Racism 5 Essay, Research Paper
Babies crying, people vomiting, some even licking food off each other. Being on a slave ship was not a ferry ride to new land. Blacks were treated like animals just because of their skin color. Now most realize that treating people different because they might be a little different isn’t right and nobody deserves it. There have been many things and people who have put a lot of time and effort into ridding our world of racism forever. A book called Uncle Tom’s Cabin was written during slavery to try to make people realize it was wrong. Reconstruction was started to help abolish it. And from more recent times Martin Luther King Jr. really made an impact on all our thoughts on racism.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin was written during the tough times of slavery by a women named Harriet Beecher Stowe in hopes people would see slavery through her eyes and attempt to stop it. On page 211 of her book a slave owner named Augustine St. Claire said, ” The fact is the whole race are pretty generally understood to be turned over to the devil for our benefit. ” Meaning that all blacks are going to hell, taking our spots there, so that we can go to heaven, they are doing our dirty work. There is also many times throughout the book where Stowe talks about how women slaves are there to be the mom of the household. By cooking big meals every night while the masters just sit around and do nothing. They would take care of the kids for their masters. And of course clean for them. The bible was used for a big source of excuses for the slave owners. There was a passage in the bible that said and they would forever serve the white man. The slave owners believed it meant blacks and so they pushed their beliefs onto the blacks, They would say, ” If you don’t do what the bible says you wont be a true Christian, so the slaves did what they were told.
As time went on more and more people became fighters for slavery. Eventually the reconstruction periods began. During this time the radical republicans got a system going where they had five different military groups occupy southern states to make sure that slaves were treated equally. This only lasted about ten years. The republicans lost every spot in the government but the president and the election was coming. Near the end of the election the Democrats were winning and only needed one vote to take over the presidency too. From some cheating that was going on down south there were officially twenty undecided votes, which was all the republicans needed to win. They were willing to do anything to get those votes and keep the presidency in fear that if they lost it all they worked for would be changed by the democrats. So they came upon a compromise. The democrats said ” We will give you all twenty votes if you do three things for us, build us a railroad in the south, give us a southern cabinet member and remove all the troops occupying southern territory.” The republicans agreed and won the presidency but removing all the troops ended reconstruction losing all they worked for anyway.
Lastly in my opinion Martin Luther King Jr. made the biggest impact on racism recently. His I have a dream speech is probably one of the most, if not the most known, speech in history. It told about the dream he had for everyone to stop being so selfish and treat everyone else equally. He was the one who started a lot of the ideas that were anti slavery. He really changed the way we looked at racism in the U.S. He lifted most of the barriers for blacks making him one of the most important people ever.
As can be seen there were many things in history that have changed the way people will forever look at slavery and racism. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, reconstruction and Martin Luther King Jr. are all things that should be looked back on if the problem ever takes over our country again, and I’m sure they will.