History Report: They Left Great Marks on Me (Chapter 5)

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HISTORY
The book, "They Left Great Marks on Me," is a narrative of the civil rights struggle for black minorities in the United States. After the American civil war, the general thinking among the black population was that they would be free indeed. However, after the election of Rutherford B. Hayes as president, black discrimination comes to the fore. Rutherford B. Hayes adopted a policy of reconciliation, pulling federal troops from the Southern States. The states were left to largely govern themselves. White supremacists quickly emerged and used the seeming power vacuum to torture the black community. They defended the lynching, murders and rape of black men and women as self-defence, their exercise of their constitutional rights to protect themselves and their women from being raped and property stolen. The converse is, however, true; the Southern whites only desired to ensure that blacks remained de facto slaves, regardless of the emancipation proclamation. Professor Kidada E. Williams notes that the Civil War was a failure for both sides on the issue of slavery. It failed to ensure a pro-slavery government for the south. The North while destroying the legislative framework that protected slavery, it failed to destroy the institutions and mind sets that would result in black discriminationCITATION Joh12 \p ": civilwarnews.com" \l 1033 (Koster: civilwarnews.com).
The fifth chapter of the book, ‘It is not for us to run away from violence," looks at the interaction between black discrimination and how the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) worked to end it. The NAACP was at the time a relatively young organisation. It had limited resources with which to wage war against black discrimination. The organisation was headquartered in the North and some of its leaders felt that getting heavily involved in the deep South would quickly expose it for what it was, a fledgling organisation with severely limited resources. The organisation, however, provided a dependable ally for the black community in their fight against racial discrimination. In contrast to federal officers who often were not interested or unable to help. The NAACP was empathetic to the plight of the black community and continually worked to record the atrocities committed against them. The report would later be presented to Congress and would result in the enacting of the 3 Enforcement acts CITATION Kid12 \l 1033 (Williams).
The leadership of the NAACP understood that the organisation was ill-equipped to wage a sustained fight against black discrimination. As such the organisation utilised the resources it had. The NAACP used in its arsenal speaking campaigns, leaflets, the mass m...