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President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act into law in 1830. This law granted the President the ability to exchange land west of the Mississippi for Indigenous territories within the boundaries of existing states. An additional act was passed in 1834. This act designated land, including what would later become the state of Oklahoma, as Indian Territory. As a result of the precedent set by these acts, over sixty tribes were either willingly or forcibly removed from their lands over the next fifty years.

The Smithsonian American Art Museum explains: “Catlin mistranslated Ah-jon-jon, whose name means ‘The Light,’ as ‘Pigeon's Egg Head.’ The Light was an Assiniboine leader who was invited in 1831 to represent his tribe in Washington. During a winter in the nation's capital, he traded his native dress for European clothes and customs. In Catlin's before-and-after portrait, the once proud warrior, with a liquor bottle in his pocket, swaggers in high-heeled boots and carries a fan and umbrella. For Catlin, this transformation illustrated the tragic gulf between Native American and white cultures.”

In 1835, in the “Treaty of New Echota,” a group of Cherokees – without consent of the majority of their nation – agreed that the Cherokee people would move West and vacate their land. This letter, a protest against the Treaty, was sent by Chief John Ross and other Cherokee leaders to Congress in an effort to declare that treaty invalid.

During the fall and winter of 1838 and 1839, the Cherokees were forcibly marched from their lands. Known as the “Trail of Tears,” this forced removal resulted in the deaths of thousands of Cherokee. The Choctaw, the Chickasaw, the Creek, and the Seminole also were forced to travel along the trail of tears.

In 1839, the enslaved people aboard the Amistad were captured by Portuguese slave traders in Sierra Leone, and they were being taken to a Caribbean plantation. The enslaved Africans seized control of the ship, killed two of their captors, and ordered the ship to sail to Africa, but it was seized off of the coast of Long Island and the enslaved Africans were brought to trial in Connecticut. As the National Archives explains, “Had it not been for the actions of abolitionists in the United States, the issues related to the Amistad might have ended quietly in an admiralty court. But they used the incident as a way to expose the evils of slavery and generate significant opposition to the practice.” In an appeal before the U.S. Supreme Court, John Quincy Adams “passionately and eloquently defended the Africans' right to freedom on both legal and moral grounds, referring to treaties prohibiting the slave trade and to the Declaration of Independence. The Supreme Court decided in favor of the Africans, stating that they were free individuals.”

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo held a direct correlation to westward movement and migration. Americans forged west with the discovery of gold in 1848 at Sutter’s Mill in California which was the first major gold rush in the United States. By the following year, tens of thousands of “forty-niners” had come to the area in hopes of striking it rich. Most did not become wealthy in California, but many stayed there. The region continued to grow rapidly, and, in 1850, California became a state. With the expansion of available land and the gold rush, people from all over the USA and the world came and new businesses developed, including the pony express, transcontinental railroad jobs, Chinese laundry, the cattle industry, and free and enslaved Africans seeking freedom.

The Fugitive Slave Act was passed in 1850 as part of the Compromise of 1850, a series of laws designed to ease sectional tensions between the North and South. The law benefitted southern enslavers by requiring northern law enforcement to assist in capturing and returning enslaved persons who had run away from their enslavers. Southern bounty hunters were also permitted to operate in the North. The law put both enslaved and free Blacks at risk. After the law was passed, thousands of freedom seekers attempted to escape to free states in the North and Canada as well, where they would be beyond the reach of the law.

During the peak of the Gold Rush, over 20,000 Chinese men immigrated to the United States to mine gold in California. Chinese immigrant labor contributed significantly to not only the mining industry, but also the expansion of the national railroad and the development of services supporting laborers. Nonetheless, xenophobic, anti-Chinese sentiment rose in California and nationally, ultimately leading to both the Chinese Massacre of 1871 (in which a violent mob lynched 18 Chinese men) and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

This book, The Fugitive Slave Law and its Victims, published in 1861, was an antislavery text, arguing for the abolition of slavery by providing accounts of the Fugitive Slave Laws’ effects and victims. The book was published by the American Anti-Slavery Society in New York.-

Popular images and music from the former Confederate states during Reconstruction created the image of the Northern “carpetbagger,” a derogatory term for an opportunistic outsider who has arrived from the Northern states to exploit the Southern states out of self-interest and greed.

Images like this one helped to portray the West as vast, unpopulated, uncharted territory ready for U.S. expansion.

According to the Digital Public Library of America, “Benjamin Singleton established the Edgefield Real Estate and Homestead Association to help organize travel and settlement for African Americans departing Tennessee for Kansas.” Singleton was a formerly enslaved man who escaped to freedom in 1846, and he helped to organize the migration of approximately 300 African Americans to Kansas in 1877 - 1878. These migrants were not only seeking opportunity, but they were also fleeing the racial violence of white supremacists.

