The Constitution made two compromises over slavery, although it never mentioned the peculiar institution. It allowed “all other persons” to be counted as three-fifths of a free person for purposes of taxation and representation (Art. I, sec 2). This was a compromise among various views of the persons and property that should be represented in the House of Representatives, which was itself part of a compromise over whether individuals should be represented in both the House and the Senate or if the states alone should be represented in the Senate. The Constitution also provided that the importation of persons by a state could not be prohibited for 20 years after its adoption, until 1808. This was a compromise between those who wanted to ban the importation of slaves immediately and those who wished for there to be no constitutional power to prohibit the slave trade (Art. I, sec. 9). In addition to these two compromises, the Constitution also contained a provision that “no person held to service” in one state would be discharged from that service in another. On the contrary, each state accepted an obligation to return such persons to those to whom their labor was due under the laws of a state (Art. IV, sec. 2). This provision became known as the fugitive slave clause. To implement it, Congress passed the first fugitive slave law in 1793.

In 1807, in what Lincoln once called 鈥渁pparent hot haste,鈥� Congress passed a law prohibiting the importation of slaves on the first day of January 1808. Four years previous to the passage of this law, the United States had acquired the Louisiana territory. After Louisiana, admitted to statehood in 1812, the first territory from this acquisition to apply for admission as a state was Missouri in 1819. It applied for statehood with a constitution that permitted slavery. At that time, there were 11 free and 11 slave states. Missouri was not admitted as slave state until Maine applied for statehood and was admitted as a free state. As part of this compromise, Congress included in the Missouri statehood enabling act the provision that in the remainder of the Louisiana territory slavery would forever be prohibited north of the line 36鈥�30鈥�.

The separation of Texas from Mexico through a revolution and the establishment of Texas as a separate republic in 1836 raised the issue of the new republic鈥檚 admission to the Union, and implicitly the fate of all the land that Mexico held west and northwest of Texas. When Texas joined the Union in 1845, war with Mexico followed. (Mexico considered Texas still part of its territory.) Early in the war, when President Polk asked for an appropriation for peace negotiations, Representative David Wilmot (D-PA) proposed an amendment to the appropriations bill stating that slavery would not be permitted in any territory gained from Mexico in the peace negotiations. The bill passed the House, but not the Senate, where through state representation, the slave interest was stronger than in the House, whose membership represented the larger populations of the free states. Whenever a version of Wilmot鈥檚 amendment was subsequently proposed, it met the same fate. The treaty that eventually ended the war, which had to be ratified only by the Senate, did not contain a prohibition of slavery. The contest between free state and slavery advocates over this territory, and what remained of the Louisiana territory, was the final phase of the sectional conflict leading to the Civil War. 

Following the Mexican War, California applied for admission as a free state. At that point, the number of free and slave states was equal (15 each). Consequently, California鈥檚 application for admission precipitated a crisis, as Missouri鈥檚 had 30 years before in the same circumstance. The crisis was resolved by the Compromise of 1850, which consisted of five separate pieces of legislation. Stephen A. Douglas, a Democratic Senator from Illinois, was responsible for getting the legislation passed. The bills admitted California as a free state; set the boundary between Texas and New Mexico and compensated Texas for giving up land claims beyond that boundary; set up territorial governments for Utah and New Mexico, with the provision that the territories could eventually enter the Union as either free or slave states; abolished the slave trade (but not slavery) in the District of Columbia; and strengthened the federal fugitive slave law.        

When it came time to organize territories north of Texas that were part of the Louisiana purchase, Senator Douglas again took the lead. He proposed in 1854 a Kansas-Nebraska bill that rescinded the Missouri Compromise line of 36鈥�30鈥�, which was supposed to have been established forever, and included a provision that the status of slavery in a territory was up to its inhabitants. This was the doctrine of popular sovereignty鈥攖he people should decide鈥攖hat Douglas proposed as the best way to resolve the slavery controversy. Its immediate practical result, however, was to foment civil violence. Once slavery got into a territory, it would receive the protection of territorial law, since if property in men was not illegal, then that property required the protection of the law. Protected by the law, slavery would grow and become ever harder to abolish. Immediately, therefore, both free state and slave state advocates, in and beyond Kansas and Nebraska, fought over who would predominate, and whether this peculiar form of property would be allowed. As one scholar has put it, 鈥渢he Kansas-Nebraska Act legislated civil war on the plains of Kansas.鈥�  

The civil war in Kansas aggravated the sectional conflict and pointed toward the greater civil war that would begin six years later. This conflict became even more likely with the Dred Scott decision (1857). In this decision, the Supreme Court held (7鈥�2), that persons of African descent were not citizens; had 鈥渘o rights which the white man was bound to respect;鈥� and that Congress could not prohibit slavery in the territories, since the right to hold property in slaves is 鈥渄istinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution.鈥� But if that right was in the Constitution, should not southerners have the right to take their property into any state? Did not the Dred Scott opinion suggest at least the possibility that a future court ruling might in fact declare this to be so and thus make slavery, rather than freedom, national?

