The History

It is commonly said that slavery is the “original sin” of the United States.  However, slavery wasn’t new to the human race.  It may be more accurate to say that the fabricated notion of white supremacy is the original sin of the United States.  This mythological supremacy was invented to justify the brutal, exploitative and inhumane enslavement of Africans and Black Americans. Furthermore, it was used to separate enslaved Africans/Black Americans from white indentured servants.  This was in response to multiracial armed rebellions (Bacon’s rebellion in Jamestown in 1676). White supremacy was formally documented in policies such as The Virginia Slave Code of 1705 and similar doctrines were put into place.

At the dawn of the American Revolution, the founding fathers boldly claimed that all men are created equal and that they are entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. However, slavery contradicted this claim. Rather than hold America to its own principles, the founding fathers allowed the white supremacy to thrive. The founding fathers permitted the continued use of slavery by leaving the matter to the states.  They even let slave holding states count enslaved African Americans as three fifths of a person when determining the number of representatives in the House of Congress (Article 1 Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution). Clearly, America wasn't great or whole from the very beginning. People were not equal - not even all of its people were considered whole.

Another factor to note during this period is the origins of the police force.  During colonial times (and in the earliest decades of the United States) police were mostly volunteer organizations.  In northern cities there were “night watch” groups and constables to enforce laws and perform other duties.  Starting with Boston in 1838, police forces were established as full-time, municipal organizations with standards and procedures.  By 1880, all major cities had municipal police forces.  In the south, the police force originated as “slave patrols”.  Slave patrols had three primary functions: (1) to chase down, apprehend, and return to their owners, runaway slaves; (2) to provide a form of organized terror to deter slave revolts; and, (3) to maintain a form of discipline for slave-workers who were subject to summary justice, outside of the law, if they violated any plantation rules (source). 

After 7 more decades of slavery, the nation finally addressed the immoral institution. The Civil War ultimately held the union together and ended the period of chattel slavery. What was not addressed was the myth of white supremacy. This is evident in the disenfranchisement and terrorsim used to counter the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments.

• Amendment Summary: Slavery abolished “unless the party shall have been duly convicted of a crime”.
• Disenfranchisement (Darity, Mullen, Chapter 9)
  • Local governments set up vagrancy laws, loitering laws and other minor infractions to justify the enslavement of newly freed African Americans
  • Some states required documentation that African Americans were employed.  If African Americans could not produce documentation they were arrested and assigned to labor camps.
  • In Mississippi it was illegal for African Americans to negotiate their own terms of employment without the presence of a white person.
• Terrorism
  • Vigilante slave patrols evolved into municipal police departments.  Their role was to enforce vagrancy and loitering laws and enforce Black Codes and later, Jim Crow laws.
  • Police departments were often complicit, and sometimes directly involved in race riots and massacres throughout the nation.  In most cases, they did not press charges on white perpetrators.
  • In Mississippi, “civil officers” who suspected that an African American had quit their employment could apprehend them, return them to their employer for “the sum of five dollars” (Darity, Mullen 189).
  • Memphis (1866) - 34 African Americans dead, African American businesses were looted and pillaged, 90 veterans' homes, 4 churches and 9 schools razed, and 5 African American women raped.

• Amendment Summary: All people born in the country (including African Americans) are citizens.  No state can deprive any person of “life, liberty or property without due process of law; nor deny … equal protection under the law”.
• Disenfranchisement
  • Life & Liberty
    • Throughout the south, Black Codes prohibited African Americans from negotiating their wages and working conditions, initiating and breaking contracts or bargaining collectively (Darity, Mullen, 186)
    • Education
      • School finding linked to real estate taxes which underfunded schools in lower income areas
      • Prince Edward County, VA closed schools rather than integrate
    • In South Carolina, children as young as 2 years old could be bound out to learn a trade if their parents were “paupers” or of “bad character”.  Also, 10-year-old children whose parents did not live in the “district” could be contracted for labor or service for one year or less (Darity, Mullen, 187).
    • Entertainment venues and amusement parks were segregated throughout the country (Race Riots and Roller Coasters - Victoria Wolcott)
    • Excluded from many Unions nationwide during and after the labor movement
    • Interstate highways and other government projects displaced African American communities
      • Hayti, Durham, NC
      • Black Bottom and Paradise Valley, Detroit (Black Detroit, Herb Boyd)
      • Central Park demolished Seneca Village, NY
    • Gentrification
      • Throughout the country, gentrification has relocated predominately African American communities to accommodate the plans of mostly white developers and business owners in the name of urban renewal.  
        • Seven cities comprised half of the nation’s gentrification: New York City, Los Angeles, Washington, DC, Philadelphia, Baltimore, San Diego and Chicago.
        • Existing African American communities usually have little to no input or control on this phenomenon and are ultimately forced to move.  The displaced community does not receive commensurate financial benefits from the increase in property value
  • Property
    • Special Field Orders No. 15 and the Freedmen’s Bureau granted freed African American families 40 acres of tillable land, based on a recommendation from a committee of African American leaders led by Reverend Garrison Frazier. A total of 400,000 people moved to 40,000 acres of land along the Atlatic coast of South Carolina and Georgia.  Months later, President Lincoln was assassinated and his successor ended the land program. This allowed southern whites to take African American land. 
    • Despite all the challenges and disenfranchisement, African Americans owned 15M acres by 1910.  However that dwindled to 2.4 M farming acres by 1997 (Darity, Mullen, 208)
    • Housing segregation (The Color of Law - Richard Rothstein)
      • Redlining - the process by which developers drew racially restrictive borders for housing.  This usually forced African American families into less desirable parts of town, often near train stations and industrial areas
      • In 1934 the Federal Government created the structure for home-ownership as we know it today; federally backed insurance lowered interest rates, fixed 30 year mortgage terms, and lower down payment requirements.  However the Federal Housing Administration’s initial insurance policies deemed African American communities high risk and therefore ineligible for FHA backed loans.  This prevented African Americans from federally endorsed home ownership and were limited to “contract buying”.  
      • Local codes required racial “harmony”
      • The manipulation of housing markets by alleging African American populations decrease property value, triggering “white flight”
• Terrorism
  • In 1895 Robert Smith estimated that 53,000 African Americans were killed by white terrorism from 1865 to 1895.  This staggering number is now seen as realistic.
  • Massacre in Atlanta, GA (1906) - 100 killed
  • Massacre in St. Louis, MO (1917) - home and business invasions - 100 killed
  • Elaine, AK (1919) - 200+ killed
  • “Red Summer”
    • Chicago 1919 - 38 killed
    • Washington DC - 15 killed(10 white, 5 Black)
    • Others 
  • Riot and Massacre in Tulsa, OK (1921) - 300 killed, several square blocks razed 
  • Riot and Massacre in Rosewood, FL (1923) - 150 killed, several square blocks razed
  • Riots of 1943 - Detroit, MI, Beaumont, TX, Harlem, NY
  • Over 4,000 lynchings took place, usually as a reaction to alleged crimes (rape of white women, murder, theft).  None of which followed due process of law.

