African Americans
Slave Trade- As the need for sugar, tobacco, cotton, and other New World products grew so did the slave trade. Slave merchants crammed nearly 11 million African Americans treating them like cargo and shipping them to the New World. As many as 2 million of these slaves would die even before reaching their destination. The slave trade was abandoned in 1808 but slavery was not abolished until after the Civil War in 1865.
Harlem Renaissance- In the 1920s after WWI this black cultural renaissance was led by writers such as Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston, and Jazz artists like Louis Armstrong and Eubie Blake. This blast of black expression made African Americans proud of their culture and helped the argument that "negros" should be full citizens and equal to whites.
Jim Crow- By the 1890s a series of legal codes of segregation were developed called Jim Crow laws. The Supreme Court validated these laws in the case Plessy v. Ferguson where it was ruled that "separate but equal" facilities were constitutional under the "equal protection" clause of the fourteenth amendment. This made African American life extremely unequal. They had to undergo literacy tests in order to vote and they were segregated and separated them from practically every public place. It made them economically inferior and politically powerless. In May 1954 in the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas the justices ruled that segregation in public schools was "inherently unequal" and unconstitutional and desegregation must go ahead with "all deliberate speed."
Civil Rights 1950's-60's- There were around 15 million black citizens in 1950. Desegregation started in 1954 after Brown v. Board of Education found that segregation was extremely unequal and helped to kick start equality of African Americans. In 1957 Congress passed the first Civil Rights Act since the Reconstruction days and it permanently set up a Civil Rights Commission to investigate violations of civil rights and authorized federal injunctions to protect voting rights. Civil rights activists like Martin Luther King Freedom riders the SNCC continued in the 1960s still making their wants known regardless of the many violent consequences. Then in 1964 Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that banned discrimination in employment and public places.