Race Racism Racism and Racial Stereotyping

slavery became a “positive good”, protecting Africans from their “savage impulses”, and responding to their “childlike dependency”. Yet, even in the abolitionist North, stereotypes portrayed Africans as ignorant, lazy, and i mmoral. During this period the “black Sambo” stereotype evolved, which portrayed black people as childlike, helpless, shuffling, and fumbling but with potentially aggressive tendencies. Aguirre, 2011: 110 From the statement above, it is clear that there were many negative stereotypes generalizing the African in the era of slavery. The White people’s superiority tends to see the Blacks as inferior, in the lowest level of human beings. As the time went by they, started to rise and develop the Black movement to fight for their rights and freedom as human beings and citizens of the United States America. In the 1960s, the public sentiment for government assistance for African Americans had turned much harsher than it was at the peak of the civil rights movement. There was Martin Luther King Jr., who led the campaign of nonviolent resistance in the late 1950s. The Civil Rights movement has begun to gain more serious momentum in the United States by 1960. In the same year, John F. Kennedy made a passage of new civil rights legislation part of his presidential campaign platform. In 1964, Golden wrote a book which tells about African American life after the signing of the Civil Rights Act. He states that African Americans’ fight for the right to enter public school was not a fight for education. They fought for life and death as well, because entering public school was the first step to obtaining adequate hospital care. “Public schools are the first step, adequate hospital care the second” Golden, 1964: 32. He states that not only educational and health issues are what they should fight for. The discrimination against African Americans was also done by the government. He states that for thirty years, Southern legislators and legislatures had led a legal war against African American people. They disfranchised the Negroes, denied them in school, hospitals, and access to tax-supported facilities and public accommodations. Golden, 1964: 38 He also tells about white men who lynched African Americans and who regularly defiled African American women were not prosecuted, as the Southern government refused to. Those treatments were considered good things by the Southern politicians as they “boasted of their parental love, knowing all the time that their strategy would help maintain the status quo ” Golden, 1964: 39. Furthermore, Golden writes another facts regarding racial discrimination experienced by African American people in daily life. In 1960, African American people had to buy shoes in a store owned by Whites because there where no shoe stores owned by African Americans. They had to pay expensives price to buy shoes. Another discrimination happened in church as they had no proprietary rights, although they spoke the same language as Whites. Golden states that “the colored man’s church, mainly Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian, was controlled and dictated to by white men who deprived Negroes of religious autonomy” Golden, 1964: 41.