The Civil War and the Negro Problem

Towards the middle of the 19^th century the conflicting interests if the Northern and Southern States became manifest. While the North based its economy on industry and trade, the South concentrated mainly on agriculture carried on by the labour of the Negroes who had been imported as slaves from Africa.

The problem of abolition of slavery was the main question about which the States were divided, resulting in a bitter civil war which lasted from 1861 to 1865.

When Abraham Lincoln, the great enemy of Negro slavery, won the Presidential Elections, eleven Southern States seceded from the Union and formed a Confederacy. Was broke out. The confederates were defeated, and in 1865 Lincoln declared that all the 4 million Negro slaves of the rebel States should be free. In the same year the President was assassinated by a fanatic.

Secret societies were organized in the South (the Ku-Klux Klan was one of them) to terrorize Negroes and prevent them from voting.

The Negro questions is still alive in the United States and the Ku-Klux Klan is still powerful. There is brutal discrimination in the South and a subtler from of inequality in the North.

In many southern towns Negroes are treated as outcasts in their own country, they are kept in an inferior and subservient position, they are obliged to take the humblest, jobs as waiters, porters and labourers, they cannot enter certain public buildings (hotels, restaurants and even churches) and they are obliged to live segregated in special quarters. 

Source: R. Colle – I. Vay, L’esame di inglese, Lattes, an old Italian book 1974.