1619 Project Introduction Essay by Nikole Hannah-Jones
This is the brilliant essay that the even more brilliant Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote and won a Pulitzer Prize for. It is the introduction to the 1619 Project - and she is coming under attack, of course, by those males privileged by race and sex, who are the history police, claiming Nikole lied. REALLY? FUCKIN REALLY? She reports that amerikkka was really founded in 1619 - and they are pissed because of the 1776 declaration of independence. Well fuck, we all know that date but few know the 1619 date - I'd even say amerikkka was founded when fuck columbus planted the fuckin flag on what he thought was india...GRRRRR
Of course these men get to police and prevail, the 'facts' according to white men.
So Nikole has spoken truth to power and I fear power will be able to take this crucial piece of work and disappear it, casting our country into infinite racism and misogyny. So I'm copying it here and also see the link below to the New Yorker Magazine where it is published still, at least currently.
Nikole has responded to this surge to rescind her Pulitzer Prize with this:
By Nikole Hannah-Jones AUG. 14, 2019
My dad always flew an American flag in our front yard. The blue paint on our two-story house was perennially chipping; the fence, or the rail by the stairs, or the front door, existed in a perpetual state of disrepair, but that flag always flew pristine. Our corner lot, which had been redlined by the federal government, was along the river that divided the black side from the white side of our Iowa town. At the edge of our lawn, high on an aluminum pole, soared the flag, which my dad would replace as soon as it showed the slightest tatter.
My dad was born into a family of sharecroppers on a white
plantation in Greenwood, Miss., where black people bent over cotton from
can’t-see-in-the-morning to can’t-see-at-night, just as their enslaved
ancestors had done not long before. The Mississippi of my dad’s youth was an
apartheid state that subjugated its near-majority black population through
breathtaking acts of violence. White residents in Mississippi lynched more
black people than those in any other state in the country, and the white people
in my dad’s home county lynched more black residents than those in any other
county in Mississippi, often for such “crimes” as entering a room occupied by
white women, bumping into a white girl or trying to start a sharecroppers
union. My dad’s mother, like all the black people in Greenwood, could not vote,
use the public library or find work other than toiling in the cotton fields or
toiling in white people’s houses. So in the 1940s, she packed up her few
belongings and her three small children and joined the flood of black
Southerners fleeing North. She got off the Illinois Central Railroad in
Waterloo, Iowa, only to have her hopes of the mythical Promised Land shattered
when she learned that Jim Crow did not end at the Mason-Dixon line.
Grandmama, as we called her, found a house in a segregated black
neighborhood on the city’s east side and then found the work that was
considered black women’s work no matter where black women lived — cleaning
white people’s houses. Dad, too, struggled to find promise in this land. In
1962, at age 17, he signed up for the Army. Like many young men, he joined in
hopes of escaping poverty. But he went into the military for another reason as
well, a reason common to black men: Dad hoped that if he served his country,
his country might finally treat him as an American.
The Army did not end up being his way out. He was passed over
for opportunities, his ambition stunted. He would be discharged under murky
circumstances and then labor in a series of service jobs for the rest of his
life. Like all the black men and women in my family, he believed in hard work,
but like all the black men and women in my family, no matter how hard he
worked, he never got ahead.
So when I was young, that flag outside our home never made sense
to me. How could this black man, having seen firsthand the way his country
abused black Americans, how it refused to treat us as full citizens, proudly
fly its banner? I didn’t understand his patriotism. It deeply embarrassed me.
I had been taught, in school, through cultural osmosis, that the
flag wasn’t really ours, that our history as a people began with enslavement
and that we had contributed little to this great nation. It seemed that the
closest thing black Americans could have to cultural pride was to be found in
our vague connection to Africa, a place we had never been. That my dad felt so
much honor in being an American felt like a marker of his degradation, his
acceptance of our subordination.
Like most young people, I thought I understood so much, when in
fact I understood so little. My father knew exactly what he was doing when he
raised that flag. He knew that our people’s contributions to building the
richest and most powerful nation in the world were indelible, that the United
States simply would not exist without us.
In August 1619, just 12 years after the English settled
Jamestown, Va., one year before the Puritans landed at Plymouth Rock and some
157 years before the English colonists even decided they wanted to form their
own country, the Jamestown colonists bought 20 to 30 enslaved Africans from
English pirates. The pirates had stolen them from a Portuguese slave ship that
had forcibly taken them from what is now the country of Angola. Those men and
women who came ashore on that August day were the beginning of American
slavery. They were among the 12.5 million Africans who would be kidnapped from
their homes and brought in chains across the Atlantic Ocean in the largest
forced migration in human history until the Second World War. Almost two
million did not survive the grueling journey, known as the Middle Passage.
