Frederick Douglass,
eloquent spokesman for the abolition of slavery in the United
States and extension of full political rights to its African
Americans. Credit: National Archives.
Slavery was inherently a system of brutality and coercion in
which beatings and the breakups of families through the sale of
individual slaves were commonplace. However, the most trenchant
criticism of slavery for many was its fundamental violation of
every human being's right to be free.
With the election of Abraham Lincoln as the country's president
in 1860, the situation began to change. "A house divided against
itself cannot stand," Lincoln had said in an 1858 Senate campaign
speech. "I believe this government cannot endure permanently half
slave and half free." Lincoln was sworn in as president on March
4, 1861. And on April 12 of that year, southerners opened fire on
federal troops stationed at Fort Sumter in the Charleston, South
Carolina, harbor, beginning the U.S. Civil War. The battle --
pitting the slave-owners of the South, who sought independence
from the United States, against those living in the North -- cost
half a million American lives before it ended in 1865.
Lincoln declared the end of slavery on January 1, 1863, with the
Emancipation Proclamation, which proclaimed as "forever free" all
slaves living in the areas that were in rebellion. Slavery was
formally abolished in December 1865 by the Thirteenth Amendment
to the U.S. Constitution, which states that "neither slavery nor
involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof
the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the
United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."
Within a few months of the end of the war, Congress began to work
out a plan for the reconstruction of the South, which had been
devastated by the battle. By mid-1866, Congress had passed a
civil rights bill and set up a Freedman's Bureau -- both designed
to prevent discrimination against blacks by southern
legislatures. Congress also passed the Fourteenth Amendment to
the Constitution, which states that "all persons born or
naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction
thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the States
wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which
shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the
United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life,
liberty, or property without due process of law; nor deny to any
person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."
This repudiated an earlier ruling -- known as the Dred Scott
decision, for the black slave who was the claimant -- which had
denied slaves the right of citizenship.
All southern legislatures with one exception refused to ratify
the amendment. It was only after ratification was made a
condition of southern states' escaping a permanent military
government established in the South by the Congress that the
amendment was ratified in 1868.
In 1870, yet another amendment was added to the Constitution,
this one maintaining that race was not to be a bar to voting
rights. The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified on March 30 of that
year, states that "the right of citizens of the United States to
vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by
any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of
servitude."
In spite of laws passed and efforts made to resolve the problems
of the South, Reconstruction was in many ways a period of
regression. Southern state legislatures passed "black codes"
aimed at reimposing bondage on the freedmen. The codes differed
from state to state, but some provisions were common. Blacks were
required to enter into annual labor contracts, with penalties
imposed in case of violation; dependent children were subject to
compulsory apprenticeship and corporal punishment by masters; and
vagrants could be sold into private service if they could not pay
severe fines. The last quarter of the 19th century also saw a
profusion of "Jim Crow" laws in southern states that segregated
public schools, forbade or limited black access to public
facilities such as parks, restaurants, and hotels, and denied
most blacks the right to vote by imposing poll taxes and
arbitrary literacy tests.
In effect, slaves had been granted their freedom, but not
equality. Their economic needs were not fully addressed by the
North. While the Freedmen's Bureau attempted to protect slaves
from violence, it could not provide them with political and
economic opportunity. Blacks depended on northern whites -- some
of them racists -- to protect them from the Ku Klux Klan, an
organization of white men that threatened blacks and prevented
them from exercising their rights. Without economic resources,
many southern blacks were forced to work as tenant farmers on
land owned by their former masters, in a cycle of poverty.
The failure of the Reconstruction period meant that the struggle
of African-Americans for freedom and equality was deferred until
the 20th century, when it would become a national, not a
southern, issue.
T
he Battle for Women's Suffrage
One of the most powerful voices for freedom in the 19th century
was Frederick Douglass. Born a southern slave in
1817, he had escaped to the North and later found the means to
buy his freedom as a guarantee against being returned
to the South as a piece of property.
Although slaves were forbidden to learn how to read by the laws
of the time, once freed, Douglass discovered that he had a gift
for writing and for speaking before audiences. He founded a
newspaper called North Star to campaign against slavery,
he wrote
scores of magazine and newspaper articles, and he became a
spokesperson for the Anti-Slavery Society in Massachusetts.
Douglass also helped form the Underground Railroad, a network of
secret routes in which both blacks and whites helped runaway
slaves make their way north to freedom.
Douglass was a leading voice for freedom not only for
black Americans. He fought for human rights for all people,
including voting rights for women. If less
bloody than the war against slavery, the battle for women's
suffrage, which began in the 19th century and continued into the
early part of the next, nevertheless necessitated a long and
arduous fight against narrow-mindedness, tradition, prejudice,
and exclusion.
