Book Notes -5 - Summary A Different Mirror: a History of Multicultural America PDF

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Notes from chapter 5 from the book A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America. Details of important events and people from the chapter. ...

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Book Notes Chapter 5 1. Who are the main characters and why are they significant?  James Madison is known as the Father of the Constitution because of his pivotal role in the document's drafting as well as its ratification. Madison also drafted the first 10 amendments.  David Walker in 1829, while living in Boston, Massachusetts, he published an Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, a call for black unity and self-help in the fight against oppression and injustice.  Benjamin Lundy was an American Quaker abolitionist from New Jersey of the United States who established several anti-slavery newspapers. He lectured and published seeking to limit the slavery's expansion, and tried to find a place outside the United States to establish a colony where freed slaves might relocate.  William Lloyd Garrison was a prominent American abolitionist, journalist, suffragist, and social reformer. He is best known as the editor of the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator, which he founded with Isaac Knapp in 1831 and published in Massachusetts until slavery was abolished by Constitutional amendment after the American Civil War.  Abram Harris was an American economist, academic, anthropologist and a social critic of blacks in the United States.  Frederick Douglass was an African-American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman. After escaping from slavery in Maryland, he became a national leader of the abolitionist movement in Massachusetts and New York, gaining note for his dazzling oratory and incisive antislavery writings. In his time, he was described by abolitionists as a living counter-example to slaveholders' arguments that slaves lacked the intellectual capacity to function as independent American citizens. Northerners at the time found it hard to believe that such a great orator had once been a slave.  Martin Robison Delany was an African-American abolitionist, journalist, physician, and writer, and arguably the first proponent of black nationalism. He was one of the first three black people admitted to Harvard Medical School.  General William Sherman was a United States Army general during the American Civil War. He succeeded General Ulysses S. Grant as commander of the Western Theater of that war in the spring of 1864.

2. What are the significant events (cite dates, periods, locations)?  In 1861, the beginning of the Civil War, The Confederate States of America were formed by South Carolina, Mississippi, Georgia, Louisiana, Alabama, Florida, and Texas, and joined by Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas and North Carolina, and it was the Confederacy's attack on Fort Sumter on April 12th that starts the Civil

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War between the Union Army of the North and The confederate Army of the South In 1861, the Blockade of Confederate Ports began during the Civil War. The Union army established a blockade of Confederate ports designed to prevent the export of cotton and the smuggling of war materiel into the Confederacy. In 1861, as the United States itself became massively divided over regional issues, leading to the American Civil War in 1861–1865. The western regions of Virginia split with the eastern portion politically, and the two were never reconciled as a single state again. In 1880, 41 percent of Birmingham’s industrial workers were black; thirty years later, blacks made up 39 percent of steelworkers in the South. The Great Railroad Strike of 1877, sometimes referred to as the Great Upheaval, began on July 14 in Martinsburg, West Virginia, after the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad cut wages for the third time in a year. In 1886, rally at Haymarket Square was organized by labor radicals to protest the killing and wounding of several workers by the Chicago police during a strike the day before at the McCormick Reaper Works. The Homestead Strike was an industrial lockout and strike which began in 1892, culminating in a battle between strikers and private security agents. The battle was one of the most serious disputes in U.S. labor history Plessy v. Ferguson, was a milestone constitutional law case of the US Supreme Court decided in 1896. It upheld state racial segregation laws for public facilities under the doctrine of "separate but equal".

3. What important themes does Takaki focus on in this chapter?  A main theme Takaki talks about was life after slavery. In the north, African Americans were “set free” of slavery, but they could not work any skilled jobs they could only find tedious work and live in low communities in the North. There was a scare of intermarriage between an African American male and white European female, and after this, the Europeans were pushing for complete segregation. They wanted segregated schools, as Takaki states, “the admission of Negro children “into our public schools would ultimately tend to bring about that feeling which favor their consolidation with our own people.” As you can see these people were not set free, but confined to a new racial segregation that limited every possibility in their life such as education, voting rights, religion, and marriage. 4. Identify the power takers in this chapter. By what means did these individuals or groups gain power?  The power takers are the white men. After the civil war, even though slavery was over the African Americans, the brutalities of white race prejudice persisted. After slavery, government across the South instituted laws known as Black Codes. These laws granted certain legal rights to blacks, including the right to marry, own property, and sue in court, but the Codes also made it illegal for blacks to serve on

juries, testify against whites, or serve in state militias. The Black Codes also required black sharecroppers and tenant farmers to sign annual labor contracts with white landowners. If they refused, they could be arrested and hired out for work. They were still hated and some rights were still not there. For little things, African Americans could be sent to imprisonment. What these white men gain was power and control, they feared that blacks would fight for jobs, so they had to show who was “boss”.

5. Identify the characters whose power was appropriated. What were the circumstances that lead to their oppression? How did these characters demonstrate resistance to their oppression?  The Characters that had their powers appropriated were the African Americans after slavery. After slavery had ended, they still did not have full rights for certain things like the white men did. Whites created the Black Codes. White feared that African Americans would act violently to get rights and freedom. They feared that they would take hard labor jobs from certain whites. So, they had created laws that band them form certain things like education, they were segregated, and weren’t allowed to have intermarriage. The way they fought back by using some of their rights to vote. Although they were segregated, they still attended school even if the education wasn’t great. They also attended religious ceremonies. They also fought back by finally having African Americans work in government jobs and using their rights of freedom from the Bill of Rights....