A History of the Civil Rights Movement

HOW THE MOVEMENT BEGAN

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of slavery and Jim Crow segregation, all of the nation’s black people were promised equality under the law. THE STAIN OF SLAVERY Slavery has been referred to as America’s “original sin.” Between the 17th century and the first decade of the 19th century, hundreds of thousands of African captives were brought in chains to the area that would become the United States. All of the 13 colonies that fought for independence from Great Britain during the Revolutionary War permitted slavery. The American Revolution was inspired by the principles of liberty and equality. As the Declaration of Independence proclaimed in 1776, “We hold these Truths to be self-evi dent, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” However, the nation’s Founding Fathers failed to extend the same “unalienable Rights” to slaves. The U.S. Constitution, drafted in 1787, banned the bringing of more slaves into the country after 1808. But it did n’t free slaves who were already in the United States. And it didn’t prevent the descendants of these slaves from being held in slavery. During the 1790s and early 1800s, most of the northern states passed laws that gradually eliminated slavery. Slave labor wasn’t vital in the north ern states, whose economies were based on small-scale farming and man ufacturing. As the decades passed, a growing movement in the North sought to get rid of slavery from the entire country. The campaign to end slavery was called abolitionism. In the southern states, however, slavery was deeply entrenched. The South’s economy was based on agriculture. Crops like tobacco, sugar, rice, and especially cotton were grown on large plantations. Slaves provided the cheap labor that made these plantations profitable. Many white southern ers considered any attempt to end or limit slavery as an attack on their way of life. From 1820 on, the issue of slavery caused a deepening rift between the