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The Road to Ending Segregation

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The Road To Ending Segregation
Barbara Pritchard
HIS 204: Historical Awareness
Professor Kimberly Hornback
September 26, 2011

The road to ending Segregation
The road to ending segregation was a long and hard move for the South. In the 1800s-1900’s segregation was enforced to keep African Americans separated from whites. During this time African Americans had to deal with the symbols of what was called Jim Crow’s, (Whites Only and Colored Only) signs; which are found today in museums, old photographs, and documentaries. Now since an African American has been elected President of the United States, a person could say segregation seems as old-fashioned and distant as watching an old black and white television. Although, the major challenge is to explain the reasons for the legacy of segregation, discrimination, and isolation to attain equality and civil rights, that African Americans worked to end.
The best way to describe the shape of the United States in the second half of the 19th century, “according to eminent historian Robert Wiebe, the answer was isolated island communities,” (Bowles, 2011, Section 1.1, Para 1). Wiebe used the symbol of the island because cities were very much separated and isolated from each other and had a weak system of communication between them. The time came, after the divisiveness and devastation of the Civil War, when the nation searched for order economically, politically, geographically, and racially. Although, emancipation came during the Civil War, nearly 4 million freed slaves struggled to make a home for themselves as citizens during a period known as Reconstruction, which lasted from 1865 to 1877. “Though Reconstruction was unable to end the social, economic, and political isolation of the modern black community, it was important for reunifying the country and establishing the first constitutional steps toward

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