Before the abolishment of the international slave trade, 400,000
enslaved Africans would be sold into America. Those individuals and their
descendants transformed the lands to which they’d been brought into some of the
most successful colonies in the British Empire. Through backbreaking labor,
they cleared the land across the Southeast. They taught the colonists to grow
rice. They grew and picked the cotton that at the height of slavery was the
nation’s most valuable commodity, accounting for half of all American exports
and 66 percent of the world’s supply. They built the plantations of George
Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, sprawling properties that today
attract thousands of visitors from across the globe captivated by the history
of the world’s greatest democracy. They laid the foundations of the White House
and the Capitol, even placing with their unfree hands the Statue of Freedom
atop the Capitol dome. They lugged the heavy wooden tracks of the railroads
that crisscrossed the South and that helped take the cotton they picked to the
Northern textile mills, fueling the Industrial Revolution. They built vast
fortunes for white people North and South — at one time, the second-richest man
in the nation was a Rhode Island “slave trader.” Profits from black people’s
stolen labor helped the young nation pay off its war debts and financed some of
our most prestigious universities. It was the relentless buying, selling,
insuring and financing of their bodies and the products of their labor that made Wall
Street a thriving banking, insurance and trading sector and New York City the
financial capital of the world.
But it would be historically inaccurate to reduce the
contributions of black people to the vast material wealth created by our
bondage. Black Americans have also been, and continue to be, foundational to
the idea of American freedom. More than any other group in this country’s
history, we have served, generation after generation, in an overlooked but
vital role: It is we who have been the perfecters of this democracy.
A
demonstrator at the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, led by the Rev. Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr. to fight for black suffrage. Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos
The United States is a nation founded on both an ideal and a
lie. Our Declaration of Independence, approved on July 4, 1776, proclaims that
“all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain
unalienable rights.” But the white men who drafted those words did not believe
them to be true for the hundreds of thousands of black people in their midst.
“Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” did not apply to fully one-fifth
of the country. Yet despite being violently denied the freedom and justice
promised to all, black Americans believed fervently in the American creed.
Through centuries of black resistance and protest, we have helped the country
live up to its founding ideals. And not only for ourselves — black rights
struggles paved the way for every other rights struggle, including women’s and
gay rights, immigrant and disability rights.
Without the idealistic, strenuous and patriotic efforts of black
Americans, our democracy today would most likely look very different — it might
not be a democracy at all.
The very first person to die for this country in the American
Revolution was a black man who himself was not free. Crispus Attucks was a
fugitive from slavery, yet he gave his life for a new nation in which his own
people would not enjoy the liberties laid out in the Declaration for another
century. In every war this nation has waged since that first one, black Americans
have fought — today we are the most likely of all racial groups to serve in the
United States military.
My father, one of those many black Americans who answered the
call, knew what it would take me years to understand: that the year 1619 is as
important to the American story as 1776. That black Americans, as much as those
men cast in alabaster in the nation’s capital, are this nation’s true “founding
fathers.” And that no people has a greater claim to that flag than us.
In June 1776, Thomas Jefferson sat at his portable writing
desk in a rented room in Philadelphia and penned these words: “We hold these
truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are
endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are
Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” For the last 243 years, this
fierce assertion of the fundamental and natural rights of humankind to freedom
and self-governance has defined our global reputation as a land of liberty. As
Jefferson composed his inspiring words, however, a teenage boy who would enjoy
none of those rights and liberties waited nearby to serve at his master’s beck
and call. His name was Robert Hemings, and he was the half brother of
Jefferson’s wife, born to Martha Jefferson’s father and a woman he owned. It
was common for white enslavers to keep their half-black children in slavery.
Jefferson had chosen Hemings, from among about 130 enslaved people that worked
on the forced-labor camp he called Monticello, to accompany him to Philadelphia
and ensure his every comfort as he drafted the text making the case for a new
democratic republic based on the individual rights of men.
At the time, one-fifth of the population within the 13 colonies
struggled under a brutal system of slavery unlike anything that had existed in
the world before. Chattel slavery was not conditional but racial. It was
heritable and permanent, not temporary, meaning generations of black people
were born into it and passed their enslaved status onto their children.
