Free at last
Introduction
While servitude conditions have been varied, slave work was used by the ancient civilizations in Mesopotamia, India and China, as well as in classical Greece and in Rome. In pre -Columbian America it was practiced by the Native Aztec, Inca and Maya empires. In the Bible it is said that the Egyptians had Hebrew slaves and that the latter, after their exodus of Egypt, had their own slaves. The first Christians accepted that practice, as well as Islam.
The Arabs of the North and eastern Africa enslaved African blacks, and as much as Syria enslaved the Mediterranean Europeans who captured or bought through slave traffickers and, ordinarily, used them in the production of sugar. Many native American tribes enslaved the members of other tribes that captured in the wars. DATE
Factors that stimulated slave trade by the Atlantic
The conquest of Constantinople (today Istanbul) by the Turks in 1453 prevented sugar from reaching Europe.
The Portuguese began to explore the coast of West Africa and buy slaves from the hands of African traffickers
With the arrival of Christopher Columbus in America in 1492, European colonizers imported large numbers of African slaves to work the earth and cultivate sugar, especially in the Caribbean.
Developing
At that time the crops of sugar, cotton, tobacco and spices were fundamental in the economy.
In total, at least 10 million Africans had to endure the trip through the middle step. (This term refers to the second and longest segment of the Atlantic Ocean included in the triangular trade in which textiles, rum and products manufactured to Africa, slaves to America, and sugar, tobacco and cotton to Europe were sent.) Those captives were taken to Portuguese Brazil, to Latin America and the various British and French sugar islands of the Caribbean. Only about 6 percent of African slaves were taken to British North America. Even so, the Afro -American experience was very different from that of the other immigrants who founded and expanded the United States. DATE
The first slaves came to the United States accidentally. In 1607, in Virginia, the colonizers buy a corsair around 20 slaves that he had captured in a Spanish ship in the Caribbean. In the next half century, slaves were not an important workforce. Landowners preferred to hire white labor. From the second half of the 17th century, the slave labor became cheaper while the contracted labor was reduced. This caused slaves to multiply.
In 1770, Afro -American ones represented about 40 percent of the population in the southern colonies and were the majority in South Carolina. (Also in the colonies of the north there were slaves, but they never constituted more than 5 percent of the population.) Before such an abundant oppressed and potentially rebellious minority, southern elites favored the hardening of social attitudes towards Afro -American.
The children of the slaves were declared slaves. The masters were allowed to punish their slaves to kill them. A more important fact was that the white elites of Virginia began to promote racism against blacks as a means to create a division between these and white workers of lower economic resources.
Most Afro -American slaves worked on agricultural farms that produced basic crops: tobacco in Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina;rice in the southeast. In 1793, the American inventor Eli Whitney manufactured the first cotton disassembly, a mechanical device that extracted the cotton fiber seeds that surrounds them. This generated a spectacular expansion of the cultivation of that plant throughout the southeast, which spread west through Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, getting to texas. About one million Afro-American slaves were transferred to the west in the 1790-1860 period, almost double those taken from Africa to the United States.
Laws known as slave codes were created that approved the application of punishment to slaves, the use of whip, irons to mark and even mutilation. Given this absence of fundamental civil rights, slaves created their own institutions, which would be used in the mid -twentieth century by the movement of civil rights. The fight for freedom had begun.
Religion offered hope to Afro -American. Many slaves joined Christianity creating the "black church". These churches were a mixture of Christianity and aspects of African religious cultures and beliefs. Its organizational strength, influence and number of members decisively influenced the success of civil rights movement.
In the civil war of 1861-1865 slavery was abolished, but the imposition of the racist system of legal segregation throughout the south repressed the political advance of blacks.
Movements and its development
After the Civil War, laws were approved that legalized segregation and Afro -state ones faced a violent and fierce opposition to civil equality.
Martín r. Delany
Mayor of the Liberating Army, considered by many as the founder of black nationalism in the United States. It was a supporter of the option, he comments that African Americans migrate to Africa, for this reason in 1859 he led a failed expedition to the African the following: we love our homeland, but she despises us, asks us to go.
conclusion
This led to many African Americans to request the means to settle in Africa to see that the situation did not change and that the desire for freedom and end of tyranny, requested in the declaration of independence by the settlers, only affected the white population. The main conflict not only developed between supporters of slavery and anti -clavistAgrarian and slave.
Leave feedback