African Americans in the U.S. West / consultant, Kennell A. Jackson.

21 cm.)

Includes Teacher's resource manual (28 p.

The role of African Americans in the movement towards westward expansion has been largely overlooked in American history books. This lesson attempts to focus students' attention on the lives and contributions of these often forgotten pioneers. Students will examine documents and statistics to compare treatment by the government of the United States and other westward migrants of Blacks and Indians. The lesson is divided into four parts, the first calling attention to early contributors to that past, such as William Clark's slave, known only as "York", and to James Beckwourth, who had a long and adventurous career as trader, trapper, scout and interpreter. The second part of the lesson emphasizes the period just before the Civil War, when abolitionists, escaped slaves and free blacks moved into the border states and the disputed territories of Kansas, Nebraska and Missouri. The final two sections of this lesson concentrate on the lives of the Exodusters and other African Americans who sought opportunities as westward pioneers, and on the Buffalo Soldiers. These African American soldiers, so named by Indians who thought the blacks' hair resembled buffalo fur, were Civil War veterans, joined by later enlistees. These troops provided little-known service to the American military establishment in the conquest and pacification of the last frontier lands. That they suffered discrimination and the resentment of the overwhelmingly white settlers and entrepreneurs they defended, while fighting the remnants of the similarly oppressed, harassed and reviled native Americans seems particularly ironic and poignant in our own time. "www.pbs.org"