Enslaved people were not recognized as human beings but as property that could
be mortgaged, traded, bought, sold, used as collateral, given as a gift and
disposed of violently. Jefferson’s fellow white colonists knew that black
people were human beings, but they created a network of laws and customs,
astounding for both their precision and cruelty, that ensured that enslaved
people would never be treated as such. As the abolitionist William Goodell
wrote in 1853, “If any thing founded on falsehood might be called a science, we
might add the system of American slavery to the list of the strict sciences.”
Enslaved people could not legally marry. They were barred from
learning to read and restricted from meeting privately in groups. They had no
claim to their own children, who could be bought, sold and traded away from
them on auction blocks alongside furniture and cattle or behind storefronts
that advertised “Negroes for Sale.” Enslavers and the courts did not honor
kinship ties to mothers, siblings, cousins. In most courts, they had no legal
standing. Enslavers could rape or murder their property without legal
consequence. Enslaved people could own nothing, will nothing and inherit
nothing. They were legally tortured, including by those working for Jefferson
himself. They could be worked to death, and often were, in order to produce the
highest profits for the white people who owned them.
Yet in making the argument against Britain’s tyranny, one of the
colonists’ favorite rhetorical devices was to claim that they were
the slaves — to Britain. For this duplicity, they faced burning criticism both
at home and abroad. As Samuel Johnson, an English writer and Tory opposed to
American independence, quipped, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for
liberty among the drivers of Negroes?”
Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that
one of the primary reasons some of the colonists decided to declare their
independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of
slavery. By 1776, Britain had grown deeply conflicted over its role in the
barbaric institution that had reshaped the Western Hemisphere. In London, there
were growing calls to abolish the slave trade. This would have upended the
economy of the colonies, in both the North and the South. The wealth and
prominence that allowed Jefferson, at just 33, and the other founding fathers
to believe they could successfully break off from one of the mightiest empires
in the world came from the dizzying profits generated by chattel slavery. In
other words, we may never have revolted against Britain if some of the founders
had not understood that slavery empowered them to do so; nor if they had not
believed that independence was required in order to ensure that slavery would
continue. It is not incidental that 10 of this nation’s first 12 presidents
were enslavers, and some might argue that this nation was founded not as a
democracy but as a slavocracy.
Jefferson and the other founders were keenly aware of this
hypocrisy. And so in Jefferson’s original draft of the Declaration of
Independence, he tried to argue that it wasn’t the colonists’ fault. Instead,
he blamed the king of England for forcing the institution of slavery on the
unwilling colonists and called the trafficking in human beings a crime. Yet
neither Jefferson nor most of the founders intended to abolish slavery, and in
the end, they struck the passage.
There is no mention of slavery in the final Declaration of
Independence. Similarly, 11 years later, when it came time to draft the
Constitution, the framers carefully constructed a document that preserved and
protected slavery without ever using the word. In the texts in which they were
making the case for freedom to the world, they did not want to explicitly
enshrine their hypocrisy, so they sought to hide it. The Constitution contains
84 clauses. Six deal directly with the enslaved and their enslavement, as the
historian David Waldstreicher has written, and five more hold implications for
slavery. The Constitution protected the “property” of those who enslaved black
people, prohibited the federal government from intervening to end the
importation of enslaved Africans for a term of 20 years, allowed Congress to
mobilize the militia to put down insurrections by the enslaved and forced
states that had outlawed slavery to turn over enslaved people who had run away
seeking refuge. Like many others, the writer and abolitionist Samuel Bryan
called out the deceit, saying of the Constitution, “The words are dark and
ambiguous; such as no plain man of common sense would have used, [and] are
evidently chosen to conceal from Europe, that in this enlightened country, the
practice of slavery has its advocates among men in the highest stations.”
With independence, the founding fathers could no longer blame
slavery on Britain. The sin became this nation’s own, and so, too, the need to
cleanse it. The shameful paradox of continuing chattel slavery in a nation
founded on individual freedom, scholars today assert, led to a hardening of the
racial caste system. This ideology, reinforced not just by laws but by racist
science and literature, maintained that black people were subhuman, a belief
that allowed white Americans to live with their betrayal. By the early 1800s,
according to the legal historians Leland B. Ware, Robert J. Cottrol and Raymond
T. Diamond, white Americans, whether they engaged in slavery or not, “had a
considerable psychological as well as economic investment in the doctrine of
black inferiority.” While liberty was the inalienable right of the people who
would be considered white, enslavement and subjugation became the natural
station of people who had any discernible drop of “black” blood.
