Interpreting Seconday Sources- The African American Experience

1. The title of this document is "The African American Experience".
2. This document was written by Leslie H. Fishel Jr.
3. This document revolves around the social, political, and economic repercussions of revolutions in America, especially pertaining to class and power dynamic, education, and expansion in the United States.
4. A few number of African-Americans had attained influence and power during the Reconstruction years; this is due to skill, perseverance, and leverage. The latter half of the nineteenth century introduced the attitudes that would prevail come the next hundred years, revolving around oppression, artistic movements, the family unit, and the struggle to prosper.
5. "While the question of how to handle a black multitude learning to live in freedom was only one of the many economic and political problems that dogged the white South in the final two decades of the century, it clung like a leech to almost every issue."
"A major component of that freedom for African Americans was the liberty to move to another plantation or region. Between 1870 and 1900, the South's black population almost doubled... the majority of them remained in the South with substantial numbers moving within that region."
"One major thrust of the migratory patten was a movement into cities or towns that were growing into urban centers. By 1900, 90 percent of New England's African Americans were city folk, and, in the mid-Atlantic, mid-western, and western states, from two-thirds to over three quarters of black lived in cities."
"From March until May 1879 about six thousand African Americans left Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas for the plains of Kansas, an exodus characterized as the 'most remarkable migration in the United States after the Civil War'."
"The Court's 1883 decision in the Civil Rights Cases invalidating the Civil Rights Act of 1875 has been called the most important decision of the decade. The court, through Justice Joseph P. Breadley, denied that individuals' access to public places of accommodation such as hotels and theaters deserved statutory protection against racial discrimination."
"The numbers of black students in school had doubles between 1877 and 1887, but still only two-fifths of eligible black children were enrolled."
6. How did this experience translate into life in the twentieth century? What are the impacts of this, even today?