African Americans in various states experienced a harshly segregation and a wide range of oppression during the civil war. This led to civil movements that were meant to end the slavery life and fight for civil rights. The slavery was more evident in southern especially Georgia where more slaves were needed to work in the growing cotton plantation. In order to protect their interest, Georgians established political, social, and cultural boundaries that oppressed the African American. The paper will evaluate the meanings or boundaries of freedom change throughout Georgia history.
The cotton boom not only revitalized slavery, but it also democratized slave ownership, which lead to denial of civil rights. This is so because the white Georgians seemed to have arrived at an agreement that focused on the production of cotton by use of black labor on land. Although Georgia had more slaves and slaveholders than any state, Georgia’s white males actually owned slaves, which indicate minority within the white population. However, they were a powerful minority whose political power extended well beyond what their numbers on the census would suggest (Cobb 17).
Prior the civil right Act, formal education stood sentinel at two distinct social boundaries in the southern slaveholding states especially Georgia. The major and heavily fortified boundary was the education that segregated white learners from black learners. Another distinct boundary was portrayed in the different white social classes. The education boundary was inscribed in legislation outlawing literacy training for slaves, and even for free blacks, whites policed it aggressively. For the social class boundary, it was maintained by custom and a general southern indifference to public and universal education.
The social differences boundary in Georgia and other states led to race and racial inequality that shaped American history significantly. Georgia established cruel strategies of power, inequality, and oppression, which denied the blacks their freedom. The civil rights were meant to uplift the equality and freedom that coexisted with slavery (Foner 32). Although the racial boundaries are drawn in very diverse ways, in the Georgia a person was considered black if they had any African origin. This became the standard system of racial classification in America after the civil war. The racial boundary harmed the disadvantaged groups within the white population in two major ways. Whites divided blacks into social and political boundaries destabilizing blacks’ ability to challenge dominant forms of power and inequality. This significantly weakened the ability of freed slaves to fight for their rights.
Although not all masters were as cruel, the potential for such brutality was always there in the slaveholding society of early 19th century Georgia. Whites fought to reestablish traditional educational boundaries that opposed and resisted schools for the freed people. Some resorted to organized terrorism to assure traditional white privileges and class advantages (Cobb 27). The whites in Georgia stoned and frequently burned down the buildings that housed black schools.
The policed educational boundary between whites and blacks adapted a deep fear of the potential power of literacy among members of the dominant race. Southern states enacted legislation barring black literacy when slave unrest seemed to shine. Therefore, Georgia proscribed formal schooling for its African American population. For many southern whites, opposition to black literacy betrayed an uneasiness concerning white racial superiority as the base of slavery. Thus, poor whites entered into enforcing laws and customs regarding black literacy as did their social superiors.
The teachers in the African American’s schools mediated for civil rights. They participated in the efforts to redraw social and cultural boundaries. Although they did not completely share the freed people’s goals, they surveyed educational boundaries intended by the freed people. They were also engaged in boundary keeping and border transgressions in their own worlds, quite independent of the educational and political needs framed by emancipation.
If slavery as an institution engraved boundaries deeply into the Georgia cultural map, emancipation as a historical moment threatened to obliterate that boundary. When slavery ended, the African American in Georgia immediately and forcefully challenged the meaning of formal education as a social boundary. Despite the hardship and poverty of their new and contested states, blacks demanded access to literacy, built schoolhouses, recruited teachers, and attended schools in overwhelming numbers. They expected nothing less than to remap southern social and racial boundaries. They intended to make the schoolhouse the fortress of freedom, set deep into territory long claimed by their oppressors. Where formal schooling had once symbolized elite white privilege, the freed people redefined it as symbolic of emancipation and independence from white influence (Foner 35). However, the white opponents fought persistently to reinforce and barricade old borders as well as defending traditional territories.
As the movement for civil rights intensified, the Georgia becomes concerned with resolving their own personal and social boundaries by assuring most positive black freedom. As a result, education and social boundary were lifted and blacks were allowed equal access to education. Likewise, real progress has been made to uplift racial inequality since the civil rights victories of the 1960s. Although African American gained freedom via civil right, it was not kind, they sought, nor the kind of justice most demanded and most required.
Works Cited
Cobb, James C. Georgia Odyssey. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008. Internet resource.
Foner, Eric. Give Me Liberty: an American History, Vol. 1, 3rd Edition. 2012. Print.