It was to keep freedom national that Lincoln returned to politics during the controversy over the Kansas-Nebraska act. Douglas based his solution to the slavery controversy, as well as his ambition to be president, on popular sovereignty, the idea that the people should choose. But Lincoln saw the danger to self-government and human liberty in an understanding of popular sovereignty divorced from the judgment that slavery was wrong. The people choose because all men are created equal and so no one has a right to choose for another, without the other鈥檚 consent. If the people chose slavery鈥攃hose inequality鈥攖hen they chose to undermine popular sovereignty and thus their own freedom. Popular sovereignty was the strongest principle among Americans, but Lincoln through his words and deeds had to show the people that the only thing more important than that principle was its ultimate cause, human equality. More difficult, he had to show the people that preserving their liberty meant restricting their freedom: there were some things that not even the people could rightly choose to do.  

The post Background to the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Crisis over Slavery appeared first on 澳门六合彩开奖直播.

Gloria Reeves Sloan was the oldest of the first three students to integrate Belmont High School. Entering Belmont High as a junior, she would be the first African American to graduate from the high school. Today, Sloan is founder and president of Personal Dynamics, Inc., a global hospitality consulting firm. In 2018 she published a memoir, (Westbow Press). In it she details the spiritual practices that enabled her to turn challenging life experiences, including her years as an integration pioneer, into opportunities for growth and achievement. You can read more about her at gloriasloan.com.

(For more about the implementation of the 叠谤辞飞苍听decision nationwide, see James T. Patterson,聽Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy [New York: Oxford University Press, 2001], 86-223.)

Below, Sloan shares her experience of school integration in Belmont with TAH Publications Editor Ellen Deitz Tucker.

You entered Belmont High School in September of 1964, as the sole black student in the junior class. The same year, two other black female students were enrolled in the sophomore class. Would you explain how the responsibility of leading the integration of Belmont High School fell on the three of you?

I will speak only for myself; I鈥檓 sure the other two black students have their own thoughts and feelings on the subject. I recall the adults speaking of what we were doing as 鈥減ioneering to integrate.鈥� Our fathers, along with other leaders in our church, had attended a meeting in neighboring Mecklenburg County at which the Reverend Martin Luther King and other members of the Southern Christian Leadership Council spoke. Their message was: It is time to get school integration done! Later, this cause was discussed at our church. I don鈥檛 recall exactly what was said, but I鈥檓 sure we had a voice in the matter. It was presented to us not as an assignment, but as an opportunity to help the community achieve an important goal. People have often asked, how were we selected? I simply say that we attended the same church. Those working behind the scenes to plan the integration process probably know why we were asked to do this.

Yet there must have been something about your character or upbringing that made church leaders feel you could handle their request.

I was the last child of six, more than a decade younger than my older siblings, and my mother died when I was small. My father raised me by himself while he worked three jobs. He was a machinist at one of the local mills, the proprietor of a small store, a cook, and a handyman. My father raised me well on his own with support from family and neighbors. When school let out for the summer, I would travel by train to visit my aunt and other relatives up North. I learned to be rather independent at an early age.聽 I also gained some understanding of the world outside of my community.

Before you entered Belmont High, were you and the two sophomore students given any sort of preparation for what you were going to do?

No. I don鈥檛 recall any specific preparation given us in the black community. I vaguely remember all of us meeting with the school superintendent before the first day of class, but there was no orientation and no support from the white community that I knew about. No one warned us about possible hostility to what we were doing; I think they did not want to put fears in our heads. Much of the planning for integration happened behind the scenes and was kept from us, you know.

Do you know whether the white students at Belmont High School were told you鈥檇 be joining them, or whether they were asked to welcome you? Did anyone at Belmont High speak with you personally to offer support or advice?

