CHAPTER V: REACHING TOWARD CITIZENSHIP AND ITS RESPONSIBILITIES, 1865-1867.
In: Secret City: A History of Race Relations in the Nation's Capital; 1967, p75-90, 16p, 1 Chart
Buch
Zugriff:
The article focuses on the citizenship and responsibilities given to the Negro community in Washington after the Civil War. Distasteful to many white Washingtonians was the prospect in 1865 of having to accept the Negro as a fellow citizen, the strong possibility of having federal law force racial equality upon the D.C. was far harder to swallow. Aware that thousands of contrabands were determined to stay permanently within the federal area, Washington's city council prepared to fight a Negro suffrage bill that would certainly come before the U.S. Congress when it convened in December. When the U.S. Senate took up the suffrage bill in June 1866, a counterproposal, fights over modifications and the excessive heat of the Washington summer combined to delay action. Omission of a literacy qualification from the suffrage act meant that the District cities would have several thousand new voters who though elated at the prospect of sharing white men's political privileges, still were unfamiliar with the obligations voting entailed. But the battle for a decent life for colored people had scarcely begun. Neither the congressional law, nor the Freedmen's Bureau, nor public-spirited educated Negroes could greatly lighten the immediate miseries of freedmen. Ill-prepared to earn a living in a competitive world, contrabands who had jobs of sorts during the Civil war were stranded when the Army demobilized, the corrals shut down and the military hospitals closed. Educated colored people still encountered rudeness and irrespective of their skills and intellectual attainments, suffered from various forms of racial discrimination; of the thousands of field hands who had moved into Washington and Georgetown during and since the war, a great many were still desperately poor and seemingly without the capacity to help themselves.
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CHAPTER V: REACHING TOWARD CITIZENSHIP AND ITS RESPONSIBILITIES, 1865-1867.
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Autor/in / Beteiligte Person: | Green, Constance Mc ; Laughlin |
Quelle: | Secret City: A History of Race Relations in the Nation's Capital; 1967, p75-90, 16p, 1 Chart |
Veröffentlichung: | 1967 |
Medientyp: | Buch |
ISBN: | 978-0-691-00568-3 (print) |
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