ABSTRACT

An analysis of numerous large-scale African American efforts is to secure freedom and social justice over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with a particular focus on organized resistance to oppression. Much of the black action for freedom and justice has been forgotten, but it has slowly been recovered of late in the research of several historians and civil rights organizations. Americans often revolted against their enslavement, both individually and collectively. The major type of protest action by African Americans involved the filing of important petitions for freedom and against slavery. After the Civil War, African Americans organized significant civil rights organizations, conferences, and other meetings at which they again assertively pressed for much greater freedom, justice, and equality. The slavery system was demonstrably one undergirded by millions of acts of torture by white slaveholders, their relatives, and their employees. Historically, enslaved African Americans have been among the foremost freedom-fighters that U.S. country has produced.