The Supreme Court enshrined this thinking in the law in its 1857
Dred Scott decision, ruling that black people, whether enslaved or free, came
from a “slave” race. This made them inferior to white people and, therefore,
incompatible with American democracy. Democracy was for citizens, and the
“Negro race,” the court ruled, was “a separate class of persons,” which the
founders had “not regarded as a portion of the people or citizens of the
Government” and had “no rights which a white man was bound to respect.” This
belief, that black people were not merely enslaved but were a slave race,
became the root of the endemic racism that we still cannot purge from this
nation to this day. If black people could not ever be citizens, if they were a
caste apart from all other humans, then they did not require the rights
bestowed by the Constitution, and the “we” in the “We the People” was not a
lie.
On Aug. 14, 1862, a mere five years after the nation’s
highest courts declared that no black person could be an American citizen,
President Abraham Lincoln called a group of five esteemed free black men to the
White House for a meeting. It was one of the few times that black people had
ever been invited to the White House as guests. The Civil War had been raging
for more than a year, and black abolitionists, who had been increasingly
pressuring Lincoln to end slavery, must have felt a sense of great anticipation
and pride.
The war was not going well for Lincoln. Britain was
contemplating whether to intervene on the Confederacy’s behalf, and Lincoln, unable
to draw enough new white volunteers for the war, was forced to reconsider his
opposition to allowing black Americans to fight for their own liberation. The
president was weighing a proclamation that threatened to emancipate all
enslaved people in the states that had seceded from the Union if the states did
not end the rebellion. The proclamation would also allow the formerly enslaved
to join the Union army and fight against their former “masters.” But Lincoln
worried about what the consequences of this radical step would be. Like many
white Americans, he opposed slavery as a cruel system at odds with American
ideals, but he also opposed black equality. He believed that free black people
were a “troublesome presence” incompatible with a democracy intended only for
white people. “Free them, and make them politically and socially our equals?”
he had said four years earlier. “My own feelings will not admit of this; and if
mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of white people will
not.”
That August day, as the men arrived at the White House, they
were greeted by the towering Lincoln and a man named James Mitchell, who eight
days before had been given the title of a newly created position called the
commissioner of emigration. This was to be his first assignment. After
exchanging a few niceties, Lincoln got right to it. He informed his guests that
he had gotten Congress to appropriate funds to ship black people, once freed,
to another country.
An
1872 portrait of African-Americans serving in Congress (from left): Hiram
Revels, the first black man elected to the Senate; Benjamin S. Turner; Robert
C. De Large; Josiah T. Walls; Jefferson H. Long; Joseph H. Rainy; and R. Brown
Elliot. Currier & Ives,
via the Library of Congress
“Why should they leave this country? This is, perhaps, the first
question for proper consideration,” Lincoln told them. “You and we are
different races. ... Your race suffer very greatly, many of them, by living
among us, while ours suffer from your presence. In a word, we suffer on each
side.”
You can imagine the heavy silence in that room, as the weight of
what the president said momentarily stole the breath of these five black men.
It was 243 years to the month since the first of their ancestors had arrived on
these shores, before Lincoln’s family, long before most of the white people
insisting that this was not their country. The Union had not entered the war to
end slavery but to keep the South from splitting off, yet black men had signed
up to fight. Enslaved people were fleeing their forced-labor camps, which we
like to call plantations, trying to join the effort, serving as spies,
sabotaging confederates, taking up arms for his cause as well as their own. And
now Lincoln was blaming them for the war. “Although many men engaged on either
side do not care for you one way or the other ... without the institution of
slavery and the colored race as a basis, the war could not have an existence,”
the president told them. “It is better for us both, therefore, to be
separated.”
As Lincoln closed the remarks, Edward Thomas, the delegation’s
chairman, informed the president, perhaps curtly, that they would consult on
his proposition. “Take your full time,” Lincoln said. “No hurry at all.”
Nearly three years after that White House meeting, Gen. Robert
E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox. By summer, the Civil War was over, and four
million black Americans were suddenly free. Contrary to Lincoln’s view, most
were not inclined to leave, agreeing with the sentiment of a resolution against
black colonization put forward at a convention of black leaders in New York
some decades before: “This is our home, and this our country. Beneath its sod
lie the bones of our fathers. ... Here we were born, and here we will die.”
That the formerly enslaved did not take up Lincoln’s offer to
abandon these lands is an astounding testament to their belief in this nation’s
founding ideals. As W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, “Few men ever worshiped Freedom with
half such unquestioning faith as did the American Negro for two centuries.”
