Salem Witch Hunt Research Paper

The Civil Rights Movement and The Salem Witch Hunts

“Only in the darkness can you see the stars.” - Martin Luther King Jr. In both the 1690’s Salem Witch Trials and the 1960’s Civil Rights Movement there were groups of people who were mistreated and faced dark times. Leading up to the protests in The Civil Rights there was enormous tension in the USA between African-Americans and their oppressors due to the history of slavery and discrimination against the minority. African-American citizens, like those accused of witchcraft in The Crucible, suffered from the inability to work, they were more likely to be assaulted or a victim of a violent crime, and were segregated from the public.

African-Americans and the people accused of witchcraft suffered from the inability to work. These people were unable to work either because they were falsely imprisoned, hospitalized or fired due to discrimination. “Thousands of African-Americans were jailed unlawfully throughout the 20th century, the actual number is unknown” (Maloney 3). So many African-Americans

They were also more likely to be murdered. “From 1882-1968, 4,743 lynchings occurred in the United States; Of these people that were lynched 3,446 were black. The blacks lynched accounted for 72.7% of the people lynched” (History Of Lynchings). A lynching is when someone is ran up on and hung; these African-Americans were lynched just because of the color of their skin. “More than 200 people were accused of practicing witchcraft—the Devil’s magic—and 20 were executed” (Blumberg 1). In The Crucible, 19 people are said to have been killed, when the number is 10 times bigger when it actually happened in the 1600s. Due to haste and lack of logic or reasoning thousands of people were wrongfully murdered and it’s frightening that some of this only happened a few generations