more than half residing in the southern states. In 1863, during the American Civil War (1861-1865), U.S. president Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing slaves in the southern states at war with the North. The 13th amendment to the Constitution of the United States, ratified in 1865, outlawed slavery in the United States. In 1868 the 14th amendment granted full U.S. citizenship to African Americans. The 15th amendment, ratified in 1870, extended the right to vote to black males. In the South, such rights were enforced only by the presence of Union troops, who occupied the region during the period known as Reconstruction. When Union troops withdrew from the South in 1877, white Southerners quickly reversed these advances. Racist groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan, used terrorism to keep blacks from voting, holding office, and enforcing labor contracts. Whites also began establishing a thorough system of segregation in the United States. Laws limiting blacks’ access to transportation, schools, restaurants, and other public facilities, sprang up throughout the South. Although legal systems of segregation were not established in the North or West, informal segregation was enforced in both of these regions. (Video #3) Blacks responded to these setbacks by forming the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1910. The NAACP mounted legal challenges to segregation and lobbied legislatures on behalf of black Americans. African Americans also created an independent community and institutional life. They established schools, banks, newspapers, and small businesses to serve the needs of their community. Between 1910 and 1950, in the largest internal migration in U.S. history, over 5 million African Americans moved from southern plantations to northern cities in hopes of finding better jobs and greater equality. In the 1920s the concentration of blacks in urban areas led to the cultural movement known as the Harlem Renaissance, which used art, music, and literature to demonstrate the creative abilities of African Americans."