Category: Racism
Confederacy & Jim Crow
Unbowed & Free
Three-Fifths Compromise, May 25 to September 17, 1787 United States Constitutional Convention
Connecticut Compromise Proportional representation of the states in the House of Representatives, but required the Senate to be weighted equally among the states. Each state would have two representatives.
Compromise of 1790 Was done between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson with James Madison wherein Hamilton won the decision for the national government to take over and pay the state debts, and Jefferson and Madison obtained the national capital (District of Columbia) for the South. The compromise made possible the passage of the Residence and Funding Acts in July and August 1790
Toussaint Louverture August/November 1791 – 1801 Freed and ruled the Island of Santo Domingo/Haiti.
Fugitive Slave Act, February 12, 1793 was made part of the US Constitution, Article 4, Section 2, Clause 3, later superseded by the Thirteenth Amendment.
Louisiana Purchase, September 18, 1803
Missouri Compromise, March 3, 1820
Kansas–Nebraska Act, was passed in 1853, by the 33rd United States Congress and become law May 30, 1854
Compromise, Fugitive Slave Act, September 18, 1850
Frederick Douglas
Papers at the Library of Congress
Frederick Douglass escaped from slavery in 1838 and became a leading abolitionist, as well as an orator, writer, editor, and public servant.
“What To the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”
At the time of the delivery of this speech, Douglass had been living in Rochester, New York for several years editing a weekly abolitionist newspaper. He was invited to give a fourth of July speech by the Ladies Anti-Slavery Society of Rochester. In the early 1850s, tensions over slavery were high across the county. The Compromise of 1850 had failed to resolve the controversy over the admission of new slaveholding states to the Union. The Fugitive Slave Act passed by Congress as part of this compromise was bitterly resented by the Northern states. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel about slavery, Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Or Life among the Lowly had been published a few months before and unexpectedly became a national bestseller. Across the country, people were thinking and arguing about slavery, abolitionism, and the future of the nation.
Frederick Douglas’s delivered on July 5, 1852 at Corinthian Hall to the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society in Rochester, New York, read by actor Ossie Davis.
‘What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?’ by Frederick Douglass
“What to the Slave is the Fourth July?” by Frederick Douglass is not only a brilliant work of oratory. It speaks to our every frustration spurred by the gap between the ideals of the United States and the reality we witness every day; between the Bill of Rights and our decaying civil liberties; between the USA’s international declarations of human rights and the ordered drone attacks backed by presidential “kill lists”; between the words “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” and a nation that leads the world in jailing its own citizens; between our highest ideals and our darkest realities. Here’s hoping people take the time to read the entirety of Douglass’s brilliant speech; even though his were words that spoke directly to his moment in history, they still ring with an unsettling power. As Douglass says: “Had I the ability, and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would today pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.” —Dave Zirin
Descriptive Versus Prescriptive
Race in America 2019
Public has negative views of the country’s racial progress; more than half say Trump has made race relations worse
More than 150 years after the 13th Amendment abolished slavery in the United States, most U.S. adults say the legacy of slavery continues to have an impact on the position of black people in American society today. More than four-in-ten say the country hasn’t made enough progress toward racial equality, and there is some skepticism, particularly among blacks, that black people will ever have equal rights with whites, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.