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This was not a surge of purposeless criminality, as many white observers claimed; it was a sustained revolt.
severe segregation, poverty, joblessness, lack of access to housing, lack of access to economic opportunities, and discrimination in the job market, combined with pervasive police violence and harassment, had created a tinderbox of rage and despair that would certainly result in more uprisings if drastic action was not taken.
white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.”87
Kerner Commission’s report,
Johnson said of the uprisings that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.: “What did you expect? I don’t know why we’re so surprised. When you put your foot on a man’s neck and hold him down for three hundred years, and then you let him up, what’s he going to do? He’s going to knock your block off.”
he favored social programs to address “root causes” of Black despair,
absent a massive investment in poor Black communities, rebellion and “white retaliation” would render racial inequality a permanent feature of American life.
our nation has declared wars on drugs and crime, invested billions of dollars in highly militarized police forces, and embarked on a race to incarcerate in Black communities, while slashing funding from education, drug treatment, public housing, and welfare.93
Elizabeth Hinton wrote with the historian Julilly Kohler-Hausmann and the political scientist Vesla M. Weaver in a New York Times opinion piece in 2016:
James Baldwin famously said, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed unless it is faced.”
many large and influential Native nations leaned toward Great Britain.
Native peoples of the South were deeply democratic and arrived at decisions by consensus.
white people were citizens, Black people were possessions, and Indigenous people were now subject to national interference.
Today, African Americans and Native Americans share the highest incarceration and poverty rates in the country, as well as the lowest high school graduation numbers.
Doctrine of Discovery, a longstanding belief that Christian nations had the right to rule over non-Christian nations and their property,
at least thirty to fifty thousand Indigenous Southerners were enslaved by Anglo colonists before the year 1715.
Enslaved Black and Native Americans produced a distinctive pottery style known by archaeologists as colonoware.
opportunities for some Native people, who were considered potentially redeemable and assimilable, to be converted to Christianity in regions like New England and the Great Lakes,
The architects of the early American state were Age of Enlightenment thinkers who believed that Indigenous people had the intelligence and ability to assimilate into proper society, unlike Africans, whom they viewed as innately insufficient.
private property and male authority. The policy demanded that Native men give up the bow for the plow, and that Native women cease farming corn and turn their attention to the domestic work of spinning thread, weaving cloth, and other “properly” feminine activities.
And Native tribes, which held lands in common, were expected to embrace, as Henry Knox put it, “a love for exclusive property.”
Natives who enslaved people found favor with the U.S. government, garnering positive reviews in the federal agents’ reports and earning government contracts and military honors.
within the nations that had signed treaties at Hopewell Plantation, slavery gradually took root.
Cherokees enslaved the largest number of people, but Creeks, Choctaws, and Chickasaws also developed entrenched systems of Black enslavement tethered to racial prejudice.
Jackson’s second State of the Union address, in December 1830, advocated for the expulsion of Native people from their homes, towns, houses of worship, and seats of government.
In the end, Jackson reasoned, this relocation would benefit Native Americans.
U.S. Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, which authorized the president to remove tribes from their homes and lands east of the Mississippi and relocate them on land west of the river.
June 1830, Georgia put into effect a law the state had passed two years earlier, asserting jurisdiction over Cherokee territory;
In 1832, Georgia established a lottery for the redistribution of all Cherokee land to white Georgians.
Approximately one thousand Cherokees died during the eviction, and the decline in the birthrate meant a total population loss of more than thirty-four hundred people.
the institution of American slavery and the event of Indian Removal were, in both cause and effect, “twin evils.”58
migration of other nonwhite peoples.” Native expulsion was, he writes, “the war the slaveholders won.”59
1866 treaties, compelled these nations to free the enslaved among them, to accept freedpeople as citizens with political rights in these nations, and to allow railroad
2017 federal court ruling requiring the Cherokee Nation to extend civil rights to descendants of formerly enslaved people after decades of resistance on the part of the tribe.66
The richest 1 percent of Americans owns 40 percent of the country’s wealth, while a larger share of working-age people (those eighteen to sixty-five)
slavery shaped our political institutions and founding documents, our laws governing private property and financial regulation, our management techniques and accounting systems, and our economic systems and labor unions.
Cotton grown and picked by enslaved workers was the nation’s most valuable export.
“American slavery is necessarily imprinted on the DNA of American capitalism,”
Congress would be divided into two houses, a lower house based on population—with each enslaved Black person counting as three-fifths of a citizen—and an upper house that gave all states an equal number of votes.
Three-fifths Clause was extended to the executive branch through the Electoral College,
To this day, the fifteen states where slavery remained legal as of 1861 still hold the power to block a constitutional amendment supported by the other thirty-five.
The three-fifths clause provided a potential solution—treat enslaved Black workers as partial citizens for the purposes of taxation—but Southern enslavers quickly realized that that would require them to pay more than Northerners who didn’t enslave people.
The result was the creation of a financially and bureaucratically weak federal government.
The federal government didn’t acquire the power to “lay and collect taxes on incomes” until 1913, when the Sixteenth Amendment was ratified.
Progressive taxation remains among the best ways to limit economic inequality,
America’s present-day tax system, however, is regressive and insipid in part because it was born out of political compromise steered by debates over slavery.
2018, sixty Fortune 500 companies, including Amazon, Chevron, Delta Air Lines, and Netflix, paid no federal income taxes.
exceptionally powerful devotion to individual property rights that made American business stronger, American labor weaker, and the American welfare state a comparative ‘laggard.’
After the Civil War, legal provisions originally developed to protect slavery were extended to strengthen corporate interests and promote laissez-faire capitalism.
Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co. that the Supreme Court believed that the Fourteenth Amendment applied to corporations as well as to people.
