Vagrancy

While there are more than a few groups of people who experience homelessness in the United States and other parts of the world different ways, their homelessness is usually characterized by lack of stable housing coupled with extreme poverty (Henslin, 2013). I realized this after reading the author’s research concerning the homeless population in the United States. However, in my career as a human services professional, I would like to work with the mentally ill and the runaways. The mentally…

The U.S. has had its fair share of violent and oppressive history. The darkest times in history for the U.S. is not often highlighted because it criticizes white dominance. It necessarily does not put America in a negative light, but it becomes critical of whites. In James Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time”, the claim that white people are “slightly mad victims of their own brainwashing” is due to the misunderstanding of their own history and social situation. This can be illustrated through the…

The struggle of economic and political issues after the Civil War in 1865, was the Reconstruction period; in which the government attempted to bring back the former South. Abraham Lincoln first introduced his Reconstruction plan in 1863, in hopes of unifying the North and South to once again become a unified state, but its lack of success left the plan with a destructive and unruly experience. Although Reconstruction did help many Southerners to survive, but the failure of Reconstruction…

profited from the cheap labor. For the African American farmers living in debt peonage, their employers decided whether the farmers were in debt or not and often deemed they were in debt. Furthermore, any farmer “refusing to work meant arrest under vagrancy laws and forced labor under the state’s penal system” (Coates). Thus, the landowners trapped African American farmers into a cycle of debt and forced labor. Additionally, in the practice of sharecropping, the landowners benefited from the…

Although Wolsey was able to celebrate success at the beginning of this juridical reformation and served his King successfully by making the system more efficient, meaning that his subjects were subjected to less waiting time and the system had less chance of being corrupted, it was eventually corrupted and abused. This turned a success into a failure and his own goals of removing threats to him from Henry, so that they would have no further influence, brought about another failure. He not only…

The end of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery within the United States brought on substantial change for all black people living in the country. The period called “reconstruction” that took place immediately after the war involved efforts to integrate the newly free population of black people into society with certain rights, and forced the acceptance of the 13th amendment in all states in the Union. Individuals who only days before were slaves and were owned indefinitely suddenly owned…

succession of black codes and practices that relegated blacks to a kind of peonage while finding ways to make sure they could only play a role in society by being bound laborers on white men’s land (Friedman, 2005). Among the black codes were a series of vagrancy laws which had the effect of maintaining strict control over…

During slavery in the United States, African Americans were not treated with respect. For instance, Caucasian people had developed scientific theories to claim that they are superior to African Americans. Some of the Caucasian people that contributed to coming up with theories or ideas that Caucasians was superior to African Americans are Thomas Jefferson, Charles White, Oliver Goldsmith and Benjamin Rush. There were also many Caucasians people in the United States whose behavior reflects the…

The Civil War and Reconstruction had far-reaching results in terms of race relations in the United States. After the Civil war in 1862 several legislations were passed to help the freed slaves. The Civil Rights act of 1875 prohibited segregation in public areas and many amendments gave African Americans more rights (Brinkley, 2014). Even with new legislations the status of the newly freed African Americans didn’t change mush until the twentieth century. The reconstruction was to provide a new…

The end of the United States Civil War firmly addressed the governments view on the legality of slavery, but issues from the American slave era still lingered throughout the country. In particular the South was devastated physically and socially from the Civil War. Many southern towns such as Atlanta were completely destroyed physically and left desolate by the Union army, and the social structure of the cotton dependant south was completely upturned with the emancipation of the African slaves.…