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Oppression: to Resist or Adapt?

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Submitted By cwkinsworthy
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Oppression: To Resist or Adapt?

Humans have this mysterious conception the one skin tone, religion, region, or ideology is superior than another human beings. From the beginning of mankind to our world today, groups of like minded people have degraded or oppressed groups that do not categorize under their idea of who is equal to them. The groups that are degraded or oppressed have historically shown that they either resist and fight against the oppressor or adapt and strive to continue living peacefully to the best of their abilities. This can be shown through the examples from the 19 century when African Americans were freed and struggled on whether to resist or adapt to post Reconstruction era America; in World War II between how people of the Jewish faith tried to adapt without resisting to Nazi occupation, imprisonment, and even murder; and finally today, how women in the Middle East, who are going against culture and trying to gain basic rights as human beings. It would be beneficial to begin describing the situation that African Americans faced during the 19th century. After 1877, slavery ceased to exist in the United States and former slaves had constitutional protection against oppression, yet African Americans continued to be oppressed in the South. During the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century Democrats, who at that time supported the Confederacy and slavery, started to implement a series of laws called the Jim Crow laws. The primary goal of these laws was to disenfranchise the African American voting population so that the southern states would hold their newly gained power and seats within the Congress, without allowing them to vote representatives that supported African American causes. Even with the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments to the constitution, which guarantees equal rights to blacks, the

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