As an african- american living in the south in the 1950s, describe four ways you were treated as a "second class citizen"

African Americans were faced with an almost insurmountable number of obstacles in 1900. Any way you look at it, in terms of the educational system, particularly considering the fact that the majority of them, the large majority are still in the South. And as far as education is concerned, African Americans are given almost no avenue of education on the lower level, which makes it difficult for them to aspire to higher education because they don't have the rudiments to get to that point. Public schools are open to African Americans only in very small communities.

Any way you look at it, socially, politically, economically, education, African Americans were kept out of society. And they had to scratch and bite to get whatever advantages that they did get. And the majority could not get those advantages. If you look at education for instance in 1900 and take for example, Mississippi, which is a state that spends about three dollars a year on the education of a black child and sixty on the education of a white child, then if you look at the whole economic structure in the states of the South which are primarily cotton states, which depend on a sharecropping, crop lien system for the production and the profit of this cotton, which African Americans are the main labor force for, then black children are forced to work rather than go to school. So even if there was money in the family for shoes and clothing which often there was not, the children were needed in the labor force. So that was a constraint on African Americans. Politically African Americans have for the most part lost whatever political situation they had had as a result of Reconstruction. And it was done very brutally and it was done very systematically. First it was done without the law, it was done extralegally through terrorism, through creating these various kinds of laws, informal ways of keeping African Americans from voting. But by the 1890s all the way up past 1900, it became legal, because the various states formed new constitutional conventions which legally disfranchised African Americans. So the political process was closed. And then of course the striking down of the civil rights act meant that all of the gains that had been made about equality and public accommodations, all of that was dead. So everywhere we looked as a people the doors seemed to be closed to us.