Black Americans had long called for universal equality and believed, as the
abolitionist Martin Delany said, “that God has made of one blood all the
nations that dwell on the face of the earth.” Liberated by war, then, they did
not seek vengeance on their oppressors as Lincoln and so many other white
Americans feared. They did the opposite. During this nation’s brief period of
Reconstruction, from 1865 to 1877, formerly enslaved people zealously engaged
with the democratic process. With federal troops tempering widespread white
violence, black Southerners started branches of the Equal Rights League — one
of the nation’s first human rights organizations — to fight discrimination and
organize voters; they headed in droves to the polls, where they placed other
formerly enslaved people into seats that their enslavers had once held. The
South, for the first time in the history of this country, began to resemble a
democracy, with black Americans elected to local, state and federal offices.
Some 16 black men served in Congress — including Hiram Revels of Mississippi,
who became the first black man elected to the Senate. (Demonstrating just how
brief this period would be, Revels, along with Blanche Bruce, would go from
being the first black man elected to the last for nearly a hundred years, until
Edward Brooke of Massachusetts took office in 1967.) More than 600 black men
served in Southern state legislatures and hundreds more in local positions.
These black officials joined with white Republicans, some of
whom came down from the North, to write the most egalitarian state
constitutions the South had ever seen. They helped pass more equitable tax
legislation and laws that prohibited discrimination in public transportation,
accommodation and housing. Perhaps their biggest achievement was the
establishment of that most democratic of American institutions: the public
school. Public education effectively did not exist in the South before
Reconstruction. The white elite sent their children to private schools, while
poor white children went without an education. But newly freed black people,
who had been prohibited from learning to read and write during slavery, were
desperate for an education. So black legislators successfully pushed for a
universal, state-funded system of schools — not just for their own children but
for white children, too. Black legislators also helped pass the first
compulsory education laws in the region. Southern children, black and white, were
now required to attend schools like their Northern counterparts. Just five
years into Reconstruction, every Southern state had enshrined the right to a
public education for all children into its constitution. In some states, like
Louisiana and South Carolina, small numbers of black and white children,
briefly, attended schools together.
Led by black activists and a Republican Party pushed left by the
blatant recalcitrance of white Southerners, the years directly after slavery
saw the greatest expansion of human and civil rights this nation would ever
see. In 1865, Congress passed the 13th Amendment, making the United States one
of the last nations in the Americas to outlaw slavery. The following year,
black Americans, exerting their new political power, pushed white legislators
to pass the Civil Rights Act, the nation’s first such law and one of the most
expansive pieces of civil rights legislation Congress has ever passed. It
codified black American citizenship for the first time, prohibited housing
discrimination and gave all Americans the right to buy and inherit property,
make and enforce contracts and seek redress from courts. In 1868, Congress
ratified the 14th Amendment, ensuring citizenship to any person born in the
United States. Today, thanks to this amendment, every child born here to a
European, Asian, African, Latin American or Middle Eastern immigrant gains
automatic citizenship. The 14th Amendment also, for the first time,
constitutionally guaranteed equal protection under the law. Ever since, nearly
all other marginalized groups have used the 14th Amendment in their fights for
equality (including the recent successful arguments before the Supreme Court on
behalf of same-sex marriage). Finally, in 1870, Congress passed the 15th
Amendment, guaranteeing the most critical aspect of democracy and citizenship —
the right to vote — to all men regardless of “race, color, or previous
condition of servitude.”
For this fleeting moment known as Reconstruction, the majority
in Congress seemed to embrace the idea that out of the ashes of the Civil War,
we could create the multiracial democracy that black Americans envisioned even
if our founding fathers did not.
But it would not last.
Anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country, as does
the belief, so well articulated by Lincoln, that black people are the obstacle
to national unity. The many gains of Reconstruction were met with fierce white resistance throughout the South,
including unthinkable violence against the formerly enslaved, wide-scale voter
suppression, electoral fraud and even, in some extreme cases, the overthrow of
democratically elected biracial governments. Faced with this unrest, the
federal government decided that black people were the cause of the problem and
that for unity’s sake, it would leave the white South to its own devices. In
1877, President Rutherford B. Hayes, in order to secure a compromise with
Southern Democrats that would grant him the presidency in a contested election,
agreed to pull federal troops from the South. With the troops gone, white
Southerners quickly went about eradicating the gains of Reconstruction. The
systemic white suppression of black life was so severe that this period between
the 1880s and the 1920 and ’30s became known as the Great Nadir, or the second
slavery. Democracy would not return to the South for nearly a century.
