9781422272701

OVERVIEW OF SLAVERY AND RACIAL DISCRIMINATION IN AMERICA

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When European merchants first took captured Africans across the Atlantic Ocean in the early

1500s to provide a labor force for Spanish colonies in the New World, they planted the first seeds of a legacy that still affects America today. Although the United States abolished slavery in 1865, the century that followed remained fraught with systemic racism that kept Black Americans from achieving full citizenship and equality under the law. In the decades since abolition, Black Americans have struggled, fought, and died in their attempts to secure the equality promised to them by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the US Constitution. The civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s legally ended segregation . But systemic racism has continued to pervade American culture and caused continued social, economic, and political strife for Black Americans. To understand how America might make amends for the legacy of slavery, it is necessary to examine the history that has shaped the reality of Black Americans today.

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