African Americans known as Afro-Americans or Black Americans are the largest ethnic group in the USA after White and Hispanic Americans.
Since the establishment of the slave trade in the 1600s African Americans have had to struggle against the chains of slavery racial, segregation, discrimination and legal deprivation of rights to achieve even the slightest representation in the U.S. government. In the formative years of the republic, there was much controversy over who should be allowed to vote. In the South, white voter insisted that only white men were allowed to vote yet also demanded that slaves should be counted when determining how many members of Congress each state is entitled to. At this time the majority of the states in the union declared that only white land-owning women could vote. Less than 5% of the united states population meet those qualifications and less than the 5 % voted in the presidential election of 1800. In the election of 1828, there were some free black men eligible to vote but the property requirement had been raised for black voters while same requirements for white were lowered out of 12,500 free black men in New York city only 60 were eligible to vote in the election of 1828. It’s unknown how many of these men actually voted. The abolitionist movement gained substantial ground during the mid 19th century. The abolitionist party consisted of thousands of politicians, Academics, businessmen and others who devoted their lives to fighting the institutions of slavery major figures of this movement were William Lloyd Garrison Harriet, Harriet Tubman, Maria Stewart and most famously Frederick Douglass. Perhaps the most famous figure of the abolitionist movement known as Frederick Douglass was born a slave . He experienced the brutality of slavery firsthand before escaping to the north, there Douglass became a journalist and started publishing his four-page weekly abolitionist magazine called north star out of Rochester New York. He was the first African-American man to run for president as a member of Liberty party in the election of 1848. He ran again as a vice president for the political abolitionist party in 1856. Frederick Douglass was renowned in the United States and elsewhere for dazzling skills as a public speaker and political writer. He was the most famous African-American living at the United States at the time and was well known in some European countries. He personally met with presidents Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson to discuss the treatment of black soldiers and black suffrage while being an outspoken abolitionist and advocate of African-American suffrage Douglass was also an advocate of women’s suffrage believing in the equal rights of all races, classes, nationalities, and genders. In 1865 Republicans wanted abolishing slavery and 100% Republican support and Democrats only 23%. After 3 years they was giving freed slaves the right to vote. 100% Republican and 0% Democrats support in congress. Slavery in the United States was legal institution made primarily of Africans and African Americans.
As the civil war drew to a close the emancipation, proclamation in the Thirteenth Amendment was passed and ended slavery in the southern states. These states which were allowed to keep their slaves for fear they would turn over to the Confederacy would not abolish their slave practice until later. The question of who got to vote was still left to individuals states some Northern States extended voting rights to blacks but most states in the union did not. The Fourteenth Amendment is passed in 1868 requiring all states of the union to consider African-American as citizens. In 1870 The Fifteenth Amendment extends voting rights to black men but only in theory, in reality, there is resistance the Fifteenth Amendment throughout the country but especially in Southern States before the Civil War began Africans-Americans that only been able to vote in a few Northern States and they were virtually none holding office. The months following the Union victory in April 1865 stocks pensive mobilization within the black community as they organized meetings parades and petitions calling for legal and political rights including the rights to vote during the first two years of reconstruction freed slaves organized equal rights league, throughout the South holding state and local convention to protest discriminatory treatment demanding suffrage and equality before the law. The federal government also sets up the freedmen’s office an organization designed to facilitate the transition from slavery to freedom in the South. During the radical reconstruction period, hundreds of thousand black men risked their lives and property to vote and many elected to office for a time.
In the late 1860’s more African-American are registered to vote in the states of the farmer confederacy than whites. The Ku Klux Klan in other racist terrorist organization carried out many attacks and lynching’s against blacks in the compromise of 1877 republicans agreed to remove the Northern military presence in the South which had up to that point provided protection to blacks. This compromise effectively ends reconstruction. Black representatives are forcefully removed from office by angry crowd in the KU KLUX KLAN. Black men who tried to vote fired from their jobs, evicted from their home, beaten and brutally lynched. Those who manage to vote faced legal disenfranchisement in the form of literacy tests poll taxes and grandfather clauses a literacy test required the voter to pass a reading comprehension test in order to gain the right to vote. These tests were virtually impossible for black men at that time to pass due to the high rates of literacy among African-American caused by discriminatory exclusion from education the test was also extremely prejudiced against black voters. Black would be given obscure passages of legalese from government documents, while white would receive a simple test with elementary sentences. Whole taxes were de facto a way of reinstating the property facto a way of reinstating the property requires the tax to be paid at the place of voting always high and would have to be paid in cash. So limiting those who could pay tax to the affluent white males.