A
postcard showing the scene at the murder of Allen Brooks, an African-American
laborer who was accused of attempted rape. He was dragged through the streets
around the Dallas County Courthouse and lynched on March 3, 1910. Postcards of
lynchings were not uncommon in the early 20th century. From the DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University, Dallas
White Southerners of all economic classes, on the other hand,
thanks in significant part to the progressive policies and laws black people
had championed, experienced substantial improvement in their lives even as they
forced black people back into a quasi slavery. As Waters McIntosh, who had been
enslaved in South Carolina, lamented, “It was the poor white man who was freed
by the war, not the Negroes.”
Georgia pines flew past the windows of the Greyhound bus
carrying Isaac Woodard home to Winnsboro, S.C. After serving four years in the
Army in World War II, where Woodard had earned a battle star, he was given an
honorable discharge earlier that day at Camp Gordon and was headed home to meet
his wife. When the bus stopped at a small drugstore an hour outside Atlanta, Woodard
got into a brief argument with the white driver after asking if he could use
the restroom. About half an hour later, the driver stopped again and told
Woodard to get off the bus. Crisp in his uniform, Woodard stepped from the
stairs and saw the police waiting for him. Before he could speak, one of the
officers struck him in his head with a billy club, beating him so badly that he
fell unconscious. The blows to Woodard’s head were so severe that when he woke
in a jail cell the next day, he could not see. The beating occurred just 4½
hours after his military discharge. At 26, Woodard would never see again.
There was nothing unusual about Woodard’s horrific maiming. It
was part of a wave of systemic violence deployed against black Americans after
Reconstruction, in both the North and the South. As the egalitarian spirit of
post-Civil War America evaporated under the desire for national reunification,
black Americans, simply by existing, served as a problematic reminder of this
nation’s failings. White America dealt with this inconvenience by constructing
a savagely enforced system of racial apartheid that excluded black people
almost entirely from mainstream American life — a system so grotesque that Nazi
Germany would later take inspiration from it for its own racist policies.
Isaac
Woodard and his mother in South Carolina in 1946. In February that year,
Woodard, a decorated Army veteran, was severely beaten by the police, leaving
him blind. From Special
Collections and Archives/Georgia State University Library
Despite the guarantees of equality in the 14th Amendment, the
Supreme Court’s landmark Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896 declared that the
racial segregation of black Americans was constitutional. With the blessing of
the nation’s highest court and no federal will to vindicate black rights,
starting in the late 1800s, Southern states passed a series of laws and codes
meant to make slavery’s racial caste system permanent by denying black people
political power, social equality and basic dignity. They passed literacy tests
to keep black people from voting and created all-white primaries for elections.
Black people were prohibited from serving on juries or testifying in court
against a white person. South Carolina prohibited white and black textile
workers from using the same doors. Oklahoma forced phone companies to segregate
phone booths. Memphis had separate parking spaces for black and white drivers.
Baltimore passed an ordinance outlawing black people from moving onto a block
more than half white and white people from moving onto a block more than half
black. Georgia made it illegal for black and white people to be buried next to
one another in the same cemetery. Alabama barred black people from using public
libraries that their own tax dollars were paying for. Black people were
expected to jump off the sidewalk to let white people pass and call all white
people by an honorific, though they received none no matter how old they were.
In the North, white politicians implemented policies that segregated black
people into slum neighborhoods and into inferior all-black schools, operated
whites-only public pools and held white and “colored” days at the country fair,
and white businesses regularly denied black people service, placing “Whites
Only” signs in their windows. States like California joined Southern states in
barring black people from marrying white people, while local school boards in
Illinois and New Jersey mandated segregated schools for black and white
children.
This caste system was maintained through wanton racial
terrorism. And black veterans like Woodard, especially those with the audacity
to wear their uniform, had since the Civil War been the target of a particular
violence. This intensified during the two world wars because white people
understood that once black men had gone abroad and experienced life outside the
suffocating racial oppression of America, they were unlikely to quietly return
to their subjugation at home. As Senator James K. Vardaman of Mississippi said
on the Senate floor during World War I, black servicemen returning to the South
would “inevitably lead to disaster.” Giving a black man “military airs” and
sending him to defend the flag would bring him “to the conclusion that his
political rights must be respected.”
Many white Americans saw black men in the uniforms of America’s
armed services not as patriotic but as exhibiting a dangerous pride. Hundreds
of black veterans were beaten, maimed, shot and lynched. We like to call those
who lived during World War II the Greatest Generation, but that allows us to
ignore the fact that many of this generation fought for democracy abroad while
brutally suppressing democracy for millions of American citizens. During the
height of racial terror in this country, black Americans were not merely killed
but castrated, burned alive and dismembered with their body parts displayed in
storefronts. This violence was meant to terrify and control black people, but
perhaps just as important, it served as a psychological balm for white
supremacy: You would not treat human beings this way. The extremity of the violence
was a symptom of the psychological mechanism necessary to absolve white
Americans of their country’s original sin. To answer the question of how they
could prize liberty abroad while simultaneously denying liberty to an entire
race back home, white Americans resorted to the same racist ideology that
Jefferson and the framers had used at the nation’s founding.
