Current Profile of African Americans in ‘White’ America In Frederick Douglass’s 1865 speech, “What the Black man wants,” shed light to the social life of African Americans in contrast to ‘whites’ in ‘free’ American states. During this period in African American history and consciousness they were still in legal slavery, facing racial discrimination in every aspect, marginalized by state policies, but most importantly they lacked suffrage and faced many inequalities that prevented them from sharing the same civic rights as ‘white’ citizens of America. Even though, the declaration of independence in 1776 viewed African American as ‘citizens,’ it failed to state that they enjoyed the same protection as ‘whites’. As a result, slavery became …show more content…
The master ‘whites’ lived a distance from the housing of the slaves and in some cases not even on the plantations that they owned. In contrast to the living situations of the African Americans in America that is housed in ‘low-income’ housing projects. These housing projects were created for immigrants but eventually were filled with migrants from the south. According to Hoffman, the constituency for public housing in the 1960s became lower-class rural migrants from the south. This has progressed pass the 1960s into the twenty first century, where in America the African Americans are still housed in low-income housing projects in the rural areas that are situated in …show more content…
During Douglass’s time the African American were subjected to all sorts of severe whippings and in some cases death. As shown in Douglass’s analysis of the value of slaves on the plantation, “it was worth half-cent to kill a "nigger", and a half-cent to bury one” is one such quote that Douglass compare the cost of black lives. However, Douglass has witnessed many horrible things done to slaves even to his aunt Hester and himself. These injustices to African Americans were not properly address by the state because black lives did not matter and the slaves had no