The United States Government policies and practices of Indian removal forced multiple indigenous nations Westward, off of their land and into smaller, isolated reservations in the Western territories and states.

According to the Library of Congress, this chart was “prepared by [W.E.B.] Du Bois for the Negro Exhibit of the American Section at the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1900 to show the economic and social progress of African Americans since emancipation.”

In the early nineteenth century, many people left their home countries seeking a better life in the United States, perceived to be a land of opportunity and wealth. During the last decades of the nineteenth century, it is estimated that nearly 12 million immigrants arrived in the United States from Germany, Ireland, and England. In the 1900s immigrants from Italy arrived in large numbers.

While immigrants often came seeking a better life or escape from oppression and economic hardship, Immigrants faced many challenges in the United States. Lack of jobs and discrimination posed barriers to many immigrant communities and many faced pressures of assimilation and hostility.

Throughout shifting immigration policies over the course of American history, there is also an ongoing debate about how best to assimilate new Americans.  According to the Library of Congress, “though nativists may have abhorred the increasing ethnic diversity in the United States, others saw the opportunity to steep newcomers in American traditions. With four million Americans of Irish descent, hundreds of thousands of Jewish Americans with strong ties to Eastern Europe, and ten million citizens hailing from nations aligned with the Central Powers, organizations like the New York National Americanization Day Committee hoped to use patriotic holidays such as the Fourth of July as a means to unify the country's diverse populations.”

During the Great Depression, hundreds of thousands of Mexicans and Mexican Americans were deported from the United States to Mexico. As unemployment increased during the 1930s, white Americans viewed Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans as competition for scarce agricultural jobs and resources. In response, many local and state governments, often with the federal government's support, initiated a program of repatriating immigrants to Mexico. Some Mexicans, many of whom were recruited as farmworkers in the 1910s and 1920s, were offered free train rides to the border. In addition, Mexican Americans were coerced into giving up their jobs and land, forcing them to move to Mexico or find work elsewhere in the United States.

Between 1936 and 1967, The Green Book was published annually for African Americans traveling throughout the United States and North America. The Green Book’s original author, Victor Hugo Green, intended for the publication to act as a travel guide for African Americans during the Jim Crow Era, when laws prohibited many establishments from offering service to Black patrons. The Green Book offered suggestions to travelers seeking places and businesses which were safe for African Americans and which would treat Black patrons with dignity.

During the 1930s, the fallout from the Great Depression and environmental disaster struck the Great Plains region of the United States. Severe drought and resulting dust storms rendered the land in the Great Plains unfit for farming. Due to the drastic loss of jobs and income as well as the overwhelming amount of dust, which made living conditions unsafe and unbearable, millions of people left the Great Plains and headed west to California. Migrants faced a long and often dangerous journey to California as well as discrimination once they arrived.

Dorothea Lange, a photographer whose work was funded by the New Deal’s Farm Security Administration, documented struggling workers during the Great Depression.  In this photograph, a Mexican family seeks work in the fields of California.

As a response to increasing anti-Japanese sentiment after the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942. Using national security as a justification, the order called for the relocation of persons of Japanese descent living in the United States. The newly formed War Relocation Authority moved nearly 120,000 Japanese Americans, the majority of whom were citizens, to “relocation centers”, most of which were located throughout the West.

The Japanese Americans who were affected by the Civilian Exclusion Order were given little time to leave their homes and dispose of their property before being transported from assembly centers to more permanent relocation centers.

While they were not required to work, the movement of the incarcerated Japanese Americans was limited by barbed wire and guard towers.

William Edward Burghard (W.E.B) Du Bois was a sociologist, educator, and political activist. Educated at Fisk and Harvard Universities, DuBois wrote histories, sociological studies, informed sketches of African American life, and an autobiography. He believed education could end discrimination. DuBois organized the First International Congress of Colored People and was a founder of the NAACP.

Countee Cullen was adopted by a black pioneer activist minister and his wife.  He was well-educated, earning his Masters in English and French from Harvard. Cullen won more major literary awards than any other black writer of the 1920s.

Though he wrote on universal themes such as love, religion, and death, Cullen believed in the richness and importance of his African American heritage and deftly applied traditional forms of verse, using melodic meter and rhyme, to African American themes.

As the literary editor of the NAACP’s Crisis magazine (1919 - 1926), Jessie Redman Fauset was one of three people Langston Hughes credited with “mid-wif{ing} the so-called New Negro literature into being. Kind and critical…they nursed us along until our books were born.” Redmon, among the first African Americans to be graduated (Phi Beta Kappa) from Cornell University, wrote books of her own as well.

Marcus Garvey, the promoter of Pan-Africanism and black pride, had a vision of economic independence for his people. Those who followed him were called Garveyites. He was the founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, (UNIA) the single largest black organization ever. In the 1920s and 30s, the UNIA had an estimated six million followers around the world.

