Founding Of America

Hello fellow Americans,

Today we are learning about the founding of America in correspondence with the freedom of African Americans, which also happened in the mid/late 1800's. African Americans started to form the idea that they had certain rights before the civil war. When the North promised slaves freedom if they thought in the civil war for them, it caused an uproar in the south and thousands of African Americans immediately fled. The Declaration of Independence influenced the decision of Vermont to abolish slavery, the same year the document was published. After more states started acting on the freeing on slaves, the northern freed African Americans started developing their lives as normal, civil humans; this is unlike anything they had seen before. Once the Emancipation Proclamation was a enacted, all slaves had free reign to do whatever they may please. This was shocking to the southern states who had never known a life that had free black people in it. It caused many conflicts. The Ku Klux Klan and other associations were constant threats to the safety of black Americans. Although it was hard to live in the segregated life style the Southerns had put forth,  it did not stay African Americans from building education systems and extending their knowledge to useful topics. The freeing of African American slaves is one of the greatest historical moments to ever occur in America. This is the turning point of all racial separation. Racism is not over because of this movement, and it never will be, but after slavery is abolished, life in America is never the same. If you would like to read more about this topic, you can visit this site.

Talk to you next time! Hope you enjoyed this post.

Over & Out,
Brooke van den Berg

     Hello, 

                Race tension and discrimination between whites and African Americans was not in colonial America at the start. The colonists initially relied on indentured servants and enslaved American Indians to do the manual labor required to sustain. This slowly began to change as indentured servitude began to fall out of favor after the Bacon rebellion, outlawing most indentured servitude. In search of source of labor, the colonists began tapping into the already present slave trade in West Africa. The colonists began shipping these slaves over to the Americas in the thousands. Even when these Africans slaves first arrived there were treated with respect and had some rights, but as time went on and the slaves became more and more valuable they lost their rights. Colonists no longer saw the slaves as people anymore, but saw them as a commodity. The colonists began passing laws that secured their power of the slaves, and in turn stripped them of things that made them human. This is truly when race discrimination of the African Americans started, as the colonists stripped them of their rights and used them for profit.


Article used http://www.pbs.org/race/000_About/002_04-background-02-03.htm

First Blog: Racial War

Hello,

Welcome to my blog! My name is Brooke van den Berg and I am enrolled in Mr. Harding's United States History class at Potomac Falls High School. The theme I have chosen to blog about this year is race. I chose this because race difference is a large conflict in the USA currently. We have been recently having a small, but growing, racial war in America concerning the two groups of individuals that are white police men, and African Americans. I chose this article to demonstrate that there is going to be a much larger problem that we can not control if we don't fix the racism conflict. Most African Americans believe that they are treated more poorly than the average white-American. One belief the rebels try to convince themselves of is that there are harsher penalties given to black people for the selling of cocaine because more African Americans sell crack cocaine than powdered cocaine, and the consequences are higher for those selling crack cocaine. This is absurd because the people who pushed for the penalties to rise were of their ethnicity. Charlie Rangel, an African American congressman in the 1980's, supported the thought to make the consequences of selling this drug more severe. I agree with this article because it is explaining that we need to end this race war and be more mature and less irrational when trying to come to a mean of agreement of what needs to be changed to compromise and make everyone a little happier.