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Who Do You Think You Are? Season Two
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The Other Side of Emancipation
Spike's great-great-great-grandfather, Mars, was born into slavery but became a free man who owned over 80 acres of land. By 1865, some 10,000 freed slaves settled on 400,000 acres granted to them in Georgia and South Carolina by an order from General William T. Sherman. Shockingly, President Andrew Jackson reversed this order and gave the land back to its white owners. For African-Americans, the end of the Civil War was just the beginning of a new kind of struggle. Here are more unsavory truths about life after slavery:
Did you know?
- 1863's Emancipation Proclamation began the unraveling of America's 250-year-old institution of slavery. However, because of Jim Crow laws (segregation), African-Americans were not viewed as legally equal until 1965.
- The Civil Rights Act of 1866 granted citizenship and the same rights to African-Americans as white citizens "without distinction of race or color, or previous condition of slavery or involuntary servitude."
- President Andrew Johnson vetoed the bill, but was overridden by a two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress.
- Johnson's continued racist pronouncements (such as "This is a country for white men, and as long as I am president it shall be a government for white men"), his break from existing ruling parties, and his refusal to pass various reconstruction acts led to his formal impeachment by the House of Representatives. In 1868, he escaped removal from office by just one vote.
- "Freedmen" was the term given to slaves who became free after the U.S. Congress passed the Confiscation Act of 1862, which stipulated that Confederates who did not surrender within 60 days of the act's passage were to be punished by having their slaves freed.
- The term Jim Crow is believed to have been originated in the 1830's by a minstrel show performer, Thomas "Daddy" Rice, who dressed in black face and danced around ridiculously, singing "Jump Jim Crow." The term was adopted as another derogatory term to call African-Americans.
- Although the Homestead Act went into effect at the same time President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, only one quarter of the trillion acres of land would actually be used as intended (to give a person 160 acres of land to farm). The bulk of the properties went to corporate interests, like the railroad and timber industries, rather than individual settlers.
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