An Overview of the Social Marginalization of African-Americans in American Society

This paper aims to provide an overview of the history of how African-Americans have been reduced to the status of the social Other in American society. This story largely characterized by racial oppression, exclusion, exploitation, and disenfranchisement starts with the arrival of twenty Negroes at Jamestown in 1619 and ends with the modern Civil Rights Movement under the leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr. in the 19605. The chief focus of the paper is on the rise and growth of slavery and segregation and the continuing efforts of African-Americans to fight against inhuman bondage and prejudice. Particular attention is given to the rise of racist ideologies, white supremacy and antiblack racism, in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, by which the inhuman slavery regime in the South as well as the racial segregation in the North were justified. Racial discrimination and segregation in the military and the labor market after the World War 1, and the black struggle to break the color bar in these sectors, which laid the foundations for the Civil Rights Movement in the sixties, are also discussed briefly