History of Civil Rights in America - Part 1 of 3
Colonial Times through the Industrial Revolution

Introduction

The birth of the civil rights and civil liberties movement officially began with the signing of the Declaration of Independence, which states “We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal...” That document stood as a blueprint for future laws that have made many forms of racial and gender discrimination in the public and private sector, prohibited. Throughout the history of the United States, its citizens have struggled to attain those rights.

According to the Illustrated World Encyclopedia,

“Civil liberties and civil rights are almost the same thing, but in the United States they have come to have different meanings, especially since 1954. Civil Liberties cover the right every citizen has to receive fair treatment from his government. Civil rights (some of which used to be called social rights) cover the right of a citizen to receive fair treatment from other citizens and from local governments.”

Colonial period

Influenced by the growth of individual freedom in England, settlers brought with them the desire for religious freedom, the right to own property, and protections against an oppressive government. Such historical documents as the Magna Charta and others laid the groundwork for some of the revolutionary ideals the colonials sought in the New World. Not only could they obtain property in America, but they could also decide how they would make a living. In the English caste system, men were locked into whatever livelihood their father before them had and virtually the only choices for women were marriage or the convent.

One of the early expressions of this relatively new idea came when Philadelphia attorney Andrew Hamilton successfully defended John Peter Zenger in 1735 against charges of seditious libel for criticizing the colonial government. Hamilton established, in his New York Weekly Journal, that punishing truthful publications of matters of public concern was an infringement of those inalienable rights and therefore were prohibited.

Different lifestyles emerged in the three colonial regions. Life in the northern colonies on small family farms, where extreme weather conditions often prevailed, was difficult. Some of those original colonies failed due to the hardship of that life. The Dutch came and founded New Amsterdam, which would later be called New York. In the mid-Atlantic colonies, members of the religious Society of Friends (commonly known as the Quakers) initially settled in Pennsylvania and parts of New Jersey. Wealthy English settlers in the Southern colonies of Virginia, Maryland, North and South Carolina, and Georgia came to America primarily for monetary gain. Initially, they imported English indentured servants, who worked for a specific amount of time to pay off their passage to America, to work their farms. As the need for greater numbers of laborers to work large plantations arose, slave labor from Africa sharply increased, so that by 1750, so many Africans had been brought to the South that slave societies began to be established.

The writers of the Constitution had largely avoided slavery issues. The number of black slaves in America did not immediately expand after the Dutch Mann o Warre brought the first boatload to Jamestown in 1619. But by 1800, there were about 900,000 slaves in the United States; fewer than 40,000 of them lived in the northern states. At that time, the question of slave populations and representation had been solved by the “Three-Fifths Compromise” and the slave trade was protected for 20 years.

In 1808, Congress acted to end the slave trade, but illegal importation into the Southern states was common. As slaveholders moved westward into new territories, they frequently took their slaves with them. When those areas achieved the population necessary for statehood, the question of slavery would have to be faced.

Industrial Revolution

Labor conditions and unions. New labor problems began as farmers’ sons and newly educated women began to enter the industrial workplace between 1861 and 1880. Overcrowding, poor working conditions, sweatshops, child labor, and long work hours were factors of life that came with the Industrial Revolution of the northern states. Labor unions began to spring up to deal with those issues. One of the first large unions, the Order of the Knights of Labor was founded in 1869 with the goal of increasing negotiating powers by unionizing all American workers.

From the 1870s through the early 1900s, violent protests against bad working conditions brought about changes in labor laws, including the institution of women and children labor laws, maximum hours worked per day, collective bargaining rights, and eventually minimum wage laws.

National Negro Business League. Blacks were not affected by many of those laws owing to the occupations most of them were in. Racial discrimination in the larger unions made it difficult for blacks to improve working conditions in those fields. The closed shop also worked to promote descrimination by excluding non-union laborers from working in the trades. Shut out from a more active role in the shaping of American industry, another solution was sought with the National Negro Business League, which was founded in 1900. With Booker T. Washington as president, the union grew to 320 branches. In The Negro in Business, Washington encouraged blacks to accept segregation, to start their own business enterprises and to frequent those establishments.

Labor leaders. Such labor leaders as Terrence V. Powderly, Eugene V. Debs, Samuel Gompers, and Mary Harris “Mother” Jones, struggled for the same civil rights afforded to the likes of the wealthy and powerful J.P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie, who made their fortunes during the economic expansion of that period.

In their footsteps arrived other labor leaders from such powerful unions as the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Under the dynamic leadership of Walter Reuther, John L. Lewis, George Meany, and Jimmy Hoffa, those unions pressured Congress to pass such labor reform laws as the Fair Labor Standards Act (1938). Its objective was for the “elimination of labor conditions detrimental to the maintenance of the minimum standards of living necessary for health, efficiency and well being of workers.” Touted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt as “the most far-reaching, far-sighted program for the benefit of workers ever adopted,” the act eventually provided for the maximum work week of 40 hours and minimum wage of 40 cents an hour by 1945. In later years, abuses of power by those labor leaders and the discontinuance of the closed shop bridled the efforts of those unions to secure further benefits for their members.

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