Though the fifteenth amendment gave black males the right to vote a poll tax was introduced to eliminate the black vote. It was effective because the large majority of blacks were poor and needed the money for priorities other than voting. Policies like these drove blacks deeper into poverty and only made the color line more definite. Racism also played a large role in immigration. Immigrants from all over the world were flooding the shores of the U.S. looking for the promise of the American Dream.
In the South segregation was supported by the Jim Crow laws that made it legal. All public institutions in the South were separated according to skin colour, the ones for blacks being inferior in quality. In the north, where segregation wasn’t imposed by law, the blacks were forced to move into ghettos, because of discrimination by the whites. As well as that, there was also economic inequality. It was much harder for blacks to get a job, and there employment position could be described as ‘the last to be hired, the first to be fired’.
Poor standards of living for blacks were another cause of Montgomery Bus Boycott. This inspired blacks to desegregate buses as facilities were segregated, blacks were seemed and treated inferior to whites. Harassment from the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) was given to blacks. In 1870, in one county South Caroline alone was 6 murders and 300 whippings. KKK was hugely supported by whites and became the voice for poor uneducated whites who felt threatened in competing for housing and jobs.
Competition also creates companies to drive down wages, as they will wish to make their products at the lowest cost they can, this alienating the working class and causing them to become impoverished. Marx is often criticised as his two-class system is often seen as too simplistic. Weber divides the proletariat into skilled and unskilled class, and includes white-collar proletariat and small bourgeoisies. Marx believes that capitalism sows
Poverty becomes un-American because the mythology of the day decrees, that in America you become wealthy if you are enterprising, and you work hard enough, and anybody that does not manage to bring themselves out of poverty is of a lesser pedigree. This idea begins to
2. While there are many reasons to prevent slavery from being abolished, maintain the social order and economic gain are possibly two of the strongest reasons to keeping slavery. White Americans do not need any more competition in their lives, and with freed slaves this would create less jobs, money, or political strength within the colonies. Whites must keep their superiority in order to maintain status quo. Men are entitled to own slaves and this right has always been protected.
The power shifted to the new elite. The way the new elite are making more money than they deserve is that they form monopolies. “Small storekeepers and merchants are becoming the clerks and salesmen of great business houses” (page15) and the big corporation form monopolies. We call the wealthy industrialists “robber barons” because they made a lot of money through “exploitation of the working class.” For example,
My initial response is that the Marxists are correct as the ruling class do have the choice to raise the workers’ wages but they still chose not to. Marxists suggest that males are the most dominant in the family. Engels believed that the farther needed to know who their offspring were in order to pass property down to their children through inheritance. He argues that the need for family came about when society started to value their private property and wealth. As a result of this he believed the nuclear family was crucial and that any other type of family was a threat to society.
Very often the rich push the poor by removing workers rights, by limiting corporate liability, by instigating war. I could go on, but you get the point. Society is essentially a contract. The poor work in order to make the rich wealthier. That's how it works.
The Constitution, until recently, did not apply to blacks; blacks feel they deserve payments from 310 years of slavery, destruction to their minds and culture. Dr. Martin Luther King's dilemma in the United States was of a different kind. He was torn between his identity as a Black man of African descent and his identity as an American. He urged Americans to judge based on the content of the character not by skin color and also believed in non-violent protests. Martin Luther King Jr’s main perspective during the fight on racism was equality.