racism

�ur founding ideals of liberty and equality were false when they were written. Black �mericans fought to make them true. �ithout this struggle, �merica would have no democracy at all.

By Nikole Hannah-Jones

�rtwork by Adam Pendleton

�ugust 18, 2019

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My dad always fl ew an American fl ag in our front yard. The blue paint on our two- story house was perennially chipping; the fence, or the rail by the stairs, or the front door, existed in a perpetual state of disrepair, but that fl ag always fl ew pristine. Our corner lot, which had been redlined by the federal gov- ernment, was along the river that divided the black side from the white side of our Iowa town. At the edge of our lawn, high on an alu- minum pole, soared the fl ag, which my dad would replace as soon as it showed the slightest tatter.

My dad was born into a family of sharecroppers on a white plan- tation in Greenwood, Miss., where black people bent over cotton from can’t- see- in- the- morning to can’t- see- at- night, just as their enslaved ancestors had done not long before. The Mississippi of my dad’s youth was an apartheid state that subju- gated its near- majority black pop- ulation through breathtaking acts of violence. White residents in Mis- sissippi lynched more black people than those in any other state in the country, and the white people in my dad’s home county lynched more black residents than those in any other county in Mississippi, often for such ‘‘crimes’’ as entering a room occupied by white women, bumping into a white girl or trying to start a sharecroppers union. My dad’s mother, like all the black peo- ple in Greenwood, could not vote, use the public library or fi nd work other than toiling in the cotton fi elds or toiling in white people’s houses. So in the 1940s, she packed up her few belongings and her three small children and joined the fl ood of black Southerners fl eeing North. She got o� the Illinois Central Rail- road in Waterloo, Iowa, only to have her hopes of the mythical Promised Land shattered when she learned that Jim Crow did not end at the Mason- Dixon line.

Grandmama, as we called her, found a house in a segregated black neighborhood on the city’s east side and then found the work that was considered black women’s work no matter where black women lived — cleaning white people’s houses. Dad, too, struggled to fi nd promise in this land. In 1962, at age 17, he

signed up for the Army. Like many young men, he joined in hopes of escaping poverty. But he went into the military for another reason as well, a reason common to black men: Dad hoped that if he served his country, his country might fi nal- ly treat him as an American.

The Army did not end up being his way out. He was passed over for opportunities, his ambition stunt- ed. He would be discharged under murky circumstances and then labor in a series of service jobs for the rest of his life. Like all the black men and women in my family, he believed in hard work, but like all the black men and women in my family, no matter how hard he worked, he never got ahead.

So when I was young, that fl ag outside our home never made sense to me. How could this black man, having seen fi rsthand the way his country abused black Americans, how it refused to treat us as full citi- zens, proudly fl y its banner? I didn’t understand his patriotism. It deeply embarrassed me.

I had been taught, in school, through cultural osmosis, that the fl ag wasn’t really ours, that our his- tory as a people began with enslave- ment and that we had contributed little to this great nation. It seemed that the closest thing black Amer- icans could have to cultural pride was to be found in our vague con- nection to Africa, a place we had never been. That my dad felt so much honor in being an American felt like a marker of his degradation, his acceptance of our subordination.

Like most young people, I thought I understood so much, when in fact I understood so little. My father knew exactly what he was doing when he raised that fl ag. He knew that our people’s contributions to build- ing the richest and most powerful nation in the world were indelible, that the United States simply would not exist without us.

In August 1619, just 12 years after the English settled Jamestown, Va., one year before the Puritans land- ed at Plymouth Rock and some 157 years before the English colonists even decided they wanted to form their own country, the Jamestown colonists bought 20 to 30 enslaved Africans from English pirates. The

pirates had stolen them from a Por- tuguese slave ship that had forcibly taken them from what is now the country of Angola. Those men and women who came ashore on that August day were the beginning of American slavery. They were among the 12.5 million Africans who would be kidnapped from their homes and brought in chains across the Atlantic Ocean in the largest forced migra- tion in human history until the Sec- ond World War. Almost two million did not survive the grueling journey, known as the Middle Passage.

