1619 the Transition of America

By Darryl Smith

This story goes back to the 1860’s as racism continues these very days , with plenty of us being guilty of it in some form or another. Prior to slavery in Southern States of American law’s were enacted keeping races from mixing prohibiting as unlawful. These law’s known as “Jim Crow Laws” Lasted until the”Civil Rights Act” was signed by president Lyndon B Johnson in 1964. Making “Jim Crow Law’s” unlawful. The signing of the “Civil Rights Act” states to discriminate against another human being is unlawful, plain and simple.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 22, 2021
• ISBN: 9781664180895

Darryl Smith

64 year African American married from San Francisco living in the Bay Area Family moved from Louisiana, Texas, Alabama, and Georgia in the late 40’s to San Francisco like many African Americans during that time. Simply telling the story of the African American version for our youth...

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Slavery Freedom Emancipation Proclamation

On January 1, 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation was signed by President Abraham Lincoln as the nation continued the third year of the Civil War. The proclamation declared that all persons held as slaves within the rebellious states are, and henceforward shall be free. By executive order.

On January 31, 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime. The amendment was ratified by the required number of states on December 6, 1865. It was the first of the three reconstructive amendments written in after the Civil War.

Since the American Revolution, states had been divided into states that either allowed or prohibited enslaving Africans.

Enslaving Africans was permitted in the original Constitution through article sections and clauses commonly known as the Three-Fifths Compromise, which detailed how each slave state would be factored in its total population count for purposes of apportioning seats in Congress, resembling gerrymandering.

Although many African American slaves had been freed by Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, African Americans’ postwar status was uncertain. Especially after Lincoln’s assassination.

The Senate passed the Thirteenth Amendment to abolish enslaving Africans on January 31, 1865.

Black Codes were factors; white supremacist violence and selective enforcement continued for most African Americans to involuntary labor in the South.

Laws such as Jim Crow were in full effect in the Southern states, stating Whites Only, No Niggers, No Mexicans, or Dogs Allowed. Black and White bathrooms.

Jim Crow laws were enforced in Southern states until 1965,

Jim Crow laws are separate and not equal based on black and white.

Many African Americans evacuated from the Southern states throughout the Jim Crow law era.

Second-generation post-emancipation African Americans got away from Jim Crow due to the abundance of jobs throughout America, working industrial or service as the United States grew into the most powerful nation. Many jobs for everyone, the auto industry Ford in Michigan and Ohio to shipyards in Texas, California, train porters all over the country, building infrastructure, roads, and bridges.

Americans worked CC Camps (conservation core). Young African American men worked on stretches of rail tracks, roads. Raising families in populous areas such as New York City, Detroit, Michigan, or Los Angeles, away from the Southern states and its Jim Crow laws.

Once television became a factor in every American household in the sixties, people discovered firsthand how one group of people treated one another, from the Vietnam War to the hatred of Jim Crow laws, being televised, students protested in many college campuses nationwide.

It began in 1965 when the Vietnam War would come into living rooms, as we watched, real-life bloody war, daily seeing explosions, people shot, executions in some cases; the war showed assaults and weapons.

Affecting American youth as they were the ones called to go to war, citizens began to question the reasoning for this bloody undeclared war.

The Selective Service System is the agency that registered male civilians, responsible for running a draft. Almost all men age 18–25 who were U.S. citizens or immigrants were to register within thirty days of turning eighteen, and immigrants were to register within thirty days of arriving in the United States, Students were Exempt.

Since 1973, the United States military has been all-volunteer, although the government can reinstate the draft in case of a national emergency.

The Tet Offensive in the deadliest week of the Vietnam War in February 11–17, 1968 saw 543 Americans killed in action and 2,547 wounded.

Americans visualized through television. What had not been seen in real time, prior to TV. Inception was more Word of Mouth; or Pictured days after happenings, television showed us at time of event.

America was like never before. Americans viewed events, around the United States from Los Angeles to New York and around the world in awe.

