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January 26 - February 13, 2023
African people had lived here, on the land that in 1776 would form the United States, since the White Lion dropped anchor in the year 1619. They’d arrived one year before the iconic ship carrying the English people who got the credit for building it all.
Even as a teenager, I understood that the absence of 1619 from mainstream history was intentional.
slavery predates nearly every other institution in the United States.
“Conveniently left out of our founding mythology,” that paragraph began, “is the fact that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.”
The linking of slavery and the American Revolution directly challenged the cornerstone of national identity embedded in our public history, the narratives taught to us in elementary schools, museums and memorials, Hollywood movies,
and in many scholarly works as well.16
we argue that much about American identity, so many of our nation’s most vexing problems, our basest inclinations, and its celebrated and unique cultural contributions spring not from the ideals of 1776 but from the realities of 1619, from the contradictions and the ideological struggles of a nation founded on both slavery and freedom. The story of Black America cannot be disentangled from the story of America, and our attempts to do so have forced us to tell ourselves a tale full of absences, evasions, and lies, one that fails to satisfactorily explain the society we live in and leaves us
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Ana Lucia Araujo writes in Slavery in the Age of Memory, “despite its ambitions of objectivity,” public history is molded by the perspectives of the most powerful members of society.
It is said that history is written by the victors.
Eight in ten Black people would not be in the United States were it not for the institution of slavery in a society founded on ideals of freedom.
is we who have been the perfecters of this democracy.
And yet none of this is part of our founding mythology, which conveniently omits 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. They feared that liberation would
Robin D. G. Kelley said. “And here you get the emergence of this idea of a white race as a way to distinguish themselves from those dark-skinned people who they associate with perpetual slavery.”
In fact, some might argue that this nation was founded not as a democracy but as a slavocracy.
The majority of the Supreme Court enshrined this thinking in the law in its 1857 Dred Scott decision, declaring that Black people, whether enslaved or free, came from a “slave” race. This made them permanently inferior to white people and, therefore, incompatible with American democracy.
“Negro race,” the court ruled, was “a separate class of persons,” one the founders had “not regarded as a portion of the people or citizens of the Government” and who had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”56
belief, that Black people were not merely enslaved but a slave race, is the root of the endemic racism we cannot pu...
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Lincoln worried about the consequences of the radical step toward abolition. Like many white Americans, he opposed slavery as a cruel system at odds with American ideals, but he also opposed Black equality.
“Why should they leave this country? This is, perhaps, the first question for proper consideration,” Lincoln told his visitors. “You and we are different races…. Your race suffers very greatly, many of them, by living among us, while ours suffer from your presence. In a word, we suffer on each side.”60
Douglass would never forget that the president initially suggested that the only solution, after abolishing an enslavement that had lasted for centuries, was for Black Americans to leave the country they helped to build. More than a decade later, organizers asked Douglass to eulogize the assassinated president at the unveiling of a new memorial for Lincoln and the freedmen in Washington, D.C. The abolitionist, whose mother had been sold away from him when he was a young child, had met with Lincoln a few times during his presidency and had repeatedly prodded Lincoln in his writings and speeches
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“Abraham Lincoln was not, in the fullest sense of the word, either our man or our model…. He was preeminently the white man’s president, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men. He was ready and willing at any time during the first years of his administration to deny, postpone, and sacrifice the rights of humanity in the colored people to promote the welfare of the white people of this country…. You are the children of Abraham Lincoln. We are at best only his step-children; children by adoption, children by forces of circumstances and necessity.”
Though the first version of his Emancipation Proclamation advocated colonization, by the end of the Civil War, Lincoln had abandoned these efforts and advocated for the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery. In his final speech before his assassination, Lincoln expressed an openness to enfranchising a limited number of Black men—particularly educated men and those who’d fought in the war.