Before the abolishment of the international slave trade, 400,000 enslaved Africans would be sold into America. Those individuals and their descendants transformed the lands to which they’d been brought into some of the most successful colonies in the British Empire. Through back- breaking labor, they cleared the land across the Southeast. They taught the colonists to grow rice. They grew and picked the cotton that at the height of slavery was the nation’s most valuable commodity, account- ing for half of all American exports and 66 percent of the world’s supply. They built the plantations of George Washington, Thomas Je� erson and James Madison, sprawling proper- ties that today attract thousands of visitors from across the globe cap- tivated by the history of the world’s greatest democracy. They laid the foundations of the White House and the Capitol, even placing with their unfree hands the Statue of Freedom atop the Capitol dome. They lugged the heavy wooden tracks of the rail- roads that crisscrossed the South and that helped take the cotton they picked to the Northern textile mills, fueling the Industrial Revo- lution. They built vast fortunes for white people North and South — at one time, the second- richest man in the nation was a Rhode Island ‘‘slave trader.’’ Profi ts from black people’s stolen labor helped the young nation pay o� its war debts and fi nanced some of our most prestigious uni- versities. It was the relentless buy- ing, selling, insuring and fi nancing of their bodies and the products of their labor that made Wall Street a thriving banking, insurance and trading sector and New York City the fi nancial capital of the world.

But it would be historically inac- curate to reduce the contributions of black people to the vast materi- al wealth created by our bondage. Black Americans have also been, and continue to be, foundational to the idea of American freedom. More than any other group in this country’s history, we have served, generation after generation, in an overlooked but vital role: It is we who have been the perfecters of this democracy.

The United States is a nation founded on both an ideal and a lie. Our Declaration of Independence, signed on July 4, 1776, proclaims that ‘‘all men are created equal’’ and ‘‘endowed by their Creator with cer- tain unalienable rights.’’ But the white men who drafted those words did not believe them to be true for the hun- dreds of thousands of black people in their midst. ‘‘Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness’’ did not apply to fully one-fi fth of the country. Yet despite being violently denied the freedom and justice promised to all, black Americans believed fervently in the American creed. Through cen- turies of black resistance and protest, we have helped the country live up to its founding ideals. And not only for ourselves — black rights strug- gles paved the way for every other rights struggle, including women’s and gay rights, immigrant and dis- ability rights.

Without the idealistic, strenuous and patriotic e� orts of black Amer- icans, our democracy today would most likely look very di� erent — it might not be a democracy at all.

The very fi rst person to die for this country in the American Revo- lution was a black man who himself was not free. Crispus Attucks was a fugitive from slavery, yet he gave his life for a new nation in which his own people would not enjoy the liberties laid out in the Declaration for another century. In every war this nation has waged since that fi rst one, black Americans have fought — today we are the most likely of all racial groups to serve in the United States military.

My father, one of those many black Americans who answered the call, knew what it would take me years to understand: that the year 1619 is as important to the American

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story as 1776. That black Americans, as much as those men cast in alabas- ter in the nation’s capital, are this nation’s true ‘‘founding fathers.’’ And that no people has a greater claim to that fl ag than us.

In June 1776, Thomas Je� erson sat at his portable writing desk in a rented room in Philadelphia and penned these words: ‘‘We hold these truths to be self- evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.’’ For the last 243 years, this fi erce assertion of the fundamental and natural rights of humankind to freedom and self- governance has defi ned

our global reputation as a land of liberty. As Je� erson composed his inspiring words, however, a teenage boy who would enjoy none of those rights and liberties waited nearby to serve at his master’s beck and call. His name was Robert Hemings, and he was the half brother of Je� erson’s wife, born to Martha Je� erson’s father and a woman he owned. It was common for white enslavers to keep their half-black children in slavery. Je� erson had chosen Hemings, from among about 130 enslaved people that worked on the forced- labor camp he called Monti- cello, to accompany him to Philadel- phia and ensure his every comfort as he drafted the text making the case for a new democratic republic based on the individual rights of men.

