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^[[Readers Digest Sept 1955]]

THE NEGROES AMONG US

Their ancestors came in chains.
Now they are rapidly becoming, as they so long dreamed, first-class citizens

By Albert Q. Maisel

WITHIN the last few years a vast and ever-more-rapid change has been transforming the lives and fulfilling the hopes of 16 million Americans. In less than a single generation the Negroes among us have marched further and faster toward full participation in every phase of our national life than in all the decades since slavery ended. But while, on every hand, walls of prejudice have been tumbling down, unlike the walls of Jericho their crumbling can be credited to no single trumpet blast. These citadels have been destroyed through generations of effort, by both whites and Negroes, to make the American dream of equality come true for all men.

Most Americans can look back to ancestors who were drawn to this country by the hope of liberty and a richer, fuller life. The Negro came in chains, in the fetid holds of slave ships. An slavery, in the beginning, was not limited to the South. If the Puritans of New England and the Patroons of New York held fewer slaves than the gentlemen of Virginia, it was only because the colder climate and different farming methods of the North made slave-owning less profitable there.

From the earliest days many white settlers opposed slavery. The Quakers in Pennsylvania passed acts against the slave trade and, South as well as North, there were thousands rich enough to own slaves who refused to do so. As the War for Independence approached, many colonial leaders felt deeply the inconsistency between a continuation of Negro slavery and their own struggle to win freedom.

As early as 1774 the Continental Congress passed a resolution to abolish the slave trade. Jefferson freed many of his own slaves. Others did likewise. By the time of the first census, in 1790, there were nearly 60,000 Negro freedmen, more than half of them in the South! In the end, the opponents of slavery were strong enough to set a firm date - the year 

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