I don鈥檛 know if the white students were briefed. No, I don鈥檛 remember any special welcome. It may be that they didn鈥檛 want to put ideas in the heads of the white students, either. I received no ongoing support from Belmont High during my two years there. The three of us supported each other as best we could鈥攂ut we could do so only outside of school, because each of was placed in a different class group during the school day. We did not even share the same lunch period. More than anything, my faith gave me support and strength.

How did your fellow students at Belmont High School receive you?

My fellow students for the most part were cordial and polite. Some were friendlier than others. I participated in school activities, such as the Drama Club, the Beta Club [an association of students with high academic achievement], chorus, and the French Club. During my senior year, things grew easier; my classmates loosened up and talked with me more.聽 There was a talent show, and I persuaded the two younger girls to join with me in impersonating the Supremes. This was a big hit; it made the school yearbook, and it鈥檚 still talked about at class reunions.

How did your teachers at Belmont High School treat you?

The teachers were nice at Belmont High School but didn鈥檛 give much support. I don鈥檛 think they knew how to work in the integrated process with a person who didn鈥檛 look like them. They just graded my papers and handed them back to me. It was nothing like the teacher support we had received at Reid High School. At Belmont High, I was put in the class with the 鈥渟martest鈥� kids. I鈥檓 sure it was to see if I could keep up with the work, and of course, I did. I made good grades on my own 鈥� not cheating like some of them did. Looking back on that time, I know that if just one teacher had said, 鈥淕loria, we are glad to have you here. You are doing good!鈥濃�� that would have made a big difference in what I was experiencing. The teachers showed no compassion for me as a student and I don鈥檛 recall ever speaking with a student counselor about my future.

What did you sacrifice in order to take on the role of an integration pioneer?

I sacrificed my junior and senior proms. I lost a close connection with the students still at Reid High School that I had been friends with in the earlier grades. But what bothered me most was the lack of counseling about what I would do after graduation. I applied to a number of colleges and was accepted; but no one suggested that I apply to the major state universities, and no one pointed me toward scholarship opportunities. As my time at the high school drew to a close, it seemed they were saying to me, 鈥淵ou broke the ice and showed that integration could work. You鈥檝e done your work鈥攜ou can go now.鈥�

Overall, what do you feel you accomplished? Who do you think you helped most鈥攖he black students who would follow you in the integrated school, or the white students and teachers who needed to learn how to relate to black students?

The integration process should have helped us all. I hope it did. The black students who followed me were relatives, neighbors, and community friends. I鈥檝e heard many stories of good and bad times at Belmont High School (now called South Point High). Relationships developed slowly, just as the town slowly adjusted to the change.

With the change, the South progressed; yet many in the black community today feel haunted by the decision to desegregate. In Belmont, we made sacrifices the white community weren鈥檛 asked to make. Reid School, with all of the history it held, and all the community support it offered, was closed and torn down. School systems continue to have problems related to racial discrimination. There are some cases where teachers just don鈥檛 get it, causing students to struggle to learn.

Did the experience help you in any way?

For me, the experience caused me to draw on my faith in God and to form my own personal goals, which helped me later in life. I decided that after graduating high school, I would seek out the education that would help me grow and accomplish what I wanted for myself. I knew I wanted a business career, so I went to business school for a couple of years. After that, I went to New York to study at the legendary Ophelia Devore School. It was a classic and elegant life preparation. Many notable celebrities and entertainers鈥擠iahann Carroll, Cicely Tyson, Richard Roundtree鈥攕tudied there. The finishing school provided a curriculum of personal development, teaching soft skills in etiquette essentials, poise, charm, behavior principles, communications, and public speaking.聽 This experience elevated my entrepreneurial goals.

After graduation, I returned to North Carolina, eventually starting a successful event planning business. Now, I鈥檓 a published author and inspirational speaker helping people identify and use valuable life skills to achieve their ambitions. In my book, Abundant Faith, and my presentation, 鈥淟ife Skills for the Journey,鈥� I share stories about my experience during the civil rights era, when I helped lead integration at Belmont High School, and how I dealt with this challenge.

What is the biggest lesson you鈥檇 like readers to learn from your story?

Teachers need to know how much they can influence a student’s life by encouraging them. They need to engage students in discussions of life skills, options for future careers, and strategies to pursue goals.聽I made the experience of integration work for me on my life鈥檚 journey.聽But not every student has the support from family or the inner resources to turn a tough experience into a growth experience. That’s why a teacher’s support is so important.