• Amendment Summary: Ensured the right of citizens to vote regardless of race, color or previous condition of servitude.
• Disenfranchisement
  • Grandfather clause
  • Literacy tests
  • Poll tax
• Terrorism
  • New Orleans Massacre (1866) - 238 killed
  • Saint Landry Parish, LA (1868) - 250 killed
  • Texas (1868) - election murders took place in 9 parishes - 227 killed 68 injured/assaulted
  • Eutaw, AL and Piedmont cotton belt, AL (1870) - 17 dead including a white probate judge and a black legislator, 54 injured
  • Meridian, MS (1871) - court proceedings interrupted, 30 blacks dead including the vast majority of leaders (Darity, Mullen, 200)
  • Massacre in Colfax, LA (1873) - 100-150 killed
  • Massacre Vicksburg, MS (1874) - 300 killed
  • Riot and Massacre in Wilmington, NC (1898) - 10-60 dead, significant loss of property
  • Massacre in Ocoee, FL (1920) - 50 killed and several blocks razed on election day, the “single bloodiest day in modern U.S. political history” 

Though the Ku Klux Klan is the most commonly known white terrorist organizations, there were scores of others during the Century of Terrorism and Disenfranchisement.  These included Knights of the White Camelia, the Innocents, the Seymour Knights, the White League, Red Shirts and others.  Several of these organizations had ties to local police, either informally or formally.  The vast majority of white terrorism occurred with impunity.

Pseudo science and cultural depictions of African Americans strongly contributed to the unfair treatment.  Non-scientific studies of racial differences, most notably eugenics, alleged that African Americans were “biologically” inferior to whites.  Some alleged that African Americans were a separate species and were therefore, not privy to the rights of humans.  Despite the lack of actual scientific credentials and procedures, these notions were widely distributed and accepted by white Americans (Stony the Road - Henry Louis Gates Jr. chapter 2).

Propaganda campaigns propagated various stereotypes of African Americans.  These often conflicted with each other.  African American men were lazy and docile (like Uncle Tom or Remus and ideal for slavery) but also brutish rapists.  Meanwhile, African American women were stereotyped as asexual “mammies” suitable for the raising of white children under slavery but also as “Jezebels” - lustful, sexual temptations.  One of the most common stereotypes was that African Americans were “criminal” in nature and wanted to rape white women.  D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation” (critically acclaimed by President Wilson) amplified this myth and reignited the Ku Klux Klan.  Other negative stereotypes were reinforced daily with “sambo” advertising which depicted caricatures of African Americans (Stony the Road - Henry Louis Gates Jr., chapter 3).

The legality of disenfranchisement would eventually erode during the Civil Rights Movement.  Irene Morgan’s landmark Supreme Court case (ruling in 1946 that segregation on interstate buses was unconstitutional) showed that segregation and disenfranchisement was unconstitutional and could be challenged in court.  Jackie Robinson’s integration into Major League Baseball (1947) and the desegregation of the U.S. Military (1948) were other early signs that things could change.  The Civil Rights Movement would force the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 which were reiterations of prior civil rights legislation and the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments.  The movement was also successful in changing the acceptable public tone with respect to race.  However, white supremacy was not addressed and continued to change form.

Coming soon