Question

what opportunities were open to african americans during and after the revolution?

Answer 1

Political and social turmoil in the decade before the American Revolution presented African Americans with opportunities and frustrations. As did their white counterparts, African Americans in the decade before the outbreak of the American Revolution in 1775 prepared for the conflict in disparate ways.

Blacks who fought with the revolutionaries included Jonathan Overton, who died in 1849 at the age of 101. A newspaper described him as “a soldier of the Revolution” who had “served under Washington, and was at the battle of Yorktown, besides other less important engagements.” Another was Ned Griffen, who was purchased by William Kitchen to serve as his substitute in the army. But Kitchen refused to give the slave his freedom for this service as he had promised. Griffen petitioned the General Assembly, which granted him his freedom “forever hereafter” and gave him the right to vote. And there was the slave James of Perquimans County who served as a sailor on a Continental ship. He was captured twice by the British, and both times he “Embraced the Earliest Opportunity in Making his Escape to Return to this Country.” The county court freed him because he had served on an “American Armed Vessel.”

Black participation in the Revolution, however, was not limited to supporting the American cause, and either voluntarily or under duress thousands also fought for the British. Enslaved blacks made their own assessment of the conflict and supported the side that offered the best opportunity to escape bondage. Most British officials were reluctant to arm blacks, but as early as 1775, Virginia’s royal governor, Lord Dunmore, established an all-black “Ethiopian Regiment” composed of runaway slaves. By promising them freedom, Dunmore enticed over 800 slaves to escape from “rebel” masters. Whenever they could, enslaved blacks continued to join him until he was defeated and forced to leave Virginia in 1776. Dunmore’s innovative strategy met with disfavor in England, but to many blacks the British army came to represent liberation.

Most Black women had been farm laborers or domestics before the war. Despite discrimination and segregated facilities throughout the South, they escaped the cotton patch and took blue-collar jobs in the cities. Working with the federal Fair Employment Practices Committee, the NAACP and CIO unions, these Black women fought a Double V campaign against the Axis abroad and against restrictive hiring practices at home. Their efforts redefined citizenship, equating their patriotism with war work, and seeking equal employment opportunities, government entitlements, and better working conditions as conditions appropriate for full citizens. In the South black women worked in segregated jobs; in the West and most of the North they were integrated, but wildcat strikes erupted in Detroit, Baltimore, and Evansville where white migrants from the South refused to work alongside black women.

The high point of the Civil Rights Movement was the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which brought more than 250,000 marchers to the grounds of the Lincoln Memorial and the National Mall in Washington, D.C., to speak out for an end to southern racial violence and police brutality, equal opportunity in employment, equal access in education and public accommodations.

The Revolutionary War enhanced white conquest of Native American lands along the Gulf of Mexico and up the Mississippi River. Plantation masters along the coast and inland took their enslaved people to remote areas as far north as western Virginia and to what would become the Mississippi Territory. Nearly four hundred slaves from South Carolina arrived in the future Mississippi Territory in 1778 and were followed by others from the nascent free states whose masters sought more hospitable locales and from the West Indies, where some of the plantations were being downsized. The Revolutionary War spread west as Americans, British, and Spanish armies battled for power along the Mississippi River and the coastal region known as West Florida. The immediate winners were the Spanish, who controlled all of the Gulf Coast from Florida to New Orleans. Quickly, African Americans evacuated American plantations for freedom in the coastal region. They established a maroon colony at Gaillardeville, north of New Orleans, that was led by James Malo, a fierce warrior and shrewd commander. Blacks also fought in units for the Spanish for a brief time, maroons and black Spanish soldiers, gaining their freedom by doing so, and thereby opening a tiny crack in the edifice of slavery. The booming economy of New Orleans offered enslaved blacks an opportunity to buy their own freedom under hiring agreements with their masters. Whites generally strove to control the conditions of self-purchase with a bias toward wives, mistresses, and the children of mixed love. But as freedom descended through the mother, this practice assured the liberty of future generations. Political changes put an end to many of these methods for gaining freedom. By the early 1800s, as white American society moved west and Spanish rule gave way to French and then to American, free blacks gave way to enslaved peoples.

The post-civil rights era is also notable for the New Great Migration, in which millions of African Americans have returned to the South, often to pursue increased economic opportunities in now-desegregated southern cities.