See how much you know about racial unrest and civil rights in the USA by playing this KS3 History quiz. Segregation was the norm during the century or so that passed between the abolition of slavery and the granting of equal civil rights to blacks in the USA. Many white Americans had difficulty with seeing black people as free and equal. In 1919 a black boy was stoned and drowned after swimming in part of a lake reserved for whites! Following the end of the civil war, many whites in the south were angry about the abolition of slavery. A hate group called the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) was formed. They murdered many freedmen and laws passed in 1870 and 1871 helped to stop their crimes.
Despite that, things still didn't settle down. The period from 1877 to the early part of the twentieth century have been called the 'nadir of American race relations'. Nadir is the opposite to the word apex so what this phrase means is that race relations could not have been any worse. The definitions of white and black were not clear either, for example, Irish Protestant immigrants doing manual labour were not regarded as whites.
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
You can find more about this topic by visiting BBC Bitesize - The civil rights movement in America
They wore white robes and hoods and were called KKK for short
|
They usually struck at night
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||
Between 1889 and 1940 almost 4,000 were lynched
|
Many southern states ignored such laws
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||
She worked as a seamstress in a department store
|
Whites and blacks were allowed on the same buses but blacks were only allowed to sit in certain places and had to move if a white person required their seat
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||
Following the arrest of Rosa Parks, blacks in Montgomery organised a bus boycott in protest
|
Their motto was 'Making Equality a Reality'
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||
He and other members were arrested several times as they campaigned to end segregation
|
To show that people of any colour could use public transport (without segregation)
|