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Treatment of Blacks in the U.S.

This study will examine the treatment of blacks from the beginning of slavery in the colonial era to the present, from a political science perspective. The history of the state's treatment of blacks is a dark one, just as the state's economic and agricultural achievement in the colonial era and later was a bright feature in the development of the country. In these terms

--sterling economic success based in part on slavery and the exploitation and mistreatment of blacks--the state of Virginia serves as a microcosm of the nation in its early years. This study will consider the roles of the three levels of government (local, state, federal) in developing a policy which exploited and brutalized blacks in the past, and ways in which government altered its position on blacks in more recent times. Certainly the treatment of blacks by Virginia has improved in the twentieth century, although the state still has room for betterment in the application of civil rights to all.

Virginia, writes Higginbotham, as a leading force politically and fiscally in the early years of the history of the nation,

was a model of agricultural and economic success as one of the first colonies. It played a major role in precipitating the American Revolution. . . . Yet, tragically, Virginia was also a leader in the gradual debasement of blacks through its ultimate institutionalization of slavery. It pioneered a legal process that assured blacks a uniquely degraded status--one in which the cruelties of slavery and pervasive racial injustice were guaranteed by its laws (Higginbotham, 1978, p. 19).

The legal and institutionalization of the mistreatment of blacks by Virginia is especially significant, then, because the state through its leadership and power was a major force in the shaping of the new nation and the establishment of its future direction. In a sense, as Virginia went in the treatment of blacks, so went the nation.

The history of the state...

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Treatment of Blacks in the U.S.. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 03:54, March 19, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1701232.html