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Civil Rights
5 articles on Civil Rights
Civil Rights
Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass
Word Count: 13838 Includes: Racialization of Slavery and Erosion of Rights | American Revolution | Revolutionary Aftermath | Political Rights | Employment, Public Services, and Property Rights | Right to Settle in or Visit a State | Civil Rights, Federal Law, and Personal Liberty | Civil Rights on the Eve of the Civil War | Slavery, Emancipation, and the Civil War | Institution of Black Codes | Toward Reconstruction | Legislation of Reconstruction | Regression | Bibliography | Bibliography[This entry contains three subentries dealing with civil rights from 1619 to 1895. The first article provides a discussion of the topic during the colonial period through the American Revolution; the second article discusses the topic up to the beginning of the Civil War in 1861; and the third article discusses civil rights during the war and after—especially focusing on the effects of Emancipation and Reconstruction on civil rights in the United States.] The first Africans to land in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619entered into the labor system of the day, becoming indentured servants who generally worked out a term of labor before earning their freedom. In this manner many indentured Africans became free in the colonies, in some cases going on to hire their own indentured servants. The system did ...
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Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-first Century
Word Count: 9091 Includes: Plessy Era. | Progressive Era. | Interwar Period. | World War II and After. | Civil Rights Revolution. | Progress Halted. | Bibliography“Civil rights” is not a term precisely defined, even by lawyers. A legal dictionary equates civil rights with personal, natural rights protected by the U.S. Constitution, but the leading casebook in the field insists that civil rights include statutory as well as constitutional guarantees. Nor is it clear to whose rights the term refers. One “Civil Rights Reader” discusses the poor, people with disabilities, and categories of gender and sexuality, as well as race. In U.S. history, however, the term most often refers to the legal rights of racial minorities, especially African Americans. Those rights deteriorated markedly during the last years of the nineteenth century, improved somewhat during the Progressive Era and the interwar period, and were transformed by a “Civil Rights Revolution” triggered by World War II. A period of accelerating progress climaxed with Supreme Court decisions and landmark federal legislation in the 1960s. Since the mid-1970s, with issues changing and white support for measures African Americans consider important ...
Read full articleCivil Rights and the Media
Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-first Century
Word Count: 2963 Includes: Early Twentieth Century. | Post–World War II Media Environment. | BibliographyThroughout the twentieth century, African Americans promoted in newspapers, in newsmagazines, and on radio and television their quest for civil rights, including eliminating segregation, discrimination, and racial barriers to social, political, and economic advancement. Through such media black people counteracted racist ideologies and dehumanizing characterizations that supported the view that African Americans did not deserve full rights of citizenship. Whenever feasible, black men and women founded their own media to voice the civil rights message that white media regularly ignored, trivialized, blocked, denounced, or sought to channel within limits acceptable to majority-white audiences. But neither the black nor the white media was monolithic; each had factions that advanced their own definition, scope, and extent of civil rights. ...
Read full articleCivil Rights, State Actions And
Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-first Century
Most modern Americans see protection of civil rights as the obligation of the national government. During the Civil War, Congress passed laws to end slavery in the District of Columbia and the federal territories, to allow the army not only to liberate slaves but also to provide them with food and other necessities, and to prohibit racial discrimination in newly chartered streetcars in the District of Columbia. Most important, late in the war Congress sent to the states the Thirteenth Amendment, which when ratified at the end of 1865 forever prohibited slavery in the United States.In the first years after the war, Congress expanded civil rights through the Freedmen's Bureau, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, and the Fourteenth Amendment, which when ratified in July 1868made blacks citizens ofFebruary ...
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Source: The Oxford Companion to United States History
Word Count: 1756 Includes: The Revolutionary War and Antebellum Eras. | The Reconstruction Era through the 1930s. | The Era of the Civil Rights Movement and Beyond.The concept of civil rights has changed dramatically since it first became a central idea in political discussions in the nineteenth century. Initially referring to a limited class of rights to which all people were entitled, the term has come to refer to a general guarantee against differential treatment in all areas of social life on the basis of what society deems to be an arbitrary grounds. The idea of natural rights played an important role in the Revolutionary War Era. Natural rights were those rights people enjoyed in a state of nature, independent of any organized society: the right to life and libertyand the right to attempt to procure property. Civil rights were the rights people possessed once they organized a society. The idea of civil rights came into its ...
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