Black Americans

Today about 39 million of the 300 million people in the USA are black. They used to live mostly in the South, working in the cotton and tobacco fields.

After the Civil War, white southerners were angry because they had lost the war and angry that slaves were now free. They showed a lot of prejudice against black people. Some white people joined the Ku Klux Klan, groups of men who dressed in white, covered their faces, and went out to beat and murder black people. Black men could not vote until 1870, and when they got the right to vote, they didn't use it because they were scared. The book "To kill a Mocking Bird" by Harper Lee tells the story of a black man who, although he has done nothing wrong, people believe that he is a criminal just because he is black. We will be watching the film in the second term.

In the 20th century, black people began to travel to the cities of the North to look for work, so there are now more black people in the North than in the South. But even in the North, they lived separately. In the South they had to sit separately on buses and eat in separate restaurants. Until 1954, they also had to go to different schools.

Then in the 1950s, Martin Luther King began to fight for the civil rights of black people. Groups of black people started to break the law, but not in a violent way. In 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks became famous when she refused to give her seat on a bus to a white man. After this, more and more black people refused to use the buses and the bus companies lost a lot of money. Black people also started to go into "whites only" restaurants.

In August 1963 200,000 people met in Washington to listen to Martin Luther King's famous speech about the need for black people to be equal with white people. He began with these famous words : "I have a dream..."

Finally, in 1964, a law was passed which gave black people their rights and martin Luther King was given the Nobel Peace Prize. Unfortunately, he was murdered in 1968.

Today, many black people have good jobs in businesses and other important fields and the American people have their first black president, Barack Obama.

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