Page 31 - Red Feather Book 2

considered legitimate. Italians could not serve Africans in shops or restaurants.
In previous units you read how in South Africa racial segregation had been traditionally accepted. In 1948 Apartheid was introduced. The main purpose was to legally and physically separate different racial groups.
The Apartheid system classified groups into blacks, whites, colored, and Indian. It also assigned different places where people were forced to live. And, of course, public areas like schools, hospitals, and even parks were labeled according to race. It was not until 1990 that President F. W. de Klerk announced the end of Apartheid.
Segregation in the United States began since the first slave arrived from Africa to Virginia in 1619. It lasted until 1863 when President Lincoln issued de Emancipation Proclamation declaring “that all persons held as slaves” within the Confederate states “are, and henceforward shall be free”.
In the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution the definition of citizenship is defined as “Individuals born or naturalized in the United States are American citizens.” This included the children born from slaves who were previously not considered citizens.
Although segregation was illegal, it was very much a part of every African American’s life up to the mid 1960’s.
Great civil right activists like Rosa Parks who refused to give up her seat at the front of the “colored section” of a bus to a white passenger, or four black students in Greensboro, North Carolina, who began a sit-in at a segregated Woolworth lunch counter, the now famous “freedom riders” who were students who took bus trips through the South to test the new laws that prohibited segregation, and of course, Martin Luther King, who in 1963 delivered his famous speech “I Have a Dream”.
It would be ideal if we could talk today about total equality, some idealists say this is possible, others believe it is a part of human nature to segregate, they say a clear example would be how children at a very young age form groups in a playground where they openly exclude others because they think they are different, or when teenagers divide the popular or non popular kids.
Others believe it depends on the intent, where it is natural for humans to try
28 The Red Feather Literature Second Course