Seeing demonstrations led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He and his following of African American protesters getting chewed by dogs led by police, while the Ku Klux Klansmen protested in hooded garb to save Jim Crow laws.

By the time the sixties got here, the United States was in turmoil over many subjects. College students protesting the Vietnam War, mostly young white men and women.

African Americans protesting for civil rights in these urban communities, outraged by decades of police abuse in their neighborhoods, facing a New Jim Crow Era: the Color of Law.

Chicano protest, led by Cesar Chavez, an American labor leader and Latino civil rights activist. With Dolores Huerta, he co-founded the National Farm Workers Association, later renamed the United Farm Workers Union, protesting civil rights for farm workers.

In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act, holding all American cities and states accountable for treating each of its citizens equal under one governing act.

This was a time in America with many issues on many fronts.

The Vietnam War killed 58,220 U.S. military known.

The Vietnam War killed as many as 2 million civilians on both sides of the war; 1.1 million North Vietnamese soldiers and over 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers died. The political answer at the time of why America was in Vietnam, in the first place, was to fight communism around the world.

Many of American youth and mothers nationwide began to question the war in Vietnam as casualties mounted, and what for, was the question. To fight communism!

One incident occurred when rioting students, protesting a bombing in the neutral country of Cambodia, next to Vietnam, by United States military forces on Campus of Kent State University in Kent, Ohio, on May 4, 1970. The Ohio National Guard Shot at unarmed students protesting, killing four and wounding nine.

That was the beginning of the end, causing eruption of more college campuses protesting around the nation as politicians scrambled to defend the war. There were increasing problems in the American Army in Vietnam. The opposition to the war was overwhelming as President Richard Nixon began pulling U.S. troops out on August 15, 1973, as a result of the Case-Church Amendment passed by the U.S. Congress. The capture of Saigon by the North Vietnamese Army in April 1975 marked the of the war.

CHAPTER 2

OPHR

The Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR) was an American organization established by sociologist Harry Edwards and others including noted Olympians Tommie Smith and John Carlos in October of 1967. OPHR voiced out loud and clear, banning South Africa and Rhodesia from the 1968 Olympics (both countries were under white minority rule at the time). The goal of the organization was to protest racial segregation in the United States such as Jim Crow laws and elsewhere such as South Africa and racism in sports in general. Smith said the project was about human rights of all humanity, even those who denied us ours. Most members of the OPHR were African American athletes and community leaders. The group advocated a boycott of the 1968 Summer Olympic Games in Mexico City unless four conditions were met:

(1) South Africa and Rhodesia uninvited from the Olympics

(2) The restoration of Muhammad Ali’s heavyweight boxing title

(3) Avery Brundage to step down as president of the International Olympic Committee

(4) Hiring of more African American assistant coaches

Despite being primarily an African American organization the OPHR was supported by white athletes such as Peter Norman and other amateur athletes, including professionals.

John Carlos from Harlem, New York, born June 5, 1945, is of Cuban descent, was a high school track star who received a scholarship to East Texas State University and became the school’s first track and field Lone Star Conference champion after only one year at ETSU. Carlos was accepted at San Jose State College under the tutelage of Lloyd Bud Winter, a notable coach who would eventually be inducted into the nation’s Track and Field Hall of Fame.

While attending San Jose State University, Carlos met sociologist student Harry Edwards, and under Edwards’s influence, he helped to co-found the Olympic Project for Human Rights.

Edwards wanted to boycott the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City to protest the United States’ inability to deal with human rights injustices. Despite the support of Carlos, Edwards and fellow athlete Tommie Smith, with a variety of civil rights leaders, the boycott never occurred.

Dr. Harry Edwards, a retired sociology professor at UC Berkeley, has long been associated with the San Francisco 49ers as the team sociologist going back to the 1980s.

In Mexico City at the time, it was said that Tommie Smith was a member of the Black Panther Party, although he was not.

Tommie Smith, was an athlete playing sports as a teen—basketball, football, track and field—while attending Lemoore High School in California. His parents moved