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has race played a role in the making of US history?
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How has race played a role in the making of US history? Does
it still impact our society as it has in the past? Why or
why not? What impact did the Civil Rights Movement have on
society?
The United States of America is the world’s magnet;
it is definitely a land of opportunity. According to the recent
New York senator New York speech: “Issues of race and
gender have been complicated through our history and have
been complicated this time”. Race has played a considerable
role in the history of the United States and racism development
has become a considerable problem since the colonial epoch.
The issue is deeply rooted in the history and was reflected
in such events as slavery, Indian reservations, segregation,
internment camps. Racial stratification was evident in housing,
education and politics, employment and other spheres of life.
Mass racial violence burst out a number of times in history,
sometimes called “race riots”. To name the most
important ones, one may enumerate assaults on black people
in the period of Reconstruction, conflicts of ethnic groups
in the northeast and Midwest of the United States in the late
nineteenth century and early twentieth century, disturbances
in African-American communities after Martin Luther King’s
assassination. It is clear that in colonial era, thousands
of African slaves served the white colonists. Though there
were revolts, one of the most remarkable was Nathaniel Bacon’s
rebellion against the system of exploitation of poor colonists
by well-to-do land-owners. But it was suppressed and black
slavery was a norm in the Northeast until the beginning of
the nineteenth century, when these states abolished slavery.
An audacious step to mount “a ladder of opportunity”
for the blacks was the Emancipation Proclamation declared
by President Lincoln in January of the year 1863.
However, after this step forward America did not set absolutely
free from racism and lynching, discrimination acts continued.
For instance, the decade from 1865 to 1965 was marked by a
number of lynchings, according to the survey conducted, between
the years 1882 and 1951 eighty-eight per cent of murder victims
were black and only ten per cent were white. The blacks who
violated Jim Crow laws, which mandated so called separate
but “equal” opportunities for all, blacks were
to use separate public schools, shops, transportation and
other facilities, were also lynched. Other common reasons
of unjust and cruel attitude were race prejudice, race hatred,
violation of the color line, etc. a number of public figures
were involved in civil rights movement which made the USA
advance towards race equality with rapid strides. For a long
time in American history civil rights and equality for all
regardless of skin color were only theoretically a success,
but actually Executive Orders promulgated by Presidents Franklin,
Roosevelt and Truman were only the beginning of a struggle
for justice and abolition of any kind of segregation, which
was a product of joint acts of the whites to isolate blacks
from their neighborhoods. The practice of “redlining”
is no longer legal but some researchers claim that this problem
has undercurrents and redlining is still subtly going on in
some regions.
History teaches, consequently, American citizens’ attitude
towards the phenomenon changed, a number of programs and foundations
implemented, incidents of discrimination still occur though.
Education for tolerance, responsibility sharing and involvement
will be so called investment into future.
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