Puerto Rico was acquired from the Spanish in the Spanish-American War along with Guam and the Philippines. ~Treaty of Paris~
Free slaves economically--sharecropping forced former slaves back to the land they had worked and kept them indebted to the landholder.
The system of sharecropping meant for a piece of land to farm, a person would owe a portion of their crop to the landholder. This program kept blacks enslaved to the land not allowing them true freedom to leave and become ecnomically independent.
<span>The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), formed to give younger blacks more of a voice in the civil rights movement, became one of the movement’s more radical branches. In the wake of the early sit-ins at lunch counters closed to blacks, which started in February 1960 in Greensboro, North Carolina, Ella Baker, then director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), helped set up the first meeting of what became SNCC. She was concerned that SCLC, led by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was out of touch with younger blacks who wanted the movement to make faster progress. Baker encouraged those who formed SNCC to look beyond integration to broader social change and to view King’s principle of nonviolence more as a political tactic than as a way of life.</span>