At the time, one-fi fth of the pop- ulation within the 13 colonies strug- gled under a brutal system of slavery unlike anything that had existed in the world before. Chattel slavery was not conditional but racial. It was heritable and permanent, not temporary, meaning generations of black people were born into it and passed their enslaved status onto their children. Enslaved peo- ple were not recognized as human beings but as property that could be mortgaged, traded, bought, sold, used as collateral, given as a gift and disposed of violently. Je� erson’s fel- low white colonists knew that black people were human beings, but they created a network of laws and customs, astounding for both their precision and cruelty, that ensured

that enslaved people would never be treated as such. As the abolition- ist William Goodell wrote in 1853, ‘‘If any thing founded on falsehood might be called a science, we might add the system of American slavery to the list of the strict sciences.’’

Enslaved people could not legal- ly marry. They were barred from learning to read and restricted from meeting privately in groups. They had no claim to their own chil- dren, who could be bought, sold and traded away from them on auction blocks alongside furniture and cattle or behind storefronts that advertised ‘‘Negroes for Sale.’’ Enslavers and the courts did not honor kinship ties to mothers, siblings, cousins. In most courts, they had no legal standing. Enslavers could rape or murder their

An 1872 portrait of African-Americans serving in Congress (from left): Hiram Revels, the first black man elected to the Senate; Benjamin S. Turner; Robert C. De Large; Josiah T. Walls; Jefferson H. Long; Joseph H. Rainy; and R. Brown Elliot.

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property without legal consequence. Enslaved people could own nothing, will nothing and inherit nothing. They were legally tortured, includ- ing by those working for Je� erson himself. They could be worked to death, and often were, in order to produce the highest profi ts for the white people who owned them.

Yet in making the argument against Britain’s tyranny, one of the colonists’ favorite rhetorical devic- es was to claim that they were the slaves — to Britain. For this duplic- ity, they faced burning criticism both at home and abroad. As Sam- uel Johnson, an English writer and Tory opposed to American inde- pendence, quipped, ‘‘How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?’’

Conveniently left out of our founding mythology 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. By 1776, Britain had grown deeply confl icted over its role in the barbaric institution that had reshaped the Western Hemi- sphere. In London, there were grow- ing calls to abolish the slave trade. This would have upended the econo- my of the colonies, in both the North and the South. The wealth and prom- inence that allowed Je� erson, at just 33, and the other founding fathers to believe they could successfully break o� from one of the mightiest empires in the world came from the dizzying profi ts generated by chat- tel slavery. In other words, we may never have revolted against Britain if the founders had not understood that slavery empowered them to do so; nor if they had not believed that independence was required in order

to ensure that slavery would con- tinue. It is not incidental that 10 of this nation’s fi rst 12 presidents were enslavers, and some might argue that this nation was founded not as a democracy but as a slavocracy.

Je� erson and the other founders were keenly aware of this hypoc- risy. And so in Je� erson’s original draft of the Declaration of Inde- pendence, he tried to argue that it wasn’t the colonists’ fault. Instead, he blamed the king of England for forcing the institution of slavery on the unwilling colonists and called the tra� cking in human beings a crime. Yet neither Je� erson nor most of the founders intended to abolish slavery, and in the end, they struck the passage.