 )

The post Implementing Brown v. Board of Education: One Southern Town鈥檚 Story (Pt. 2) appeared first on 澳门六合彩开奖直播.

Ellen Deitz Tucker

In May of 1954, the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education, finding segregated schools 鈥渋nherently unequal.鈥� One year later, the Court issued its 鈥淩uling on Relief,鈥澛� mandating that desegregation proceed 鈥渨ith all deliberate speed.鈥� Given the deliberate vagueness of the instruction, Southern school authorities delayed compliance. As a white child born in 1954 who grew up in the small town of Belmont, North Carolina, I did not share my classroom with a single black student until I was an eleven-year-old sixth grader. Later I would inquire why it took so long.

Many white Southerners did not accept integration as unavoidable until the Civil Rights Act passed in the summer of 1964, when I was ten years old. This act required integration in employment, retail businesses and restaurants, and public facilities like libraries, parks and museums鈥攁s well as schools. Even then, many Southern school districts stalled for time, some waiting until the 1971 Supreme Court ruling in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklinberg School District, which compelled the district serving North Carolina鈥檚 largest city to integrate despite the de facto segregation of residential neighborhoods. The plan the Court eventually endorsed unanimously for Charlotte鈥攁fter much negotiation among the judges鈥攗sed a combination of newly organized magnet schools and long bus rides to achieve integration.

A Human Relations Committee Forms to Plan Integration

In Belmont, a small town just west across the Catawba River from Charlotte, school integration presented fewer logistical problems, because segregated schools for black and white children were situated within a mile of each other. More proactive than many communities,[1] Belmont initiated its integration plan only two months after the 1964 Act passed. Even so, Belmont鈥檚 leaders did not publicly promote the plan. They hoped to introduce it quietly and gently to a skeptical and potentially hostile white community. They would test that community鈥檚 receptivity to African American students by sending a group of carefully vetted volunteers into formerly white schools during the 1964鈥�1965 school year. As a fifth grader, I had no idea such plans were being made; but when I returned to school the next year, I met a new student: a very quiet, studious black girl, the daughter, I would learn, of a local pastor.

I was only dimly aware that my father served on the local 鈥淗uman Relations Committee.鈥� Initiated by black church leaders, who had invited several trusted white clergymen and business leaders to work with them, this citizens鈥� committee were planning the integration of Belmont鈥檚 schools and businesses. Later, when I reached high school, I talked with my father about how he鈥檇 helped to locally implement the Brown decision. He explained that the quiet black child had been deliberately placed in my sixth-grade classroom, just as two other black children had been placed in the ninth and third grades, in the classes where my older sister and younger brother sat.

Quietly Integrating Black Children into Majority-White Schools

In Belmont, integration faced three political problems. First, would white students accept black students without public protest or secret retaliation against the students themselves? On the first day of school in September 1964, when three young black women enrolled in Belmont High School, no angry outburst disrupted the order of the school day. Whether the black students felt welcomed and comfortable is another question. Still, to those orchestrating the integration process, this first year of limited integration succeeded well enough, and plans were made to send other carefully chosen black students into the elementary and junior high schools in September 1965.

I believe my sister and brother, both more extroverted than I, welcomed the new students warmly, probably helping their adjustment in a small way. I, however鈥攖hen a very shy child鈥攄id not reach out to my new classmate, and the memory of my standoffish behavior still haunts me. Still, I wonder why my parents never sat me down to explain how I should behave. They probably talked about it in indirect ways, hoping I would catch on. They seemed to think integration would proceed most smoothly if the minimum attention were called to it.

Accustoming White Families to聽 Black School Teachers

When this second year鈥檚 trial also worked, plans were finalized for the third year, when all of the black community鈥檚 school-age children would enroll in the formerly white elementary and secondary schools. But this meant also integrating the teaching staff of Reid School, which served the black community, into the formerly white schools. Might those white parents whose children drew black teachers complain? To make clear that black schoolteachers would serve in equivalent roles to those of white teachers, the Human Relations Committee proposed to school officials that teachers for the entire fourth grade class during the 1966鈥�1967 school year be drawn from Reid School. There had been only one or two fourth grade teachers at Reid, while at Belmont Elementary School there had been four. The latter now received new and unexpected grade-level assignments, just as several black teachers were drawn out of other grades to cover the fourth. None of the teachers with shifted assignments were happy about it; but no doubt the black teachers unused to both fourth grade curriculum and to majority-white classrooms faced the greater challenge.

