African Americans have a long and difficult history. Slavery started in the late 16th century and continued to the early 18th century. Africans were brought to the American colonies by white masters where they worked on the plantations. Throughout this time, African Americans hoped for freedom and a time when they would not be treated as slaves. Slavery was abolished in the United States in 1865 with the 13th Amendment (Crispin, 2017). While African Americans could now work and earn a living, they still experienced segregation and they expressed their freedom throughout the Civil Rights movement. This paper compares the two periods of slavery and segregation and shows that there are similarities and differences in the way African Americans expressed their freedom.
During slavery African Americans wanted freedom so as to have basic rights but this was different as these basic rights during segregation. African Americans wanted the right to work and earn, the right to marry, and the right to move freely during slavery. Unpaid labor to produce wealth was the heart of slavery in the United States. Enslaved people worked from morning to night without earning anything as they were regarded as property of owners. They were not given the right to legally marry since the law considered them property and commodities that could not enter a contract like marriage. Slaves were thus property that could be sold and bought depending on the owner. This was different from segregation where the African Americans were accorded with most of the basic rights. However, African Americans were still not accorded with all the basic human rights such as the freedom of association.
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The importance of freedom during the segregation movement was for equality to be realized for the African Americans. The segregation was enforced by the Jim Crow laws which required the separation of the whites from people of color in public transportation and in schools (Winston, 2019). Segregation extended to different places such as theatres, parks, restaurants, and cemeteries and it was meant to prevent any contact between blacks and whites who were not regarded as equals. Freedom was thus important for African Americans during this time because they wanted to be treated as equals with the whites. The segregation laws had created extreme discrimination as African Americans could not associate or make contact with the whites. Such discrimination was also inherent during slavery where African Americans unequal to the whites because their skin color meant that they were regarded as property.
African Americans expressed their appreciation for freedom through warfare in both times. The engagement in warfare through the Civil War and Civil Rights Movement showed that African Americans understood that they had the freedom to fight for their rights. The Civil War was thus used to give a new meaning for freedom to African Americans. It meant that African Americans understood that they had the power to fight and defeat slavery. During the Civil Rights movement, African Americans resisted the oppressive laws by refusing to abide by them. When Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the public bus to a white male, it was an expression of her freedom of expression and a freedom from any discrimination. The engagement in the Civil Rights protests and riots was also an expression of the freedom for African Americans.
African Americans were enlightened in the segregation and this created a difference in their expression of freedom which was through the use of various works of art and literature. Such an expression of freedom was different from the time of slavery where most African Americans were illiterate and could not thus actively engage in literary and artworks expressions. The most common form of expression of freedom during slavery was thus through flight where African Americans attempted to flee their slave owners. When caught they were punished and whipped. African Americans also organized multiple armed rebellions during this time.
The period of segregation was a time when most African Americans had poured into the industrialized cities. The Great Migration took place between 1910 and 1920 and African Americans moved to fill the labor shortages that had been created ruing World War I (Reny & Newman, 2018). The Harlem Renaissance is an example of the literary and artwork expression caused by the great migration. The Harlem Renaissance was an artistic, social, and intellectual explosion that was based in Harlem, Manhattan during the 1920s. It was also known as the New Negro movement and African Americans expressed their literary and artistic freedom (Krasner, 2016). African Americans thus engaged in music and artworks where they embraced their self-expression and African Heritage and thus rejected the degrading stereotypes.
In conclusion, the similarities and differences of slavery and segregation periods were identified by considering the importance of freedom and how African Americans expressed their freedom even during the oppression. Freedom was important during both times because African Americans wanted to be equal to their white counterparts. However, during slavery the freedom was so that African Americans could be accorded with the basic rights and these rights were accorded during segregation. The expression of freedom during both times was similar because Africans Americans resisted and engaged in warfare such as the Civil War and the Civil Rights movement. However, one of the differences between the two time periods was that African Americans had been enlightened during the segregation period and thus expressed their freedom through literature and various works of art.
References
Crispin, A. (2017). 13th Slavery in the Past, Present, and Future. Tapestries: Interwoven voices of local and global identities , 6 (1), 13.
Krasner, D. (2016). A Beautiful Pageant: African American Theatre, Drama and Performance in the Harlem Renaissance . Springer.
Reny, T. T., & Newman, B. J. (2018). Protecting the right to discriminate: the second great migration and racial threat in the American West. American Political Science Review , 112 (4), 1104-1110.
Winston, M. (2019). The Desegregation of Public Libraries in the Jim Crow South: Civil Rights and Local Activism. Journal of Information Ethics , 28 (2), 127-129.
