African-Americans after Slavery

During World War I, many white men were away being soldiers, and because of the war no new people came from Europe to take their places. So some black people were able to find work in factories, which paid better than any work they had had before. In World War II, in the 1940's, the same thing happened, and more black people began to work in factories, making weapons and building boats for the war. By the 1950's, new government farm policies pretty much ended sharecropping in the United States.

In the 1950's, these people, who were richer and better educated than their parents or grandparents had been, began to protest and try to get rights equal to white people. Some black people, like the boxer Muhammad Ali and the preacher Malcolm X, decided to stop being Christians, the religion of the old slave-owners, and convert to Islam. Other black people stayed Christians and used their religion to organize protests. The Christians' most important leader was Martin Luther King, Jr. Dr. King helped to get Congress to pass a Civil Rights Bill in 1964 that made it illegal to keep black people out of any public place, like a swimming pool or a restaurant, and also illegal to refuse to hire black people for a job just because they were black. But Malcolm X was shot dead in 1965, and a white man who was angry about Dr. King's work shot him dead in 1968.

Here's a video of some people in South Carolina marching to protest the way they were being treated:

Because of the Civil Rights Act and their own work, black people managed to get better jobs, better houses, and better schools than they had had before. But even now, while some black people are rich, most black people are still not as well off as white people, and they still suffer from racism that keeps them from getting good jobs or sending their kids to good schools. And most black people are still pretty much where they were before, working as unskilled labor for low wages for white people in the South.