How Free Were The Free Blacks In The North During The Time Of Slavery - History - Essay

Ryan Trybula
Canul
History
05 March 2018
How Free Were Free Blacks In The North
So what kind of rights did the blacks that were free have in north? The blacks that were free in the northern states don't necessarily have the kind of rights that one might think. While they were free they were still discriminated against all the time. They had trouble politically and couldn’t get jobs very easily. Also whites did not allow the blacks to do anything socially with them. So the free blacks couldn’t do anything the easy way, they had to work extremely hard for everything. Free blacks in the north did not have the same kind of rights as whites had due to social, political, and economic restrictions.
Social rights are the first mentioned rights that the free blacks lacked in. There are many reasons as to why they did not have the same social rights as whites, for example a primary source from a white male states that the blacks cannot eat, mingle, be at the theatre, church, and cannot marry with the white race. So because of bigots like the man who said this the blacks had to stick together and form all of these things that they couldn’t do with the “superior” race. However some free black did get the privilege to attend school, but they had to grind and do everything the hard way to succeed. The fact that they were allowed to school is a good sign though because they could get a good education. Or is it? They were still very oppressed towards various other rights that a regular pasty white person would have. A prime example of this is that the blacks had to come together and form their own church due to the fact that they couldn’t practice their faith with the whites. This is significant because the church was not just a church, it offered a Sunday school for kids, buried the dead, and also married those in holy matrimony. But most importantly the
church started to get itself involved with any kind of special causes whether it be black suffrage, the temperance movement, or the abolition of slavery. These are reasons as to how and why the blacks did not have the same social rights as the whites.
The second freedom that the northern free blacks lacked in was political rights. Things such as voting restrictions are elite examples of a scarcity of political rights. The limitations of voting in the northern states began to increase the further south ...