“Still, the final stage of Lincoln is still a person who only believes in partial Black inclusion and who is only advocating for inclusion of certain Black people on certain terms. It’s valid to expect that he would have continued to evolve, but what we do know is that in the unfortunately short period of his presidency, Lincoln wasn’t an advocate for full equality.”69
“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.”70
W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, “Few men ever worshiped Freedom with half such unquestioning faith as did the American Negro for two centuries.”
Civil Rights Act of 1866, the nation’s first such law and one of the greatest pieces of civil rights legislation in American history. The law codified Black American citizenship for the first time, prohibited housing discrimination, and provided all Americans the legal right to buy and inherit property, make and enforce contracts, and seek redress from courts.75
Just five years into Reconstruction, every Southern state had enshrined the right to a public education for all children into its constitution.79
period between the 1880s and the early twentieth century became known as the second slavery or the Great Nadir, a phrase taken from the work of the historian and public intellectual Rayford W. Logan.
system so grotesque that Nazi Germany would later take inspiration from it for its own racist policies.
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: that Black people were an inferior race whose degraded status justified their treatment.
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.
This nation’s white founders set up a decidedly undemocratic Constitution that excluded Black people and did not provide the vote or equality for most Americans.
“Enslaved African-Americans have been among the foremost freedom-fighters this country has produced.”
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.
review of prosecutorial decisions in sexual-assault cases in Kansas City and Philadelphia discovered that prosecutors were 4.5 times more likely to file charges in rapes by strangers involving white victims than Black victims.
Middle Passage, mortality rates ranged from 5 to 20 percent, lowering as the centuries passed.
Between 1877 and 1950, more than four thousand Black men, women, and children lost their lives to lynching.72
“low-road capitalism,”
How did we arrive at a point of so much overincarceration, abusive policing, and excessive punishment? Why are racial disparities so pronounced throughout this system? We cannot answer these questions without understanding the legacy of slavery and the harsh, racialized instinct for punishment our history has created.
As the Supreme Court of Alabama explained in an 1861 ruling, enslaved Black people were “capable of committing crimes,” and in that capacity were “regarded as persons,” but in most every other sense they were “incapable of performing civil acts” and considered “things, not persons.”11
Reconstruction may have challenged the existing paradigm, with changes to the Constitution aimed at enforcing equality before the law, but it was short-lived and could not overcome the commitment to white supremacy evident in so many jurisdictions.
After emancipation, Black people, once seen as less than fully human “slaves,” were now seen as less than fully human “criminals.”
Laws governing slavery were replaced with laws governing free Black people, making the criminal legal system central to new strategies of racial control.
Anything Black people did to challenge the racial hierarchy could be seen as a crime, punished either by the law or by lawless lynchings, which were an epidemic in the South but also took place in the West and the North.
In Germany, there has been a meaningful reckoning with the history of the Holocaust; this sort of reflection and remembrance has been largely absent in America, where many people resist confronting the most disturbing and difficult parts of our past.
the Compromise of 1877:
Most outrageously, Cartwright maintained that enslaved people were prone to a “disease of the mind” called drapetomania, which caused them to run away from their enslavers. Willfully ignoring the inhumane conditions that drove desperate men and women to attempt escape, he insisted, without irony, that enslaved people could contract this ailment when their enslavers treated them as equals, and he prescribed “whipping the devil out of them” as a preventive measure.22
For much of the nation’s history, the campaign to keep African Americans “in their place” socially and politically manifested itself in an effort to keep them quite literally in one place or another.
Progress has primarily come for “a growing middle class minority,” while for poor Black people “the walls are rising and the gulf is widening,” Johnson pointed out. “Thirty-five years ago the rate of unemployment for Negroes and whites was about the same,” he noted.
“Tonight the Negro rate is twice as high.” In recent decades, Johnson added, income disparities, disparities in poverty rates, disparities in infant mortality, and urban segregation were all increasing.57
This iteration of the racial-progress refrain, which can be traced back to the Cold War pamphlet The Negro in American Life, focuses our attention on how the United States has come a long way (the past) and how America has a long way to go (the future). This past/future logic has compelled generation after generation to overlook the present—indeed, the presence of racism.
