Васил Антевски-Дрен
Проектна задача
Ментор Изработил/а
During the 20th century almost all countries made laws forbidding slavery. The Universal
Declaration of Human Rights says that slavery is wrong. Slavery is now banned by international
law. Nevertheless, there are still different forms of slavery in some countries.
The English word "slave" comes from the medieval word for the Slavic peoples of Central
Europe and Eastern Europe, because these were the last ethnic group to be captured and enslaved
in Central Europe. According to Adam Smith and Auguste Comte, a slave was mainly defined as
a captive or prisoner of war. Slave-holders used to buy slaves at slave auctions. In many cases
slaves are not allowed rights.
In one form or another, slavery has been practiced since the earliest civilizations. Early hunter-
gatherers had no use for slaves. They did everything for themselves. Having another pair of
hands to help them meant another mouth to feed. Slavery or owning another person made no
sense to these people. Once men gathered in cities and towns and there was more than enough
food, having a cheap supply of labor made sense. This is when the earliest forms of slavery
appeared. Slavery can be traced back to the earliest records, such as the Code of Hammurabi (c.
1760 BC). This refers to it as an established institution.
In the Ancient Near East, captives obtained through warfare often became slaves. This was seen
by the laws in the Bible book of Deuteronomy as a legal form of slavery. But the Israelites were
not allowed to enslave other Israelites. The Deuteronomic Code calls for the death penalty for the
crime of kidnapping Israelites to enslave them.
In Ancient Egypt, slaves were mainly prisoners of war. Other ways people could become slaves
was by inheriting the status from their parents who were slaves. Someone could become a slave
if he could not pay his debts. People also sold themselves into slavery because they were poor
peasants and needed food and shelter. The lives of slaves were normally better than that of
peasants. Young slaves could not be put to hard work, and had to be brought up by the mistress
of the household. Not all slaves went to houses. Some also sold themselves to temples, or were
assigned to temples by the king. Slave trading was not very popular until later in Ancient Egypt.
Afterwards, slave trades sprang up all over Egypt.
In many places, citizens were partly or fully protected from being enslaved, so most slaves were
foreigners.
Roman slaves played an important role in society and the economy. Besides manual labor, slaves
performed many domestic services. They could work at highly skilled jobs and professions.
Teachers, accountants, and physicians were often slaves. Greek slaves were often highly
educated. Unskilled slaves, or those sentenced to slavery as punishment, worked on farms, in
mines, and at mills. Their living conditions were brutal, and their lives short.
Slaves were considered property under Roman law and had no legal personhood. Unlike Roman
citizens, they could be subjected to corporal punishment, sexual exploitation (prostitutes were
often slaves), torture, and summary execution. The testimony of a slave could not be accepted in
a court of law unless the slave was tortured—a practice based on the belief that slaves in a
position to be privy to their masters' affairs would be too virtuously loyal to reveal damaging
evidence unless coerced. Over time, however, slaves gained increased legal protection, including
the right to file complaints against their masters. Attitudes changed in part because of the
influence among the educated elite of the Stoics, whose egalitarian views of humanity extended
to slaves.
Roman slaves could hold property which, even though it belonged to their masters, they were
allowed to use as if it were their own. Skilled or educated slaves were allowed to earn their own
money. With enough money they could buy their freedom.
After the Roman Empire broke up, slavery gradually changed into serfdom.
Between 1452 and 1455, Pope Nicolas V issued a series of papal bulls authorizing the
Portuguese to take African slaves. At first slave traders raided coastal areas and carried black
people off. But the mines and fields of the colonies needed more and more slaves. In the early
16th century Spain began to issue licenses and contracts to supply slaves. By the 1750s large
slaving companies were established. Most of Europe at the time was involved in the slave trade. Commented [I1]: This entire section is irrelevant. You should
write about the post slavery period in America, not about the
slavery around the world. Remove this section
Slavery Today
Millions of people are still slaves in some parts of the world, mostly in South Asia and Africa. It
is less common in the developed world because of better law enforcement, but it still happens
there as well. The ways in which it is done have changed. Today, slaves may work because of
things like a high debt (for example, slaves have to work to pay off a debt). Many victims are
told that their families will be harmed if they report the slave owners. Many slaves are forced to
be domestic servants. In some cases, their families sell them to the slave owners. Some slaves
have been trafficked from one part of the world to another. These people are illegally in their
host country, and therefore do not report the abuse. Forced prostitution is a type of slavery.
Another form of slavery still happening today is forced child labor. Some children have to work
in mines or in plantations, or they have to fight wars as child soldiers, for no pay. One study says
that there are 27 million people (but others say there could be as many as 200 million) in slavery
today. Other terms that describe the recruitement of laborers, and that may have similarities to
slavery are Blackbirding, Impressment and Shanghaiing.
Slavery was abolished after the end of the Civil War of 1861-1865 and the adoption of the
Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution in December 1865. The last state to ratify this
amendment was Mississippi in 2013.
Education
King went to segregated schools in Georgia, and finished high school at age 15. He went on to
Morehouse College in Georgia, where his father and grandfather had gone. After graduating
from college in 1948, King decided he was not exactly the type of person to join the Baptist
Church. He was not sure what kind of career he wanted. He thought about being a doctor or a
lawyer. He decided not to do either, and joined the Baptist Church. King went to a seminary in
Pennsylvania to become a pastor. While studying there, King learned about the non-violent
methods used by Mahatma Gandhi against the British Empire in India. King was convinced that
these non-violent methods would help the civil rights movement. Finally, in 1955, King earned a
Ph.D. from Boston University's School of Theology.
