¶ … Civil War From Slavery to African-American

By the beginning of the Civil War, there were some four million African-Americans living in the United States, 3.5 million slaves lived in the South, while another 500,000 lived free across the country (African pp). The Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 granted freedom to all slaves in the Confederacy, and the 13th Amendment of 1865 freed the remaining slaves throughout the nation (African pp). During the Reconstruction Era, African-Americans in the South gained a number of civil rights, including the right to vote and to hold office, however, when Reconstruction ended in 1877, white landowners initiated racial segregation that resulted in vigilante violence, including lynchings (African pp).

This resulted in the Great Migration of African-Americans from the South to the North during the beginning of the twentieth...

Perhaps the most prominent of these groups was the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, NAACP, which became involved in a series of legal battles during the 1950's in an effort to overturn Jim Crow segregation and culminated in the landmark United States Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education (African pp).
The Civil Rights Movement reached a peak during the 1960's with leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. And Roy Wilkins emerging into the national spotlight (African pp). Malcolm X and such leaders raised the consciousness of African-Americans by encouraging them to embrace…