During the 1830s and 1840s, women had been playing important
roles in various American reform movements, such as temperance
(prohibition of alcohol), abolition (slavery), and educational
reform. And while the work they did was significant, women found
they could not take leadership roles nor could they lobby
strongly for their positions. They were expected to be part of
the background. For some, the situation became intolerable.
The first important "women's meeting" was held in 1848 at the
Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls, New York. Not surprisingly, its
chief sponsors were linked to the abolitionist movement.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott had attended an
anti-slavery meeting in London and had been excluded because they
were women. Their anger at this treatment led directly to the
Seneca Falls meeting, where 240 people, 40 of them men, came
together to draft a "women's bill of rights" modeled after the
Declaration of Independence. Although the bill included a
provision calling for the right of women to vote, most of the
delegates were reluctant to pass such a measure, and it was only
after Frederick Douglass spoke to the assembly that it was
adopted.
From this moment on, gaining the franchise would be the rallying
cry at every women's rights convention. Gradually, women were
allowed to speak in public, and individual states adopted laws
enabling women to own property in their own names, to keep their
earnings, and to retain custody of their children in cases of
divorce.
In 1869, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony established
the National Woman Suffrage Association and began an all-out
campaign for an amendment to the U.S. Constitution to give women
the right to vote. The two would form a 50-year alliance,
becoming the most outspoken advocates of the women's movement
across the United States.
That same year, the western U.S. state of Wyoming became the
first state to grant women the right to vote within its borders.
But it was not until 1920 that the Nineteenth Amendment to the
Constitution, granting the right to vote to every adult woman in
the country, was passed.
T
he New Deal
Yet another struggle involved the worker. The life of the
19th-century American worker was far from easy. Even in good
times, wages were low, hours long, and working conditions
hazardous. Before 1874, when Massachusetts passed the nation's
first legislation limiting the number of hours women and child
factory workers could perform to 10 a day, virtually no labor
legislation existed in the country. Indeed, it was not until the
1930s that the federal government became actively involved.
In 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected to the presidency
of the United States. With that election, the concept of rights
expanded to include economic and social rights. Roosevelt's
program of direct federal relief and economic security, known as
the New Deal, won the support of the overwhelming majority of
Americans, then suffering through the devastating Great
Depression of the 1930s.
In 1935, the U.S. Congress passed the Social Security Act. Social
Security created a system of insurance for the aged, the
unemployed, and the disabled based on employer and employee
contributions. The program was funded in large part by taxes on
the earnings of current workers. Although its origins were
modest, Social Security today is one of the largest domestic
programs administered by the U.S. government, guaranteeing to
millions of Americans a modicum of financial protection.
During the same year, workers gained the right to organize and
bargain collectively. And in 1938, a minimum wage and a maximum
work week were established.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, president of the
United
States from 1933 through 1945, in January 1941 called on all
governments to assure their citizens freedom from want and fear,
as well as freedom of speech and worship. Credit: USIA Files.
Although Roosevelt saw himself
very much in
the tradition of
Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln in terms of his concern for
political rights, he was, by necessity, preoccupied with the
problems of poverty and basic economic needs. The outbreak of war
in Europe in 1939 forced Roosevelt to turn from the country's
pressing domestic problems and begin considering the kind of
world that might emerge from the devastation of so many millions.
In January of 1941, in what came to be known as the "Four
Freedoms" address, Roosevelt called on all governments to
guarantee their citizens freedom from want and fear, as well as
freedom of speech and worship.
In August 1941, Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston
Churchill agreed on the Atlantic Charter, which proclaimed a
broad vision of a new postwar world order based on democracy,
freedom, disarmament, and international cooperation. In January
1942, two dozen nations fighting Japan and Nazi Germany adopted
the charter's basic principles. Roosevelt's term "the United
Nations" was used for the first time in this document.
In December 1941, the Japanese attacked the U.S. naval base at
Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The viciousness of the attack and fear of
Asian espionage led the U.S. government to inter
Japanese-Americans without due process of law. In February 1942,
nearly 120,000 Japanese-Americans residing in California were
removed from their homes and placed behind barbed wire in 10
temporary camps, later to be moved to "relocation centers"
outside isolated southwestern towns. More than 60 percent of
these Japanese-Americans were American born and were U.S.
citizens. No evidence of espionage ever surfaced. In fact,
Japanese-Americans from Hawaii and the continental United States
fought with distinction on the Italian front, while others served
as interpreters and translators in the Pacific. Although the
exclusion of the Japanese from the U.S. West Coast was upheld in
1944 by the U.S. Supreme Court in Korematsu v. U.S., in
1983, the
U.S. government acknowledged the injustice of its actions with
payments to those Japanese-Americans of that era who were still
living.
Throughout World War II, Roosevelt remained intensely interested
in the peace to follow and in establishing effective
international institutions to promote the fundamental human
rights of all mankind, not just Americans. As political
philosopher Isaiah Berlin said, Roosevelt's vision of
international responsibility made him a hero "to the indigent and
oppressed far beyond the confines of the English-speaking world."