March on Washington
In 1963, King helped plan the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. This was the largest
protest for human rights in United States history. On August 28, 1963, about 250,000 people
marched from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial. Then they listened to civil
rights leaders speak. King was the last speaker. His speech, called "I Have a Dream," became
one of history's most famous civil rights speeches.King talked about his dream that one day,
white and black people would be equal. That same year, the United States government passed the
Civil Rights Act. This law made many kinds of discrimination against black people illegal.
The March on Washington made it clear to the United States government that they needed to
take action on civil rights, and it helped get the Civil Rights Act passed.
Nobel Prize
In 1964, King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. When presenting him with the award, the
Chairman of the Nobel Committee said:
Today, now that mankind [has] the atom bomb, the time has come to lay our
weapons and armaments aside and listen to the message Martin Luther King has
given us[:] "The choice is either nonviolence or nonexistence"....
[King] is the first person in the Western world to have shown us that a struggle
can be waged without violence. He is the first to make the message of brotherly
love a reality in the course of his struggle, and he has brought this message to all
men, to all nations and races.
Voting rights
King and many others then started
working on the problem of racism in voting. At the time, many of the Southern states had laws
which made it very hard or impossible for African-Americans to vote. For example, they would
make African Americans pay extra taxes, pass reading tests, or pass tests about the Constitution.
White people did not have to do these things. In 1963 and 1964, civil rights groups in Selma,
Alabama had been trying to sign African-American people up to vote, but they had not been able
to. At the time, 99% of the people signed up to vote in Selma were white. However, the
government workers who signed up voters were all white. They refused to sign up African-
Americans. In January 1965, these civil rights groups asked King and the SCLC to help them.
Together, they started working on voting rights.However, the next month, an African-American
man named Jimmie Lee Jackson was shot by a police officer during a peaceful march. Jackson
died.Many African-American people were very angry. The SCLC decided to organize a march
from Selma to Montgomery. By walking 54 miles (87 kilometers) to the state capital, activists
hoped to show how badly African-Americans wanted to vote. They also wanted to show that
they would not let racism or violence stop them from getting equal rights.
The first march was on March 7, 1965. Police officers, and people they had chosen to help them,
attacked the marchers with clubs and tear gas. They threatened to throw the marchers off the
Edmund Pettus Bridge. Seventeen marchers had to go to the hospital, and 50 others were also
injured. This day came to be called Bloody Sunday. Pictures and film of the marchers being
beaten were shown around the world, in newspapers and on television. Seeing these things made
more people support the civil rights activists. People came from all over the United States to
march with the activists. One of them, James Reeb, was attacked by white people for supporting
civil rights. He died on March 11, 1965.
Finally, President Lyndon B. Johnson decided to send soldiers from the United States Army and
the Alabama National Guard to protect the marchers. From March 21 to March 25, the marchers
walked along the "Jefferson Davis Highway" from Selma to Montgomery. Led by King and
other leaders, 25,000 people who entered Montgomery on March 25. He gave a speech called
"How Long? Not Long" at the Alabama State Capitol. He told the marchers that it would not be
long before they had equal rights, "because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends
toward justice."
On August 6, 1965, the United States passed the Voting Rights Act. This law made it illegal to
stop somebody from voting because of their race.
After this, King continued to fight poverty and the Vietnam War.
Assassination
King had made enemies by working for civil rights and becoming such a powerful leader. The
Ku Klux Klan did what they could to hurt King's reputation, especially in the South. The Federal
Bureau of Investigation (FBI) watched King closely. They wiretapped his phones, his home, and
the phones and homes of his friends.
On April 4, 1968, King was in Memphis, Tennessee. He planned to lead a protest march to
support garbage workers who were on strike. At 6:01 pm, King was shot while he was standing
on the balcony of his motel room. The bullet entered through his right cheek and travelled down
his neck. It cut open the biggest veins and arteries in King's neck before stopping in his shoulder.
King was rushed to St. Joseph's Hospital. His heart had stopped. Doctors there cut open his chest
and tried to make his heart start pumping again. However, they were unable to save King's life.
He died at 7:05 p.m.
Legacy
Just days after King's death, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1968. Title VIII of the Act,
usually called the Fair Housing Act, made it illegal to discriminate in housing because of a
person's race, religion, or home country. (For example, this made it illegal for a realtor to refuse
to let a black family buy a house in a white neighborhood.) This law was seen as a tribute to
King's last few years of work fighting housing discrimination in the United States.
After his death, King was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. King and his wife were
also awarded the Congressional Gold Medal. In 1986, the United States government created a
national holiday in King's honor. It is called Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. It is celebrated on the
third Monday in January.[1] This is around the time of King's birthday. Many people fought for
the holiday to be created, including singer Stevie Wonder.
In 2003, the United States Congress passed a law allowing the beginning words of King's "I
Have a Dream" speech to be carved into the Lincoln Memorial.
King County in the state of Washington, is named after King. Originally, the county was named
after William R. King, an American politician who owned slaves. In 2005, the King County
government decided the county would now be named after Martin Luther King, Jr. Two years
later, they changed their official logo to include a picture of King.
More than 900 streets in the United States have also been named after King. These streets exist
in 40 different states; Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico. and many others.
In 2011, a memorial statue of King was put up on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.
Conclusion
While it might be disregarded as fixed/solved, the issue still persists racism is still a worldwide
issue. Slavery was and still is an atrocious subject. Slavery might be near non-existent in this day
and age but racism is not, which is really concerning towards us the people and how this world
shapes itself in the following years of existence. While police brutality is somewhat a familiar
sight, social media helps make matters worse with its speed of transfer of information, while it
might all be true it might all be complete non-sense. In this day and age of computers and so
called smart phones where everyone can say their bad mannered or even racist thoughts
anonymously, those who aren’t as mentally strong suffer the most. The main matter I’m trying to
address here is racism is never good, never was never will be.