Equality: The Role Of Racial Discrimination In America

For hundreds of years, longer than what should have been, many races excluding white men have been subjected to discrimination and segregation. Races such as African Americans and Native Americans have been oppressed by society and the United States government without remorse. The fight for equality for African Americans and Native Americans began when the first slave decided enough is enough. It started with the first slave to run away, the first person to speak out, the first person to stand their ground, and the first person to take risks that could end their life. That fight still continues today. People like Booker T. Washington, Martin Luther King Jr., and Zitkala Ša are the reason different races around america have been given equality, even if it

He had many beliefs, one of them being that before white people judged his race, they should give them a chance to become equally intelligent. According to the Constitutional Rights Foundation, if African Americans learned skills in mechanics and agriculture, white people “would prove to whites the value of blacks to the American economy”(). This goes along with what Washington was trying to say in his most famous and popular speech given at a convention called The Atlanta Compromise. There is a repeating line where he says “cast down your buckets” and what this means is African Americans should quit striving to gain every right that white people had and focus on trying to get the favor of them. He believed in that period of time, they had just been given freedom and had no use for the liberal arts, he says, “cast your buckets down in agriculture, mechanics, in commerce, in domestic service, and the professions” (p.450), because these are the skills they are good at and can make a quick living off of. It was also the skills white people wouldn’t put up a fight about them having. Washington had a fear that they would try to jump into freedom and not think of how they would survive, it is