Keywords: Southern States
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Displaying 1-20 of 143 results.
"A Bold Stroke for Freedom."
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Abstract: On Christmas Eve, 1855, patrollers finally caught up with a group of teenaged slaves who had escaped by wagon from Loudon County, Virginia. But the posse was driven off when Ann Wood, leader of the group, brandished weapons and dared the pursuers to fire. The fugitives continued on to Philadelphia. Although ... More »
A Case of Black and White: White Women Protest the Hiring of Black "Wage-Slaves"
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Abstract: Before the Civil War, some enslaved African Americans labored in Southern textile mills, especially in the spinning and weaving rooms. But with the jump in the price of slaves in the 1850s, manufacturers decided that poor white farmers provided a cheaper labor force. After the Civil War, the textile ... More »
"A Clear Signal to Officials of the White South: 'Go Back to Your Old Ways'": Vernon Jordan Argues Against the Nixon Administration's Voting Rights Proposal
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Abstract: The Voting Rights Act of 1965--called "the most successful civil rights law in the nation's history" by Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights--was enacted in order to force Southern states and localities to allow all citizens of voting age to vote in public elections. ... More »
"A Definite and Imperative Need for Legislation Against Discrimination"
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Abstract: The first laws passed in the South to impose statewide segregation in public facilities, instituted in the 1880s and 1890s, applied to railroad car seating. During this period, railway lines spread rapidly from cities to rural communities. In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court validated these early "Jim Crow" ... More »
A Georgia Sharecropper's Story of Forced Labor ca. 1900
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Abstract: At the turn of the century the group of black women most subject to sexual exploitation and abuse were those who lived under the system of quasi-slavery known as "peonage."Under contract labor laws, which existed in almost every southern state, a laborer who signed a contract and then quit his or her ... More »
"A Jubilee of Freedom": Freed Slaves March in Charleston, South Carolina, March, 1865
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Abstract: At the Civil War's end, enslaved people responded in a variety of ways to take their freedom. One meaning of freedom can be glimpsed in the following report from Charleston, South Carolina, published in the New York Daily Tribune on April 4, 1865, just a few days before General Robert E. Lee's surrender ... More »
A map of servitude.
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Abstract: The back of a Louisiana slave named Gordon, photographed in 1863 after he escaped to the Union forces. Whipping was the most common form of punishment on plantations, and slaveowners and overseers whipped slaves with frightening regularity. Slaves could be whipped for almost any pretext: for "not picking ... More »
A Quaker Abolitionist Travels Through Maryland and Virginia: The Journal of John Woolman, 1757
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Abstract: In both Britain and the United States, Quakers were among the first to denounce slavery in the 18th century. This was due to the efforts of Quaker abolitionist leaders such as John Woolman. Born in New Jersey in 1720, Woolman was a tailor and shopkeeper. Continual encounters with slavery in his own neighborhood--notably ... More »
"A Religious Flame That Spread All Over Kentucky": Peter Cartwright Brings Evangelical Christianity to the West, 1801-04
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Abstract: In the decades following the Revolution, a vast variety of choices appeared on the American religious landscape as an antiauthoritarian climate encouraged the formation of new democratic religious sects. The Baptists and Methodists were most adept in preaching to the new populist audience during these ... More »
"A Shocking Instance of Brutal Employer Aggression": Antiunion Violence in a "Union-Free" Town
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Abstract: In the late 1940s, large labor unions and major corporations worked out an accord that guided labor-management relations for the next quarter century. During this period, unions benefited from high wages and relative stability, while relegating company decision-making to management. Many workers in certain ... More »
"A society of patriotic ladies."
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Abstract: Cheap prints depicting current events were in great demand in both England and the colonies. This 1775 British print presented a scene in Edenton, North Carolina. Fifty-one women signed a declaration in support of nonimportation, swearing not to drink tea or purchase other British imports. Boycotts of ... More »
A Word of Warning: A Former Slave Urges Constitutional Caution
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Abstract: The South Carolina Constitutional Convention of 1895 completed the process of disenfranchising African-Americans (and many poor whites). The state's restrictive policies began with the election law of 1882 that used an intricate system of eight ballot boxes to discourage illiterate white and black residents ... More »
A Year's Wage for Three Peaches: A Black Man Tells of Exploitation in the Late 19th century South
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Abstract: The harsh brutality of race relations in the late nineteenth-century South was sometimes best expressed through small incidents. For William Robinson, the story that best encapsulated his own experience growing up African-American in rural Georgia in the 1880s involved three peaches. He was interviewed ... More »
Actions speak louder than words.
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Abstract: "The Land of Liberty" was the ironic title of this cartoon published in an 1847 edition of the British satirical weekly Punch . As the cartoon suggests, Americans faced a number of dilemmas and crises that came to revolve around the institution of slavery and its expansion into the West. As slavery ... More »
Address of the Colored State Convention to the People of the State of South Carolina
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Abstract: In November 1865 a group of 52 black delegates met in Charleston's Zion Church to formulate a position regarding their future in the still uncertain world of the post-emancipation South. Their address invoked the language of the Declaration of Independence to claim full rights of citizenship for themselves, ... More »
"All Over the Land Nothing Else Was Spoken Of ": Cabeza de Vaca Takes Up Residence as a Medicine Man in the Southwest, 1530s
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Abstract: One of the earliest accounts of the European-Indian encounter in North America was of the ill-fated 1527 expedition of Pánfilo de Narváez. After disembarking on the Florida coast near Tampa, the Spanish forces on land and sea became disastrously separated. Having overstayed their welcome and with local ... More »
"All We Are Seeking Here Is Equal Opportunity": The American G.I. Forum Desegregates a Texas Community's Schools
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Abstract: With the annexation of Texas in 1848 at the end of the Mexican-American War, Tejanos--Texans of Mexican descent--lost property rights and political power in a society dominated by Anglos. Through discriminatory practices and violent force, Tejanos were kept at the bottom of the new political and socio-cultural ... More »
"Almost Broken Spirits": Farmers in the New South
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Abstract: In the decades following the Confederacy's 1865 defeat and the abolition of racial slavery, white southern landowners, entrepreneurs, and newspaper editors heralded the coming of a "New South" economic order. Freed from the plantation system, the South would enter the modern age, building factories to ... More »
"And We Shall Overcome": President Lyndon B. Johnson's Special Message to Congress
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Abstract: Although the 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870, guaranteed citizens the right to vote regardless of race, by 1957 only 20 percent of eligible African Americans voted, due in part to intimidation and discriminatory state requirements such as poll taxes and literacy tests. Despite the passage of the landmark ... More »
"Another Race of White Men Come Amongst Us": Native American Views as British Replace the French in the Lower Mississippi Valley, 1765
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Abstract: Because most early-eighteenth century European colonization occurred in coastal areas, Native Americans living in interior regions maintained greater control over their lands and culture. In the lower Mississippi Valley (as in the Great Lakes region), the contest between European imperial rivals for ... More »
