Ms. Maher
English 836
Due Date: 4/10/13
African American Discrimination in The Newly Formed U.S.
The book, A People’s History of the United States written by Howard Zinn, is one that displays countless cases of African Americans being physically, emotionally, and morally drained as human beings in the newly formed United States. The era that Zinn gives these numerous cases of beatings and harsh punishment is during the “enslavement” era where African Americans played the roles of servants to the high-class colonists. These high-class colonists treated the African Americans like dogs, lashing them whenever they pleased, for reasons in which shouldn’t have even been blown out of proportion to begin with. Howard Zinn shows that African Americans were discriminated against in the colonies and newly formed United States by not only giving us countless cases of unlawful physical punishment, but he gives clear and detailed situations that African Americans were forced into by high-class supremacy.
Zinn makes it clear in chapter nine that African Americans were always put at disadvantages by the rich colonists whether it be the disadvantage of blacks being enslaved, or the disadvantage of blacks who weren’t enslaved, not having a voice to speak or stand up for their freedom. In that era, if you were rich like many colonists who owned black slaves, then you would be accommodated to the “upper-hand” whenever legal cases were brought to the Supreme Court’s attention. For example, Howard Zinn states,” With slavery abolished by order of the government- true, a government pushed hard to do so, by blacks, free and slave, and by white abolitionists- its end could be orchestrated so as to set limits to emancipation. Liberation from the top would go only so far as the interests of the dominant groups permitted.” (171) By Zinn introducing this quote, he is saying that although slavery was abolished by rule of the government, the interests of the...