Go Through a Horrible Period of History

Blacks faced terrible discrimination in the United States and South Africa, which is shown in this documentary. This documentary goes over a couple of topics which will be summarized in this essay, topics included are the origins of Afrikaners, the link between religion and white supremacy, a system of Apartheid, Nelson Mandela’s role, the Anti-segregation movement in the United States and black voting rights in the United States. Black had a period in history when they were completely discriminated against, prejudiced, and treated just horribly, this documentary does a very great job to open your eyes and see the perspective of what the blacks had to endure during this horrific time in history.

This documentary shows how segregation was enforced in both the United States and South Africa. Once people started to protest, it took about 10 years for blacks in the United States to receive some of the same rights as whites, whereas it took South Africa about half a century.

This is a quote from the video, “the U.S. constitution promised equality before the law, but in the 1950s in the South where 10 million blacks lived it was the laws of the state that counted”. So even when they passed laws to move toward equality for blacks, it didn’t make much of a difference because they were still facing discrimination in their everyday life. Even after slavery, everything became segregated in the United States, law enforcement was used to keep whites and blacks separate. Then when there was talk about ending segregation, that is when the KKK came in to put the fear into the whites to prevent that from happening.

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Eventually, the Federal Court allowed the schools to integrate, whereas before they were use the National Guard to keep blacks out of white zones of schools. This was a difficult transition, to say the least, they started with a black test group in Little Rock, but they had to evacuate the school because they were so many violent white protesters. The president at the time sent the army to remove the violent white protesters so the black students were able to attend school. This was a movement in the Civil Right Movement in hopes to end segregation. The Civil Rights Movement is where blacks started to use mass actions because they felt that the government wasn’t making as much of a change in the racial discrimination of blacks.

Moving on with the Civil Rights Movement is when blacks began doing sitting protests where 50,000 joined a sitting protest in 1961. There were also a group of blacks called the freedom riders who would not sit in their segregated spot on the public bus, but this ended in one bus getting firebombed by a group of whites. In the U.S. 36,000 blacks were arrested due to protesting segregation laws. In 1964, the Civil Rights Act was put in place to “eliminate segregation in all settings”. The South pushed back on this Act and didn’t allow blacks the rights they were given. For example, they didn’t allow blacks in the South to vote in some locations. As stated in the video, “only 10% of blacks were registered in Alabama”.

Going into the history of South Africa, Afrikaners were white descendants of European origins that migrated to South Africa centuries beforehand. Afrikaners had their language, political system, and even their church. In the Afrikaners’ church is when white supremacy was enforced and told that God believed in the idea of blacks being cursed with the only purpose of being laborers. In 1948, an all-white parliament passed institualizating white supremacy in South Africa. In South Africa, blacks were technically the majority and the whites were the minority, statistically anyways. That isn’t how things worked out on the everyday bias. Things were also segregated in South Africa and the whites were treated much better in comparison to blacks, which made whites the majority. Whites were given better hospital care, land, voting rights, opportunities, and more. Blacks weren’t even allowed to vote.

The apartheid system that was put in place had a huge part in the segregation of blacks and whites in South Africa. In South Africa, people were forced to register their origins. If you were white mixed with something else you were considered colored, and if you were black mixed with something else you were also considered colored, whereas white and blacks were considered what they are. Blacks had to carry a passbook at all times, they were able to enter only the white area unless they had a stamp that showed they had a job to do in that area. If a black was caught without their passbook they would get arrested. Some of the laws of the apartheid system besides segregating every place, also made it illegal for interracial marriage and could mix “race” blood transfusions in their segregated hospitals.

In South Africa, whites receive the same “normal” education that a white in the United States would receive but for blacks, it was a different story, instead, they were only taught practical household skills in school any knowledge about the outside knowledge was eliminated. Black children had to give up their dreams of being a doctor, teacher, or actress because those were only dreams for white children in South Africa. When the blacks in South Africa had had enough they went to a meeting held by African National Congress, where they wanted to protest the apartheid system. Protesting the apartheid system was considered to be very dangerous. The video states that “the African National Congress call for mass civil disobedience” in 1955. The African National Congress offered a freedom charter where it proclaimed that “South Africa belonged to all who lives in it, blacks and whites”. This later resulted in 156 African National Congress leaders being arrested for high treason. Blacks were eventually forced out of their homes and towns and moved to white-created townships made for blacks. Another protest was started when blacks started to burn their passbook in protest. Following that, there was a protest in the township of Sharpeville where 15,000 people attended 67 were shot to death and many others were injured. Nelson Mandela is a well-known name, mostly because he later became the president of South Africa. But first, Nelson Mandela was one of the leaders of the African National Congress, which promoted the idea of the sabotage campaign that later resulted in his arrest in 1962. He was sent to live in prison on Robins Island. Nelson Mandela stated that “I planned the sabotage campaign because lawful methods of opposition were closed”.

Overall, this was a terrible period in history for both whites and blacks, but mostly blacks. It was a horrible time for blacks just getting out of slavery to still face discrimination in their everyday life, and then terrible for whites that they could treat blacks with the huge amount of disrespect that they did is completely astounding. Overall, I’m glad to see that we have made a huge progression in comparison to what this documentary showed. We still aren’t in a perfect world where blacks and whites are completed treated equal, but I have the hopes that we will get there one day.