There is no mention of slavery in the fi nal Declaration of Inde- pendence. Similarly, 11 years later, when it came time to draft the

Constitution, the framers careful- ly constructed a document that preserved and protected slavery without ever using the word. In the texts in which they were making the case for freedom to the world, they did not want to explicitly enshrine their hypocrisy, so they sought to hide it. The Constitution contains 84 clauses. Six deal directly with the enslaved and their enslavement, as the historian David Wald streicher has written, and fi ve more hold implications for slavery. The Con- stitution protected the ‘‘property’’ of those who enslaved black peo- ple, prohibited the federal govern- ment from intervening to end the importation of enslaved Africans for a term of 20 years, allowed Congress to mobilize the militia to put down insurrections by the enslaved and forced states that had outlawed slavery to turn over enslaved people

A postcard showing the scene at the murder of Allen Brooks, an African-American laborer who was accused of attempted rape. He was dragged through the streets around the Dallas County Courthouse and lynched on March 3, 1910. Postcards of lynchings were not uncommon in the early 20th century.

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be citizens, if they were a caste apart from all other humans, then they did not require the rights bestowed by the Constitution, and the ‘‘we’’ in the ‘‘We the People’’ was not a lie.

On Aug. 14, 1862, a mere fi ve years after the nation’s highest courts declared that no black person could

be an American citizen, President Abraham Lincoln called a group of fi ve esteemed free black men to the White House for a meeting. It was one of the few times that black people had ever been invited to the White House as guests. The Civil War had been raging for more than a year, and black abolitionists, who

had been increasingly pressuring Lincoln to end slavery, must have felt a sense of great anticipation and pride.

The war was not going well for Lincoln. Britain was contemplat- ing whether to intervene on the Confederacy’s behalf, and Lincoln, unable to draw enough new white

who had run away seeking refuge. Like many others, the writer and abolitionist Samuel Byron called out the deceit, saying of the Con- stitution, ‘‘The words are dark and ambiguous; such as no plain man of common sense would have used, [and] are evidently chosen to conceal from Europe, that in this enlightened country, the practice of slavery has its advocates among men in the highest stations.’’

With independence, the found- ing fathers could no longer blame slavery on Britain. The sin became this nation’s own, and so, too, the need to cleanse it. The shameful par- adox of continuing chattel slavery in a nation founded on individual freedom, scholars today assert, led to a hardening of the racial caste system. This ideology, reinforced not just by laws but by racist sci- ence and literature, maintained that black people were subhuman, a belief that allowed white Ameri- cans to live with their betrayal. By the early 1800s, according to the legal historians Leland B. Ware, Robert J. Cottrol and Raymond T. Diamond, white Americans, wheth- er they engaged in slavery or not, ‘‘had a considerable psychological as well as economic investment in the doctrine of black inferiority.’’ While liberty was the inalienable right of the people who would be considered white, enslavement and subjugation became the natural sta- tion of people who had any discern- ible drop of ‘‘black’’ blood.

The Supreme Court enshrined this thinking in the law in its 1857 Dred Scott decision, ruling that black people, whether enslaved or free, came from a ‘‘slave’’ race. This made them inferior to white people and, therefore, incompatible with American democracy. Democracy was for citizens, and the ‘‘Negro race,’’ the court ruled, was ‘‘a sep- arate class of persons,’’ which the founders had ‘‘not regarded as a portion of the people or citizens of the Government’’ and had ‘‘no rights which a white man was bound to respect.’’ This belief, that black peo- ple were not merely enslaved but were a slave race, became the root of the endemic racism that we still cannot purge from this nation to this day. If black people could not ever

Isaac Woodard and his mother in South Carolina in 1946. In February that year, Woodard, a decorated Army veteran, was severely beaten by the police, leaving him blind.

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volunteers for the war, was forced to reconsider his opposition to allowing black Americans to fi ght for their own liberation. The presi- dent was weighing a proclamation that threatened to emancipate all enslaved people in the states that had seceded from the Union if the states did not end the rebellion. The proclamation would also allow the formerly enslaved to join the Union army and fi ght against their former ‘‘masters.’’ But Lincoln wor- ried about what the consequences of this radical step would be. Like many white Americans, he opposed slavery as a cruel system at odds with American ideals, but he also opposed black equality. He believed that free black people were a ‘‘trou- blesome presence’’ incompatible with a democracy intended only for white people. ‘‘Free them, and make them politically and socially our equals?’’ he had said four years earlier. ‘‘My own feelings will not admit of this; and if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of white people will not.’’

