From Slavery to Segregation

It is estimated that more than 20 million Africans were captured and forcibly taken to the North and South America continents.

The majority of these captured slaves did not come to what is today the United States. Rather, more than half of all slaves captured in Africa went to the Caribbean and South America.

This was known as the Triangular Trade

• Watch 1st Video (in student drive)

Diagram of an actual slave ship. The diagram was completed because the owners wanted to determine if more slaves could be “stored” on the Middle Passage journey.

Once in the Americas, families were split up and sold as if they were animals for sale

• Take a moment in your groups to share notes.– Which main points do you have in your left hand column? – What supporting details do you have? – The person in your group whose birthday is next needs to

be prepared to share out to the class.

• Summarize the information we saw today in 1-2 sentences in the box provided.

Here are slaves “spearing” tobacco crop. Slaves were needed mostly for agricultural work where labor was intensive and needed greatly to increase profit.

One invention that dramatically increased the need for slaves was the Cotton Gin (short for cotton engine)

Life on a plantation was extremely difficult. Slaves faced disease, violence, rape and extreme oppression.

• Watch 2nd Video (in student drive)

• Take a moment in your groups to share notes.– Which main points do you have in your left hand column? – What supporting details do you have? – The person in your group who is youngest needs to be

prepared to share out to the class.

• Summarize the information we saw today in 1-2 sentences in the box provided.

The causes and reasons for fighting the Civil War (1861-1865) are complex. However, by the end of the war, slavery in the United States was now illegal.

By the end of the conflict, over 620,000 men were dead and an unknown number of civilians. It was the deadliest war in U.S. history.

Amendments, or changes, to the U.S. Constitution

• 13th Amendment (change) to the U.S. Constitution: abolished slavery

• 14th Amendment: made all freedmen citizens of the United States

• 15th Amendment: guarantees the right to vote regardless of race

A new system quickly replaced slavery, known as sharecropping, it allowed tenant farmers to work the land for a “share” of the profit from the crop. Abuses were rampant and many sharecroppers worked the land for no payment.

Entire families would become tied to the land, forced to pay off debts that farm owners would create in order to keep the families working the land.

• Watch 3rd Video (in student drive)

Violence towards blacks (and whites who were sympathetic to their oppression) increased after the Civil War.

Over 4,000 people were lynched between the Civil War (1865) and World War II (1941)

The Jim Crow South was alive and well. Blacks feared violence if they tried to vote, or speak out against injustice, and were kept from gaining economic footholds in society.

And in most communities throughout the nation, blacks and whites were segregated in nearly every area of their lives. Slavery was gone, but another racist system, nearly as bad, was firmly in it’s place.

• Take a moment in your groups to share notes.– Which main points do you have in your left hand column? – What supporting details do you have? – The person in your group who is oldest needs to be

prepared to share out to the class.

• Summarize the information we saw today in 1-2 sentences in the box provided.