This ideology — that black people belonged to an inferior,
subhuman race — did not simply disappear once slavery ended. If the formerly
enslaved and their descendants became educated, if we thrived in the jobs white
people did, if we excelled in the sciences and arts, then the entire
justification for how this nation allowed slavery would collapse. Free black
people posed a danger to the country’s idea of itself as exceptional; we held
up the mirror in which the nation preferred not to peer. And so the inhumanity
visited on black people by every generation of white America justified the
inhumanity of the past.
Just as white Americans feared, World War II ignited what became
black Americans’ second sustained effort to make democracy real. As the
editorial board of the black newspaper The Pittsburgh Courier wrote, “We wage a
two-pronged attack against our enslavers at home and those abroad who will enslave
us.” Woodard’s blinding is largely seen as one of the catalysts for the
decades-long rebellion we have come to call the civil rights movement. But it
is useful to pause and remember that this was the second mass movement for
black civil rights, the first being Reconstruction. As the centennial of
slavery’s end neared, black people were still seeking the rights they had
fought for and won after the Civil War: the right to be treated equally by
public institutions, which was guaranteed in 1866 with the Civil Rights Act;
the right to be treated as full citizens before the law, which was guaranteed
in 1868 by the 14th Amendment; and the right to vote, which was guaranteed in
1870 by the 15th Amendment. In response to black demands for these rights,
white Americans strung them from trees, beat them and dumped their bodies in
muddy rivers, assassinated them in their front yards, firebombed them on buses,
mauled them with dogs, peeled back their skin with fire hoses and murdered
their children with explosives set off inside a church.
For the most part, black Americans fought back alone. Yet we
never fought only for ourselves. The bloody freedom struggles of the civil
rights movement laid the foundation for every other modern rights struggle.
This nation’s white founders set up a decidedly undemocratic Constitution that
excluded women, Native Americans and black people, and did not provide the vote
or equality for most Americans. But the laws born out of black resistance
guarantee the franchise for all and ban discrimination based not just on race
but on gender, nationality, religion and ability. It was the civil rights
movement that led to the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of
1965, which upended the racist immigration quota system intended to keep this
country white. Because of black Americans, black and brown immigrants from
across the globe are able to come to the United States and live in a country in
which legal discrimination is no longer allowed. It is a truly American irony
that some Asian-Americans, among the groups able to immigrate to the United
States because of the black civil rights struggle, are now suing universities
to end programs designed to help the descendants of the enslaved.
The
March on Washington for civil rights, 1963. Associated Press
No one cherishes freedom more than those who have not had it.
And to this day, black Americans, more than any other group, embrace the
democratic ideals of a common good. We are the most likely to support programs
like universal health care and a higher minimum wage, and to oppose programs
that harm the most vulnerable. For instance, black Americans suffer the most
from violent crime, yet we are the most opposed to capital punishment. Our
unemployment rate is nearly twice that of white Americans, yet we are still the
most likely of all groups to say this nation should take in refugees.
The truth is that as much democracy as this nation has today, it
has been borne on the backs of black resistance. Our founding fathers may not
have actually believed in the ideals they espoused, but black people did. As
one scholar, Joe R. Feagin, put it, “Enslaved African-Americans have been among
the foremost freedom-fighters this country has produced.” For generations, we
have believed in this country with a faith it did not deserve. Black people
have seen the worst of America, yet, somehow, we still believe in its best.
They say our people were born on the water.
When it occurred, no one can say for certain. Perhaps it was in
the second week, or the third, but surely by the fourth, when they had not seen
their land or any land for so many days that they lost count. It was after fear
had turned to despair, and despair to resignation, and resignation to an
abiding understanding. The teal eternity of the Atlantic Ocean had severed them
so completely from what had once been their home that it was as if nothing had
ever existed before, as if everything and everyone they cherished had simply
vanished from the earth. They were no longer Mbundu or Akan or Fulani. These
men and women from many different nations, all shackled together in the
suffocating hull of the ship, they were one people now.
