(Note: This diary got so long that I decided to divide it in two. The first part will briefly recount US oppression of African Americans up to the Civil Rights movement of the sixties. The second part will discuss persistent and systemic marginalization of African Americans since the Civil Rights movement. Though either part should make sense alone, once both parts are up I will try to link them.)
Sixty years after Brown vs. Board of Education, fifty years after the voting rights act and affirmative action, and more than two years after we elected a black President for a second term, African Americans continue to struggle with poverty and marginalization. Conservatives, including the current Supreme Court, argue that the civil rights laws passed in the 60’s changed the system and that therefore the problem must be with impoverished people of color themselves and not with the system. I profoundly disagree. The problems suffered by impoverished African American communities today derive from our country’s long and continuing history of systemic and pervasive racial bias and resulting lack of opportunity, a history that still haunts us all.
Though much of the country’s wealth by the 1860’s had been built on the backs of black slaves, the slaves and their descendants took virtually none of that wealth with them upon emancipation. According to The Half Has Never Been Told, Edward Baptist’s history of American slavery, in the 1830’s nearly 50% of US “economic activity” derived ultimately from cotton cultivated and picked by slaves. By 1850 slaves themselves were collectively valued at $1.3 billion, roughly 20% of total American wealth.
Yet, as we all know too well, the benefits of this thriving economy have not been shared with the former slaves or their descendants. In 1865 President Andrew Johnson returned to Southern planters much of the land conquering Northern armies had taken from them. But the slaves who had suffered and endured and built the wealth of the American economy found themselves with nothing. No homes. No land. No investments. No assets of any kind other than their capacity for hard work and their intricate knowledge of cotton farming. By 1870, fewer than 1% of more than 4 million Southern blacks owned even a small plot of land.
Though de jure slavery ended upon passage of the thirteenth amendment in 1865, various forms of de facto slavery continued in the South. Sharecropping, Jim Crow laws, convict leasing, and the reign of terror created by lynching controlled and suppressed Southern blacks. Ever since emancipation, deliberate government policy and intentional political manipulation have divided blacks and whites and pitted them against one another, resulting in the continued marginalization of black communities.
Lacking land in an agricultural economy, most newly freed blacks had no way to earn a living other than sharecropping, raising mostly cotton on whites’ land. Landowners supplied land in return for a substantial share of the crop and sold the croppers seed, tools, and some food on credit. Since landowners by law set the terms of sharecropping agreements, black farmers often had to pay as much as 70% interest on the tools and seed they borrowed
and “planters regularly falsified accounts.” Consequently, black sharecroppers often found themselves effectively re-enslaved by debt.
Other forms of oppression combined with sharecropping to control and suppress blacks. Jim Crow laws created all sorts of petty crimes that were enforced only against blacks. Moving or leaving employment without permission, failure to pay appropriate respect to whites, failure to tip one’s hat to a white woman, and, most commonly, vagrancy could land a Southern black man in jail, where his inability to pay fines and fees subjected him to further incarceration in prison. The “vagrancy laws were so ill-defined that any free black who was not under the protection of a white person could be arrested.” Douglas Blackmon (Slavery by Another Name: the Re-enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to WWII, New York: Anchor Books, 2009) examined vast collections of public documents relating to the arrest, imprisonment, and convict leasing of blacks after the Civil War. He found “hundreds of thousands of pages” of such documents “in Alabama” alone, detailing injustices of monstrous proportions:
Instead of thousands of true thieves and thugs . . . the records demonstrate the capture and imprisonment of thousands of random indigent citizens, almost always under the thinnest chimera of probable cause or judicial process
(6).
Once imprisoned, black men found themselves subject to the convict leasing system, which Blackmon has called “slavery by another name.” The 13th amendment, which most of us think outlawed slavery, left a loophole—“except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted”—which powerful Southerners exploited relentlessly. Under the convict leasing system, Southern governments would lease prisoners to businesses. The system served three purposes: it controlled and suppressed blacks, it provided revenue for governments, and it provided a cheap supply of labor for Southern businesses. Hundreds of forced labor prison camps sprung up around the South. Since those leasing prisoners for work had no material interest in the welfare of their workers, they often treated them worse than slaves, sometimes virtually working them to death. Blackmon estimates that millions of Southern blacks were affected, directly or indirectly, by convict leasing (8). Among those acquiring cheap labor through this system was a Birmingham, Alabama based subsidiary of US Steel, which worked thousands of such convicts.
Without a doubt, though, the most brutal, terrifying, and despicable, but effective means of controlling and suppressing Southern blacks was “racial terror lynching”.. Not merely tolerated, but often endorsed, encouraged, and even led by magistrates, powerful sheriffs, and elected officials, mobs of self-proclaimed “Christian” white terrorists tortured and lynched thousands of Southern blacks between 1865 and 1950. These were lynchings perpetrated not to punish or deter crime, but to terrify and suppress blacks, often for very minor or even imagined infractions. After excluding post-trial hangings and the few lynchings that were punished, the Equal Justice Institute catalogued 3959 “racial terror lynchings,” acts whose primary purpose was not so much to punish crime as to instill terror in the black population. One man was lynched in Alabama in 1940 for failing to call a white law enforcement officer “’mister’” while a soldier, after fighting in WWI, was lynched in Georgia in 1919 for wearing his uniform.
