The ship had only 20 surviving Africans to sell to the struggling colony. Soon may colonies started importing African slaves. Lincoln summed up the problem of slavery in his speech accepting the presidential nomination, saying, "the nation can not survive half-slave and half-free." The U.S. Civil War was fought partly over the issue of slavery, a war that resulted in almost 900,000, casualties. Lincoln's Emancipation of Proclamation on January 1, 1863 declared the slave of the confederacy free during the war. With the passing of the thirteenth Amendment in 1865 slavery was constitutionally abolished in the United States. The 15th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States ratified in 1870, prohibits federal or state governments from infringing on a citizen's right to vote "on account of race, color or previous servitude." Slavery was inherently a system of brutality and coercion in which beating and the breakup of families through the sale of individuals were commonplace. In the end, however, the strongest criticism of slavery was not the behavior of individual masters and overseers towards their slaves, but slavery's fundamental violation of every human being's inalienable right to be free. Today Africans are free from slavery but the memories and turmoil that erupted to that freedom would forever live on. .
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The abolishment of slavery was just one of the many struggles towards equal rights for African Americans. The struggle for the right to vote, be accepted, attend the same schools and drink from the same water fountain as whites still has to be fought for in years to come. The Civil Rights Movement1 was initiated by Southern blacks in the 1950s and "60s to break the prevailing pattern of racial segregation2. .
During the 1940's and 1950's, National Association for the Advancement of Color People, lawyer, Thurgood Marshall, appointed by President Lyndon Johnson as the first African American justice on the U.