Roosevelt's belief that a better world lay ahead after the war
never dimmed. "The great fact to remember is that the trend of
civilization is forever upward," he noted in his January 1945
inaugural address -- his fourth and his last. At the time he died
later in 1945, the United Nations and the international financial
institutions he had done so much to create were well on their way
to becoming enduring institutions. In contrast to the years
following World War I, when the United States rejected membership
in the League of Nations and adopted a policy of isolationism,
its participation in the 1945 San Francisco conference to erect
the framework of the United Nations signaled to the world that
the United States intended to play a key role in international
affairs.
T
he Civil Rights Movement
The changes that Franklin Roosevelt and World War II wrought upon
the United States helped begin the process of extending the full
benefits of freedom to African-Americans. Despite the Bill of
Rights, amendments to the U.S. Constitution granting full
citizenship rights, and numerous presidential executive orders,
African-Americans continued to suffer from widespread, blatant,
and often legal discrimination.
African-Americans became increasingly restive in the postwar
years. During the war they had challenged discrimination in the
military services and in the work force, and they had made
limited gains. Millions of blacks had left southern farms for
northern cities, where they hoped to find better jobs. They
found, instead, crowded conditions in urban slums. Now, black
servicemen returned home, intent on rejecting second-class
citizenship, as other blacks began to argue that the time was
ripe for racial equality.
Blacks in the South then enjoyed few, if any, civil and political
rights. More than one million black soldiers had fought in World
War II, but those who came from the South could not vote. Blacks
who tried to register to vote faced the likelihood of beatings,
loss of jobs, loss of credit, or eviction from their land.
Lynchings still occurred, and Jim Crow laws enforced segregation
of the races in street cars, trains, hotels, restaurants,
hospitals, recreational facilities, and employment.
President Harry Truman, a Democrat, supported the campaign for
civil rights, and he responded by sending a 10-point civil rights
program to the Congress. When southern Democrats, angry about a
strong civil rights stance, left the Democratic party in 1948,
Truman issued an executive order barring discrimination in
federal employment, ordered equal treatment in the armed forces,
and appointed a committee to work toward an end to military
segregation.
Blacks also began to take matters into their own hands. In the
years after slavery ended, blacks had formed scores of
nongovernmental organizations to organize and lobby for the
rights that other Americans took for granted. The most
influential of these was the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which had been founded in
1909 and included the participation of many non-blacks who
believed in equal justice.
In the decade following World War II, attorney Thurgood Marshall,
then the NAACP's chief legal counsel and later to become the
first black to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, traveled
throughout the country, laying the legal foundations for an
assault on racial segregation. His efforts culminated in a U.S.
Supreme Court decision in 1954 -- Brown v. Board of
Education --
outlawing the segregation of black and white students in public
schools. A year later, the Supreme Court demanded that local
school boards move with "all deliberate speed" to implement the
decision.
Despite the Supreme Court's ruling, black Americans were
impatient at the slow rate of progress toward full integration.
On December 1, 1955, a seemingly insignificant event took place
in Montgomery, Alabama -- then still a southern stronghold of
segregation -- that ignited the modern Civil Rights Movement. An
African-American woman named Rosa Parks refused to give up her
seat on a Montgomery city bus to a white man, as was then
required by Alabama law. She was arrested.
Her act of defiance might have gone unnoticed had it not been for
Martin Luther King, Jr., a young Baptist minister. King led a
382-day boycott of the city's public transportation system that
forced the city to integrate it.
In 1960, black college students sat down at a segregated lunch
counter in North Carolina and refused to leave. Their sit-in
captured media attention and led to similar demonstrations
throughout the South. The next year, civil rights workers
organized "freedom rides" in which blacks and whites boarded
buses heading south toward segregated terminals.
Martin Luther King, Jr., continued to be part of these
activities. A life-long advocate of nonviolence, King, with other
ministers, founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference,
which was dedicated to the nonviolent struggle against racism and
discrimination. But in his quest for racial justice, he joined
forces with many other organizations to, as he put it, "make
America what it ought to be."
There were many important milestones in the Civil Rights
Movement. One of the most memorable took place on an August day
in 1963, when over 200,000 Americans, black and white, assembled
at the memorial to Abraham Lincoln in Washington, D.C. Scores of
speakers addressed the crowd, but the day belonged to King, who
set aside his prepared text and spoke from his heart. "I have a
dream," he said. "It is a dream deeply rooted in the American
dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and
live out the true meaning of its creed: ` We hold these truths to
be self-evident; that all men are created equal.' "
King was to see the U.S. Congress in 1964 pass the Civil Rights
Act, which outlawed discrimination in all public accommodation,
and in 1965 the Voting Rights Act, which authorized the federal
government to appoint examiners to register voters where local
officials made black registration impossible. The year after
passage, 400,000 blacks registered in the Deep South. King was
killed by an assassin's bullet in April 1968, while on a visit to
the city of Memphis, Tennessee, to champion the rights of
sanitation workers there, most of whom were black and poor.
