Abstract
The recognized history of the Negro in North America began with the importation of twenty African indentured servants to Jamestown, Virginia in 1619. During the next 244 years the Negro traveled a long arduous road which led from involuntary servitude to slavery to freedom. Since the close of the American Civil War, the Negro's striving has been toward the attainment of social and economic equality within the framework of American Democracy.|But the upheaval of the Civil War and Reconstruction periods caused the South to adopt a new attitude toward the Negro. By the end of the Nineteenth century the region was beginning to pass discriminatory laws which tended to solidify the economic, political, and social inferiority of the Negro. In the North the custom was also for Negroes to be treated as a separate and second-rate if not inferior group.