Langston Hughes was known as the “Poet Laureate of Harlem.” One of the first African Americans to support himself solely as a writer. Hughes blended the sounds of jazz into his poetry. He focused on the need for artistic independence and racial pride.

Zora Neale Hurston was a brilliant, multifaceted chronicler of African American life as she saw it.  Her dominant influence was her hometown of Eatonville, Florida, the first incorporated all-black township in the United States.  Ms. Hurston grew up there independent and self-reliant, her imagination fired by the rich oral traditions of the rural African American South and her sense of self undistorted by prejudice. She later pursued field studies of southern black folklore that would be documented in her book Mules and Men (1935) and would permeate much of her best fiction.

James Weldon Johnson was a poet (God’s Trombones) and an influential anthologist (The Book of American Negro Poetry). The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, his only novel and perhaps his best-known literary work, was first published in 1912, four years before he became field secretary of the NAACP. Over the next sixteen years, Johnson expanded NAACP membership and coordinated its programs, resigning, and finally accepting a professorship at Fisk University. He continued to write poetry, essays, and magazine articles throughout all those years, as well as the historical study of Black Manhattan and his autobiography, Along this Way.

Alain Locke is referred to as the “Father of the Harlem Renaissance.” Locke’s book The New Negro made him the leader and principal spokesman of the “New Negro Movement, “ which he encouraged through numerous essays and art and literary reviews. He also was deeply involved in efforts to help African-American artists and writers- including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Aaron Douglas, and Richmond Barthe-find financial support.

Claude McKay was born in Jamaica on September 15, 1889. In 1920, he published Spring in New Hampshire in England. Many of the poems from Spring in New Hampshire were used in his Harlem Shadows (published 1922, in New York). Harlem Shadows showcased a new African American voice. It was bold and angry. It discussed the racial prejudices that McKay experienced when he arrived in America.

Aaron Douglas’ work focused on social issues in the United States, like segregation. Douglas often references history in his work. Douglas examines slavery, African heritage, and the future of society. Douglas’ paintings often symbolized the history and struggle of the African American community. Douglas’ paintings included monochromatic color, silhouetted figures, and geometric forms.

Palmer Hayden was an extremely talented painter. Early in his career, he focused mostly on landscapes. In 1927, he moved to Paris and grew greatly as an artist. In 1932, he returned to the U.S. and changed his focus to small-town African Americans. He has been criticized for perpetuating stereotypes of African American physical features.

As a teenager, Jacob Lawrence took art classes at the Uptown Art Laboratory, finding mentors in Harlem Renaissance artists Charles Alston and Augusta Savage. Lawrence explored issues central to African American history and daily life. Lawrence created The Migration Series based on the Great Migration.

Lawrence studied at the Schomburg Library and eventually gained employment as a painter for the Federal Art Project.

Augustus Savage was recognized on the Harlem scene after being commissioned to sculpt the bust of W.E.B. Dubois. She won a scholarship to Academie de la Grande Chaumiere in Paris. Savage opened the largest free art program in Harlem, and students like Jacob Lawerence attended Savage School of Arts.

James VanDerZee became interested in photography as a teenager. He told the history of African Americans with his photographs. He is noted for documenting African American middle-class life in Harlem. He documented the work of Marcus Garvey in 1924, and in 1969, his work was a part of the Harlem on My Mind exhibition at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Louis Daniel Armstrong Is one of the foremost jazz trumpeters in American music. Born in poverty, Armstrong was raised by his grandmother in New Orleans, a city known for its bands and jazz musicians. After 1931, Louis Armstrong became the best-known jazz musician in the world. He toured Europe several times and appeared in a number of movies.

Cab Calloway was an energetic bandleader who took the Cotton Club by storm. He appeared in several movies and radio broadcasts. Mr. Calloway was awarded the Nation Medal of Arts by President Bill Clinton in 1993.

Composer, pianist, and bandleader Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington was one of the great innovators of modern American music, taking big-band jazz into realms of harmony, form, and tonal color. Though ever seeking to grow and expand as a musician, Ellington seldom strayed from the heart of the matter: “If it sounds good,” he said, “it is good.” One of Ellington’s signature songs, “Take the ‘A’ Train” refers to a New York subway line and pays homage to Harlem, its destination.

Born in 1915, Billie Holiday became one of the most influential jazz singers of her time. Holiday was discovered at the age of 18, singing in a nightclub in Harlem. One of her most famous songs, “Strange Fruit,” was banned by many radio stations when it debuted; the song tells the story of the lynching of African Americans. Drug addiction affected both her career and her personal life, and it led to her untimely death in 1959.

“Ma” Rainey was known as the Mother of the Blues; she was the first woman to introduce blues in her performances, and she established her own entertainment company in 1917.

The 1920s in America were a golden age of the powerful blueswoman. At the pinnacle stood Bessie Smith, whose personal and musical power pushed the boundaries of both female and African American expression for a new mass audience.