Just a few months earlier, they had families, and farms, and
lives and dreams. They were free. They had names, of course, but their
enslavers did not bother to record them. They had been made black by those
people who believed that they were white, and where they were heading, black
equaled “slave,” and slavery in America required turning human beings into
property by stripping them of every element that made them individuals. This
process was called seasoning, in which people stolen from western and central
Africa were forced, often through torture, to stop speaking their native
tongues and practicing their native religions.
Edward
Crawford Jr. returns a tear gas canister fired by police who were trying to
disperse protesters in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014. Robert Cohen/St. Louis Post-Dispatch, via Associated Press
But as the sociologist Glenn Bracey wrote, “Out of the ashes of
white denigration, we gave birth to ourselves.” For as much as white people
tried to pretend, black people were not chattel. And so the process of
seasoning, instead of erasing identity, served an opposite purpose: In the
void, we forged a new culture all our own.
Today, our very manner of speaking recalls the Creole languages
that enslaved people innovated in order to communicate both with Africans
speaking various dialects and the English-speaking people who enslaved them.
Our style of dress, the extra flair, stems back to the desires of enslaved
people — shorn of all individuality — to exert their own identity. Enslaved
people would wear their hat in a jaunty manner or knot their head scarves
intricately. Today’s avant-garde nature of black hairstyles and fashion
displays a vibrant reflection of enslaved people’s determination to feel fully
human through self-expression. The improvisational quality of black art and music comes
from a culture that because of constant disruption could not cling to
convention. Black naming practices, so often impugned by mainstream society,
are themselves an act of resistance. Our last names belong to the white people
who once owned us. That is why the insistence of many black Americans,
particularly those most marginalized, to give our children names that we
create, that are neither European nor from Africa, a place we have never been,
is an act of self-determination. When the world listens to quintessential
American music, it is our voice they hear. The sorrow songs we sang in the
fields to soothe our physical pain and find hope in a freedom we did not expect
to know until we died became American gospel. Amid the devastating violence and
poverty of the Mississippi Delta, we birthed jazz and blues. And it was in the
deeply impoverished and segregated neighborhoods where white Americans forced
the descendants of the enslaved to live that teenagers too poor to buy instruments
used old records to create a new music known as hip-hop.
Our speech and fashion and the drum of our music echoes Africa
but is not African. Out of our unique isolation, both from our native cultures
and from white America, we forged this nation’s most significant original
culture. In turn, “mainstream” society has coveted our style, our slang and our
song, seeking to appropriate the one truly American culture as its own. As
Langston Hughes wrote in 1926, “They’ll see how beautiful I am/And be ashamed
—/I, too, am America.”
For centuries, white Americans have been trying to solve the
“Negro problem.” They have dedicated thousands of pages to this endeavor. It is
common, still, to point to rates of black poverty, out-of-wedlock births, crime
and college attendance, as if these conditions in a country built on a racial
caste system are not utterly predictable. But crucially, you cannot view those
statistics while ignoring another: that black people were enslaved here longer
than we have been free.
Ieshia
Evans being detained by law enforcement officers at a Black Lives Matter
protest in 2016 outside the headquarters of the Baton Rouge Police Department. Jonathan Bachman/Reuters
At 43, I am part of the first generation of black Americans in
the history of the United States to be born into a society in which black
people had full rights of citizenship. Black people suffered under slavery for
250 years; we have been legally “free” for just 50. Yet in that briefest of
spans, despite continuing to face rampant discrimination, and despite there
never having been a genuine effort to redress the wrongs of slavery and the
century of racial apartheid that followed, black Americans have made astounding
progress, not only for ourselves but also for all Americans.
What if America understood, finally, in this 400th year, that we
have never been the problem but the solution?
When I was a child — I must have been in fifth or sixth grade —
a teacher gave our class an assignment intended to celebrate the diversity of
the great American melting pot. She instructed each of us to write a short
report on our ancestral land and then draw that nation’s flag. As she turned to
write the assignment on the board, the other black girl in class locked eyes
with me. Slavery had erased any connection we had to an African country, and
even if we tried to claim the whole continent, there was no “African” flag. It
was hard enough being one of two black kids in the class, and this assignment
would just be another reminder of the distance between the white kids and us.
In the end, I walked over to the globe near my teacher’s desk, picked a random
African country and claimed it as my own.
I wish, now, that I could go back to the younger me and tell her
that her people’s ancestry started here, on these lands, and to boldly,
proudly, draw the stars and those stripes of the American flag.
We were told once, by virtue of our bondage, that we could never
be American. But it was by virtue of our bondage that we became the most
American of all.
posted by Xan @ 10:35 AM
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