Terror lynchings often included torture. The Equal Justice Institute describes one such lynching, which was not atypical:
In Dyersburg, Tennessee, a mob tortured Lation Scott with a hot poker iron, gouging out his eyes, shoving the hot poker down his throat and pressing it all over his body before castrating him and burning him alive over a slow fire.
These were highly visible events, often carried out in public places or in prominent locations within African American neighborhoods. The press invariably supported and even celebrated the lynchings as rituals of white supremacy. Thousands of whites, often including whole communities, attended lynchings, watching the brutal torture and burning, buying food and souvenir postcards from vendors, and even taking small pieces of the victim’s body as trophies. The EJI report includes a photograph of the June 26, 1919 issue of the
New Orleans States, much of whose front page is devoted to the impending lynching of an Ellisville, MS, black man accused of assaulting a white woman. The town of Ellisville appointed a committee to plan the event, “scheduled” for 5 pm. One of several bold face headlines reads “3000 will burn Negro.” An 1893 lynching in Paris, Texas, was attended by more than 10,000 whites. Photos in the EJI article show whites smilingly posing with the lynched in the background.
Perhaps as terrifying as lynching and even more destructive were the attacks led by mobs of white vigilantes against whole black communities, North and South, attacks culminating in the Red Summer of 1919. In that one year alone, race riots initiated by whites caused widespread destruction in 25 or more different cities, North and South. White mobs lynched over 50 blacks, killed hundreds more by other means, and injured thousands while many more were left homeless.
Two years later Tulsa’s “Black Wall Street” was completely destroyed by rioting white mobs. Apparently a young white woman accused a black man of assault. Soon a mob of “deputized” whites gathered and began an attack on the thriving nearby African American town of Greenwood, looting and setting fires everywhere. The mob burned over 40 blocks of the prosperous community, including more than 150 black-owned businesses and over 1200 other buildings, and killed more than 300 blacks. The National Guard, called in to quell the disturbance, arrested thousands of black residents instead of the white rioters. Later, charges against the suspected rapist were dropped.
Given the combination of sharecropping, Jim Crow laws, convict leasing, and lynching, it’s no wonder that millions of blacks migrated to Northern cities in search of work and a better life. There they continued to face oppression. Corporations sometimes used them as scabs and strikebreakers, creating antagonism between the newly arrived blacks and whites. But they faced oppression from their own government as well. After Congress created the FHA in 1934, enabling the government to insure private mortgages, the FHA graded neighborhoods according its estimate of their credit worthiness. Black neighborhoods, colored red on maps, hence the term “redlining,” got the lowest ratings, and houses in those neighborhoods were not eligible for federal mortgage insurance. To be denied insurance, neighborhoods did not have to be entirely or even majority black. A single black resident was enough to render an entire neighborhood ineligible. Unless they resorted to shady and usurious small-time lenders, blacks were effectively blocked from buying homes or businesses in their own communities. The neighborhoods were owned by absentees with little or no interest in maintaining their property while white-owned businesses spent the profits earned from black buyers in other neighborhoods, drawing any black wealth out of the community.
If, on the other hand, blacks sought to buy homes in white neighborhoods, they immediately reduced, by their very presence, the value not only of their own homes, but of the white-owned homes near them, further contributing to white animosity and creating “white flight.” Moreover the government’s policy of redlining effectively branded black neighborhoods as poor investments, thereby reducing investment there and further impoverishing black communities. Lack of investment meant, of course, lack of jobs as well as fewer educational resources. As quoted by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas Shapiro in Black Wealth/White Wealth summarize the effects such policies had on black communities:
Locked out of the greatest mass-based opportunity for wealth accumulation in American history, African Americans who desired and were able to afford home ownership found themselves consigned to central-city communities where their investments were affected by the “self-fulfilling prophecies” of the FHA appraisers: cut off from sources of new investment[,] their homes and communities deteriorated and lost value in comparison to those homes and communities that FHA appraisers deemed desirable.
Those who want to believe that minority neighborhoods themselves are solely responsible for their own degradation will argue that this is ancient history, that the civil rights movement, the Brown decision, and the various laws and executive actions of the 60’s to grant rights to blacks ended pervasive racial discrimination. But while blacks have undeniably make some gains since the 60’s, the simple fact is that in our society racism remains widespread, infecting many of our institutions and systems.
Over 350 years both the brutal exploitation and suppression of blacks and the myths that justified it—myths that blacks are lazy and irresponsible, that they are violently aggressive, that they are wildly sexual, that they are inhuman animals—had become self-sustaining, pervasive, and habitual. So how do we overcome 350-year-long cultural habits? After nearly 250 years of slavery and 100 years of policies designed to replicate its effects, how can we who are white imagine that a few laws, inconsistently enforced, will have freed us from the officially endorsed myths that justified our pernicious institutions? After 350 years of brutally exploiting and suppressing black people, how can we overcome the habit of such mistreatment?
And how can we expect African Americans, whose grandparents and parents, uncles, aunts, and neighbors had for 350 years suffered enforced poverty, injustice, and oppression of every kind, to put aside their amply justified distrust, fear, anger, and outrage? How might those of us who are white react to such persistent discrimination and marginalization? To learning from one’s parents not to be too ambitious, that striving and excelling will draw unwanted attention? To constantly feeling the stress of being regarded as a lazy, violent, and ignorant “thug”? To being expected by the authorities, particularly the judicial system, to be aggressive? Might we not fight out of anger or run out of fear or escape through drugs?