African-American History

Alexis Albea

Content Area: Social Studies

Grade Level: Seventh Grade

Summary: The purpose of this instructional PowerPoint is to inform students about African-American History.

Learning Objective:Analyzes the Freedom Movement and its impact American history from 1954 to 1965

Content Standard:

Accomplishment:

Emmett Till

In 1955, a young boy from Chicago was visiting his family in Mississippi. Back then, things were different in Mississippi than in Chicago. Jim Crowe laws were more enforced in Mississippi than in Chicago. Before departing from Chicago, Emmett's mother, Mamie, warned her son of how to act and how it was different down south. One day while on his visit, Emmett and his cousins and friends were in a store in the small town of Money, Mississippi when Emmett began bragging about how he had a white girlfriend back in Chicago. One of his friends told him that he wouldn’t talk to the white woman that was in the store. Emmett saw that as a challenge and went to the lady and called her “baby” and whistled at her. She was very offended and ran him out of the store.

Continued

The white lady told her husband and her brother what Emmett had did, they were enraged. They went to Emmett’s uncles house, where he was staying for his visit, and demanded that Emmett come out of the house and get in their truck. Emmett’s uncle,Mose Wright, tried to beg his pardon to the two white men. He explained to them that Emmett was from up north and did not know any better. However, that did not matter to them. Emmett did not show any fear and he put his shoes and clothes on and went with the men. Once Emmett left with them that was the last time he was seen alive.

And the story goes on…

The men took Emmett down to the river, beat him, shot him in the head, and dumped him in the river. His body was not found until three days later. The men were arrested and tried in a court case. Meanwhile, Emmett’s mother, Mamie, demanded the body be shipped back to Chicago and had an open casket funeral to show her sons beaten body to the world. Mose Wright was the first black man to testify against white men. In the end, the two men who beat and killed Emmett Till were acquitted and let free. Years after the trial was over, the two men sold their stories to a local newspaper telling what they did to this young boy.

Little Rock Nine-1957

During the civil rights, there were a lot of different stories of integration within the schools, but the Little Rock Nine was the first and really made a difference in history. The reason this integration was so popular was because the National Guard was involved. There were nine black students in Little Rock, Arkansas who were going to attend Central High School. On their first day, the students were hit and spit on and one student was even sprayed with acid and stabbed. The National Guard was not any help to the students because this went on with the students security there and continued after they left.

Little Rock Nine, cont.

The students were not only mistreated by the students but by the staff as well. One student, Minnijean Brown, was suspended twice. One time for dumping her lunch tray on two students because they were insulting her and another time for calling a white girl “white trash”. None of the white children were suspended or even got a punishment. Eight of the students went on to the next school year and Earnest Green graduated from Central High School. He was the first black student to graduated from the school. Green was the only one of the nine students who attended Central High that graduated before the school was shut down by the governor. Those students were extremely brave and should be recognized for the difference they made.

Nashville Lunch Counter Sit-in

This lunch counter sit-in lasted from February to May 1960. Part of this movement that made it so memorable was that it was one of the nonviolent movements that was practiced during the Civil Rights Movement. Most of the participants of this movement in Nashville were mostly students from black colleges. After marching to the City hall, the mayor agreed that the lunch counters should be desegregated. The agreement was reached on May 10, 1960 and restaurants in downtown Nashville started serving black people. Lunch counter sit ins and marching were just a couple of nonviolent movements Dr. King suggested using during the Civil Rights movement. It took months and even years before a change was made but it was worth it.

Freedom Summer-1964

The whole point in Freedom Summer was to allow blacks to register to vote. Blacks had been denied access to the vote and intimidated in many ways. The state's political leadership, controlled by the segregationist Citizens Council, had been preventing blacks from registering to vote. The state had passed new voting laws to make registration even harder, and dependent upon local officials, who could register whites and reject blacks at will. Blacks went to City Hall every day asking to be allowed to register that way they could vote.

Freedom Summer, cont.

Organizers focused on Mississippi because it had the lowest percentage of African Americans registered to vote in the country; in 1962 only 6.7% of eligible black voters were registered. White officials in the South systematically kept African Americans from being able to vote by charging them expensive poll taxes, forcing them to take especially difficult literacy tests, making the application process inconvenient, harassing would-be voters economically (as by denying crop loans), and carrying out arson, battery, and lynching. In Mississippi, the council did everything possible to stop blacks from being able to register to vote. They made laws that you had to be able to read and write, your family had to be from Mississippi. These laws not only made black ineligible to vote but some whites as well.

Continued…

Many of Mississippi's white residents deeply resented the outsiders and any attempt to change their society. Locals routinely harassed volunteers. Newspapers called them "unshaven and unwashed trash." Their presence in local black communities sparked drive-by shootings, Molotov cocktails, and constant harassment. State and local governments, police, the White Citizens' Council and the Ku Klux Klan used murder, arrests, beatings, arson, spying, firing, evictions, and other forms of intimidation and harassment to oppose the project and prevent blacks from registering to vote or achieving social equality.

Over the course of the ten-week project:

four civil rights workers were killed (one in a head-on collision)

at least three Mississippi blacks were murdered because of their support for the civil rights movement

four people were critically wounded

eighty Freedom Summer workers were beaten

one-thousand and sixty-two people were arrested (volunteers and locals)

thirty-seven churches were bombed or burned

thirty Black homes or businesses were bombed or burned

The End of Summer…

Though Freedom Summer failed to register many voters, it had a significant effect on the course of the Civil Rights Movement. It helped break down the decades of isolation and repression that were the foundation of the Jim Crow system. Before Freedom Summer, the national news media had paid little attention to the persecution of black voters in the Deep South and the dangers endured by black civil rights workers, but when the lives of affluent northern white students were threatened the full attention of the media spotlight was turned on the state. This evident disparity between the value that the media placed on the lives of whites and blacks embittered many black activists. The most significant effect of Freedom Summer was on the volunteers themselves, almost all of whom – black and white – still consider it one of the defining moments of their lives. However, that summer was not the end of the Civil Rights movement.

Conclusion

The years, 1954 to 1965, were very important in the Civil Rights movement. Many innocent people were killed during that time, Emmett Till, people who participated in the movements and multiple civil rights leaders were killed. During this time period, much was accomplished. Schools were desegregated and blacks went to school with whites. Some blacks were even allowed to register to vote. It took some brave people to do what these people did. They took major risks back then just so black people today can vote or go to school with whites or go into a restaurant and be able to eat. Many people take for granted the things they are allowed to do today and do not remember the people who made those things possible for them.