Race to equality

RACE TO EQUALITY

Back in 1965, Malcom X said: “Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you’re a man, you take it”. The problem of equality between African American and white people took place in the USA since the age of slavery. And the principal problems we can see are the next : lack of equality, lack of justice, lack of recognition.

The question we can ask ourselves is: How have African Americans achieve recognition and what remains have to be done to achieve full equality?

This problem took his origin in the Declaration of Independence on which it is written “All men are created are equal”. But it is contradiction with the reality before 1965 because more or less645.000 Africans were shipped as slaves to the USA. We have also the myth of the good negro by Uncle Tom who shows slaves having a respectful attitude towards white people. At this period there were the Black Codes which forbid any negro or farmer to married a white person at the risk of be confined in the State penitentiary for life. Moreover from the beginning of slavery there was segregation in the southern states of the USA.

There is also a negative impact of exclusion based on skin colour as it shows the Oliver Harrington’s cartoon: black laughter on which we can see two African American children, and one is telling to the other “ the teacher says that everyone can git to be president. The how come the whole class falls out laughin’ when I tell ‘em that’s my dream”

At this moment of this essay it is important to introduce important persons who have fought for desegregation:

The most famous between them is Martin Luther king. He gave many speeches and led many marches to help end segregation. He thought you should fight for equal rights peacefully, and gave his life helping people do that.

The other famous person is Rosa Park. She worked to end segregations on buses. She played a role by refusing to move from her seat when the bus driver asked her to move to the back of the bus. This helped start the Montgomery boycott and helped end segregation in the South.

To be equal with whites, African Americans had to fight in particular fight for the right vote. The constitution said they could vote, but racist Southern kept many blacks from voting for one hundred years after the civil war.

They had to fight, also, for Equality. One hundred years after the civil war, Blacks had to sit separately from whites on trains, buses... they were treated unequally at school, at work, and almost everywhere they tried to go.

But this fight was made with pacifist weapon like art. For example with the Harlem Renaissance (1920-30): the “New Negro Movements “reflected the expression of a new racial consciousness for African American artists and intellectuals who believed that , through art, they could fight stereotypes and racial prejudice and thus achieve recognition. Moreover in literature with Langston Hughes and in music with the invention of the blues and the jazz.

Thanks all that today the situation of the Black has increased. Indeed the USA known his first African American president: Barack Obama in 2008 and also there is the worldwide recognition of African American culture.

But to have a perfect

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