King's primary objective was equality for African-Americans, but
he realized that racism is not just an American problem but a
global one. "Among the moral imperatives of our time," he said,
"we are challenged to work all over the world with unshakable
determination to wipe out the last vestiges of racism. It is no
mere American phenomenon. Its vicious grasp knows no geographical
boundaries."
D
iscontent and Change
During the debate on the 1964 Civil Rights bill, some legislators
had hoped to defeat the measure by proposing an amendment to
outlaw discrimination on the basis of gender as well as race.
First the amendment, then the bill itself, passed, giving women
the legal tool to secure their rights.
Women themselves took measures to improve their lot. In 1966, 28
professional women established the National Organization for
Women (NOW) "to take action to bring American women into full
participation in the mainstream of American society now." Four
years later, membership had reached 15,000. NOW and similar
organizations helped make women increasingly aware of their
limited opportunities and strengthened their resolve to increase
them.
Organized activity on behalf of women's rights reached its peak
in the early 1970s. In 1972, Congress passed the Equal Rights
Amendment to the Constitution, which declared: "Equality of
rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the
United States or by any State on account of sex." Over the next
several years, 35 of the necessary 38 states ratified the
amendment, but this was not enough for passage, and the amendment
died in 1982 as the women's movement stagnated. Although the
effort to protect women from gender discrimination continues
today, the gains made by women during the 1970s and in the years
following firmly established their place in all aspects of
American life.
In post-World War II America, Spanish-speaking groups faced
discrimination as well. Coming from Cuba, Puerto Rico, Mexico,
and Central America, they were often unskilled and unable to
speak English. Some worked as farm laborers and, at times, were
cruelly exploited while harvesting crops; others gravitated to
the cities where, like earlier immigrant groups, they encountered
difficulties in their quest for a better life.
The National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which secured many
gains for U.S. workers, had excluded agricultural workers from
its guarantee of the right of labor to organize and bargain
collectively. But the example of black activism had taught
Hispanics the importance of pressure politics in a pluralistic
society. Cesar Chavez, founder of the overwhelmingly Hispanic
United Farm Workers, called for a nationwide consumer boycott of
selected agricultural products that laid the foundation for
representation to secure higher wages and improved working
conditions for migrants. Also during this time, Hispanics became
politically active, further increasing their assimilation into
American society.
One final group that worked to claim their rights in the wake of
the Civil Rights Movement were Native Americans. In the 1950s,
the federal government had undertaken a program of moving Native
Americans off reservations and into cities, where they might
become part of "mainstream America." Not only did they face the
loss of land; many of the uprooted Indians often had difficulties
adjusting to urban life.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Native Americans became aggressive in
pressing for their rights. A new generation of leaders went to
court to protect what was left of tribal lands or to recover that
which had been taken, often illegally, in previous times. In
state after state, they challenged treaty violations and, in
1967, won the first of many victories guaranteeing long-abused
land and water rights. The American Indian Movement, founded in
1968, helped channel government funds to Indian-controlled
organizations and assisted neglected Indians in the cities.
Indian activism brought results. Other Americans became more
aware of Native American needs, and officials in all branches of
government had to respond to pressure for equal treatment that
was long overdue.
T
he Cold War and Beyond
From its beginning, the Cold War put limits on those who hoped to
make human rights America's top international priority. Locked in
competition with the Soviet Union, the United States chose to
accept responsibility for countering Communist moves in Eastern
and Central Europe and elsewhere.
The most dramatic defense of Western freedom took place in
Berlin, when Soviet occupation forces closed off the city, still
struggling to recover from wartime devastation, in June 1948.
U.S. and Allied forces flew 277,000 missions, keeping the city
alive until the Soviets lifted the embargo some 10 months later.
With the arrival of détente, an era of lowered
U.S.-Soviet
tensions began. A high point of the era was the Helsinki Accords.
Signed in 1975, they set the stage for the struggle for freedom
and human rights that would culminate in the fall of the Berlin
Wall 14 years later.
In November 1976, Jimmy Carter was elected president of the
United States. Carter took office two months later with a strong
commitment to human rights. In 1977, a human rights bureau was
created within the U.S. Department of State. Its first human
rights reports were issued that year. Since then, reports have
been produced every year; they now cover every country,
including, for the first time in 1995, the United States itself.
To some, Carter's belief in the universality of human rights was
too idealistic. Nonetheless, despite ideological differences, the
succeeding U.S. presidential administrations have made human
rights a fundamental tenet of national policy.