Whether to Save or Close a Beloved Black School

So far, so good; but the third political problem facing the integration plan seemed irresolvable: what would happen to the well-loved Reid School, which had provided both elementary and secondary education for all black students in town since visionary educator Charles Reid became principal in 1914?[2] It was a cultural center for the black community, where dedicated teachers working with the white schools鈥� discarded textbooks cultivated black students鈥� futures. But school officials felt white parents would not send their children to a school in a black neighborhood without fierce protest. They decided that Reid School would close for good. The facilities at Reid were no longer needed, they said, since Belmont had increased its classroom capacity in 1964 by opening a new high school and converting the old high school into a new middle school.

The black community would castigate this decision, especially after the old school was demolished, along with the auditorium that had housed community events, the trophy cases housing awards for Reid鈥檚 winning teams, and a brand new gymnasium that many had hoped to see converted into a town recreation center.

The White Reformer’s Perspective

I don鈥檛 think my father ever seriously questioned the decision to close Reid School. To him, Reid鈥檚 closure was just one element of a countywide school consolidation he was working to accomplish. (He鈥檇 been interested in this reform since serving a term as foreman of the Grand Jury and making it his task to investigate the wildly divergent school facilities across the county. He鈥檇 found they ranged from well maintained buildings in Belmont to, in a distant rural area, a one-room schoolhouse heated by a pot-bellied stove.) He hoped to see racial integration occur throughout the county as part of the student reassignments that would result from consolidation and new building.

Pleased to see the school system modernized and countywide racial integration quietly begun, did Dad stop to consider the loss borne by black students and teachers as they left the more supportive environment of the older black schools? I’d like to think he did; but I don鈥檛 know that he dwelt on it. He wanted to see the integration of schools and businesses in Belmont. He wanted to help make the 鈥淣ew South鈥� a more just, more prosperous place. An optimist, he saw racism as thoughtless conformity to an irrational code.聽 To change the code, you just had to signal to the white community that new and better behavior was now expected. Years later, recalling visits to local restaurant owners whom he asked to serve black customers, he told me, 鈥淵ou鈥檇 be surprised how many people were willing to do it if you just asked.鈥�

[1] But not as proactive as some. In my father鈥檚 papers I found a pamphlet published by the Southern Regional Council, 鈥淣ext Steps in the South: Answers to Current Questions.鈥� It states that prior to the Brown decision, segregation was required by law in 17 states and the District of Columbia. But 鈥渢wo years after the decision, more than 350 school districts in nine of the 17 states had desegregated their public schools. Schools in the nation鈥檚 capital were also opened to all鈥� (Reprint of New South [Vol. 11, No. 7 and 8, July鈥揂ugust 1956], p. 3).

[2] Before becoming an educator, Charles Reid had to earn his own education. One of eight children born to freed slaves in Lowell, NC, he first traveled 11 miles to Lincoln Academy, a boarding school for black students operated by the American Missionary Association. Graduating in 1904 at the age of 26, he took $40 he had managed to save and traveled across the Appalachian Mountains to Knoxville College in Tennessee (a missionary effort of the United Presbyterian Church founded in 1875 ). Four years later, at the age of thirty, Reid returned to Gaston County and began teaching. In 1914 he assumed leadership of the school in Belmont that would eventually take his name. (Ross Yockey, Between Two Rivers: The Centennial of Belmont, North Carolina [City of Belmont, 1996], p. 170; Oscar DePriest Hand and Julia Neal Sykes, Footprints on the Rough Side of the Mountain: An African American Niche in the History of a Southern Textile City [Hand and Sykes Concepts, 1997], p. 77.) Among his many contributions, Reid organized the building of an early school house in 1921, one of 800 鈥淩osenwald schools鈥� built in North Carolina between 1919 and the early 1930s, a joint project of Booker T. Washington and Chicago philanthropist Julius Rosenwald. The project combined seed money from Rosenwald with contributions from the African American communities served; local school boards contributed the remaining funds. (. For a history of Rosenwald schools, see Thomas W. Hanchett, North Carolina Historical Review, vol LXV, no. 4 [October 1988], 387 鈥� 444.))

The post Implementing Brown v. Board of Education: One Southern Town鈥檚 Story appeared first on 澳门六合彩开奖直播.