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February 25 - December 18, 2024
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 overseas while brutally suppressing democracy for millions of American citizens.
Floyd McKissick, the national director of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), told The New York Times on the night of King’s murder that his death meant the end of nonviolence as a political strategy. “Nonviolence is a dead philosophy, and it was not the black people that killed it. It was the white people that killed nonviolence and white racists at that.”
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.
But the United States government is characterized by political inaction—and that was by design. By creating political structures that weakened the role of the federal government’s ability to regulate slavery, the framers hobbled Washington’s ability to pass legislation on a host of other matters.
Given the choice between parity with Black people—by inviting them into unified unions—and poverty, white workers chose poverty, spoiling the development of a multiracial mass labor movement in America.
Their most popular “solution” was known as “colonization,” a plan to remove Black Americans from the United States. The American Colonization Society (ACS), founded in 1816, committed to preserving the United States as a white man’s country by ensuring that Black Americans would not become citizens.
In 1822, just one year after Congress allowed a ban on Black migration to Missouri, the ACS established the West African colony of Liberia. Promising migrants economic independence, political autonomy, and citizenship, the society outfitted ships, organized expeditions, and did all it could to encourage Black people to leave the United States.
for Black Americans, full citizenship would not come by the ballot. Nor would it come by way of white lawmakers’ benevolence. Instead, the only route to national belonging was through organizing and advocacy.
The nation’s highest court declared that Blackness rendered them unequivocally noncitizens.
Congress responded by promulgating the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which opened with a declaration of citizenship as birthright:
Delaware, Maryland, and Kentucky—did not ratify the amendment until years later, in 1901, 1959, and 1976, respectively. Ambivalence about Black citizenship persisted.
The new amendment had finally affirmed the principles for which the colored conventions—dozens of them over nearly four decades—had stood: Black Americans were citizens of the United States by virtue of birthright.
With citizenship came the grand challenge of showing the way forward on how women fit into the ideals of universal rights.
In a matter of weeks, at the end of February 1869, Congress sent the Fifteenth Amendment to the states for ratification: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
Stand Your Ground law, crafted by the National Rifle Association during the 2000s. The law gave a person the right, when faced with a perceived threat, to be “justified in using force which is intended or likely to cause death or great bodily harm only if he or she reasonably believes that such force is necessary to prevent death or great bodily injury to himself or herself or a third person or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony.”
“castle doctrine”: if one’s home was invaded, the owner had the right to ward off the intruder.
The Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights granted citizens of the new country the right to bear arms in order to provide for a “well regulated militia.” But the enslaved were not considered citizens, and in most states, even free Black people struggled to exercise their citizenship rights.
everyone understood that one of the purposes of the Second Amendment’s “well regulated militia” was to suppress uprisings of the enslaved. Though it did not explicitly say so, the Second Amendment was motivated in large part by a need for the new federal government to assure white people in the South that they would be able to defend themselves against Black people.
Like many previous such laws, Stand Your Ground depends on the perception of threat, and research shows that Black people are often linked with danger in the minds of white people.
The pressure of a series of British victories and the ongoing and worsening reluctance of white men to enlist finally compelled a number of states in the North to offer freedom to their enslaved men in exchange for military service.
Even when faced with overwhelming British force, the Southern states resisted arming enslaved people.
Madison recognized that though all the delegates were determined to create a viable nation, there were two divergent agendas under the surface. The Deep South was intent on strengthening the slaveholders’ power and protecting the institution of slavery. Meanwhile, the other delegates were motivated by a variety of moral, economic, and philosophical reasons. The asymmetry allowed the dream of the United States of America to be held hostage to the tyrannical aims of enslavers.
legislation known as the Black Codes. These laws were designed to reinstall something close to slavery.
because of mandatory sentencing and three-strikes laws, I have found myself representing people sentenced to life without parole for stealing a bicycle or for simple possession of marijuana. For a nation that prides itself on being exceptionally committed to freedom, America has produced an endless list of harsh, extreme, and cruel sentences, across the fifty states, for minor and major crimes.
The Thirteenth Amendment is credited with ending slavery, but it stopped short of that. It made an exception for those convicted of crimes: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction”
Today, it is Black and other nonwhite people who are disproportionately targeted, stopped, suspected, arrested, incarcerated, and shot by the police or prosecuted in courts.
Recognizing the unbroken links between slavery, Black Codes, lynching, and our current era of mass incarceration is essential.
Truth-telling can be powerful. In many faith traditions, salvation and redemption can come only after confession and repentance. 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.
On rented land, which could never be stolen from them, they could still set up numerous moneymaking ventures.
With violence largely sanctioned by state and local governments, Black families, especially in the South, faced poverty coupled with a life in limbo, where safety, stability, access to education, and mental health were always precarious. This was true for many generations. Today, Black Americans far removed from slavery and Jim Crow continue to be handed the economic misfortune of their forebearers. This is why, as of 2017, white households were twice as likely as Black households to receive an inheritance. And when white people inherit money, it’s typically three times the amount Black
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Instead of wealth, millions of Black families have passed down something else from one generation to the next: the mental and emotional stress that results from the constant threat of white violence and financial insecurity.
Black liberation theology, a concept developed in the 1960s by James H. Cone,
Cone argued that the plight of Black Americans must be a central concern of the church.
Most church fellowships are more concerned about drinking or new buildings or Sunday closing than about children who die of rat bites or men who are killed because they want to be treated like men.”
Jefferson himself freed only two enslaved people in his lifetime.
“The Fifteenth Amendment confers upon the African race the care of its own destiny. It places their fortunes in their own hands.” These sentiments were widespread despite the fact that the formerly enslaved escaped their bondage with absolutely nothing.
From this point forward, white Americans were ready to blame Black behavior, and not racism and the deprivations of 250 years of enslavement, for persisting racial inequities.
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.
Until Americans replace mythology with history, until Americans unveil and halt the progression of racism, an arc of the American universe will keep bending toward injustice.
even if we pass wide-ranging policing and voting reforms, on their own, these cannot bring justice to America.
If we seek to truly make this a transformative moment, if we are indeed serious about creating a more just society, we must go much further than that. We must get to the root of it.
The prosperity of this country is inextricably linked with the forced labor of the ancestors of more than 30 million Black Americans, just as it is linked to the stolen land of the country’s Indigenous people.
We are often taught in school that Lincoln “freed the slaves,” but we are not prodded to contemplate what it means to achieve freedom without a home to live in, without food to eat, a bed to sleep on, clothes for your children, or money to buy any of it.
The authors point out how many white Americans love to play up moments of racial progress like the Emancipation Proclamation, Brown v. Board of Education, and the election of Barack Obama, while playing down or ignoring lynching, racial apartheid, and the 1985 government bombing of a Black neighborhood in Philadelphia.
The seldom-quoted King is the one who said that the true battle for equality, the actualization of justice, required economic repair.
it didn’t cost the nation anything to integrate lunch counters. It didn’t cost the nation anything to integrate hotels and motels. It didn’t cost the nation a penny to guarantee the right to vote. Now we are in a period where it will cost the nation billions of dollars to get rid of poverty, to get rid of slums, to make quality integrated education a reality.
most Americans believe that Black households hold $90 in wealth for every $100 held by white households. The actual amount is $10.
For the gap to be closed, America must undergo a vast social transformation produced by the adoption of bold national policies.
At the center of those policies must be reparations.
it is the federal government that would pay.
