DIVERSITY | Offering a place for everyone
29 December 2008
Slavery Spreads to America: Introduction
One group did not enjoy American rights and protections
This article is excerpted from the book Free At Last: The U.S. Civil Rights Movement, published by the Bureau of International Information Programs. View the entire book (PDF, 3.6 MB).
Among the antiquities displayed at the United Nations headquarters in New York is a replica of the Cyrus Cylinder. Named for Cyrus the Great, ruler of the Persian Empire and conqueror of Babylonia, the document dates to about 539 B.C. Cyrus guaranteed to his subjects many of what we today call civil rights, among them freedom of religion and protection of personal property. Cyrus also abolished slavery, “a tradition,” he asserted, that “should be exterminated the world over.”
Throughout history, nations have varied in how broadly they define and how vigorously they defend their citizens’ personal protections and privileges. The United States is a nation built on these civil rights, on the soaring ideals enshrined in its Declaration of Independence and the legal protections formalized in its Constitution, and most prominently, in the first 10 amendments to that Constitution, known collectively as the American people’s Bill of Rights.
Yet one group of arrivals did not enjoy those rights and protections. Even as European immigrants found unprecedented economic opportunity and greater personal, political, and religious liberty in the New World, black Africans were transported there involuntarily, often in chains, to be sold as chattel slaves and compelled to labor for “masters,” most commonly in the great agricultural plantations in the South.
This book recounts how those African-American slaves and their descendants struggled to win — both in law and in practice — the civil rights enjoyed by other Americans. It is a story of dignified persistence and struggle, a story that produced great heroes and heroines, and one that ultimately succeeded by forcing the majority of Americans to confront squarely the shameful gap between their universal principles of equality and justice and the inequality, injustice, and oppression faced by millions of their fellow citizens.