That August day, as the men arrived at the White House, they were greeted by the towering Lincoln and a man named James Mitchell, who eight days before had been given the title of a newly creat- ed position called the commission- er of emigration. This was to be his fi rst assignment. After exchanging a few niceties, Lincoln got right to it. He informed his guests that he had gotten Congress to appropri- ate funds to ship black people, once freed, to another country.

‘‘Why should they leave this country? This is, perhaps, the fi rst question for proper consideration,’’ Lincoln told them. ‘‘You and we are di� erent races. . . . Your race su� er very greatly, many of them, by liv- ing among us, while ours su� er from your presence. In a word, we su� er on each side.’’

You can imagine the heavy silence in that room, as the weight of what the president said momen- tarily stole the breath of these fi ve black men. It was 243 years to the month since the fi rst of their

ancestors had arrived on these shores, before Lincoln’s family, long before most of the white peo- ple insisting that this was not their country. The Union had not entered the war to end slavery but to keep the South from splitting o� , yet black men had signed up to fi ght. Enslaved people were fl eeing their forced- labor camps, which we like to call plantations, trying to join the e� ort, serving as spies, sabotaging confederates, taking up arms for his cause as well as their own. And now Lincoln was blaming them for the war. ‘‘Although many men engaged on either side do not care for you one way or the other . . . without the institution of slavery and the col- ored race as a basis, the war could not have an existence,’’ the presi- dent told them. ‘‘It is better for us both, therefore, to be separated.’’

As Lincoln closed the remarks, Edward Thomas, the delegation’s chairman, informed the president, perhaps curtly, that they would con- sult on his proposition. ‘‘Take your full time,’’ Lincoln said. ‘‘No hurry at all.’’

A demonstrator at the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, led by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to fight for black suffrage.

Nearly three years after that White House meeting, Gen. Rob- ert E. Lee surrendered at Appomat- tox. By summer, the Civil War was over, and four million black Amer- icans were suddenly free. Contrary to Lincoln’s view, most were not inclined to leave, agreeing with the sentiment of a resolution against black colonization put forward at a convention of black leaders in New York some decades before: ‘‘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.’’

That the formerly enslaved did not take up Lincoln’s o� er to aban- don these lands is an astounding tes- tament to their belief in this nation’s founding ideals. As W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, ‘‘Few men ever worshiped Freedom with half such unquestion- ing faith as did the American Negro for two centuries.’’ Black Americans had long called for universal equal- ity and believed, as the abolitionist Martin Delany said, ‘‘that God has made of one blood all the nations that dwell on the face of the earth.’’ Liberated by war, then, they did not seek vengeance on their oppres- sors as Lincoln and so many other white Americans feared. They did the opposite. During this nation’s brief period of Reconstruction, from 1865 to 1877, formerly enslaved people zealously engaged with the democratic process. With federal troops tempering widespread white violence, black Southerners started branches of the Equal Rights League — one of the nation’s fi rst human rights organizations — to fi ght dis- crimination and organize voters; they headed in droves to the polls, where they placed other formerly enslaved people into seats that their enslavers had once held. The South, for the fi rst time in the history of this country, began to resemble a democracy, with black Americans elected to local, state and federal o� ces. Some 16 black men served in Congress — including Hiram Rev- els of Mississippi, who became the fi rst black man elected to the Senate. (Demonstrating just how brief this period would be, Revels, along with Blanche Bruce, would go from being the fi rst black man elected to the last for nearly a hundred years, until

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Edward Brooke of Massachusetts took o� ce in 1967.) More than 600 black men served in Southern state legislatures and hundreds more in local positions.

These black officials joined with white Republicans, some of whom came down from the North, to write the most egalitarian state constitutions the South had ever seen. They helped pass more equi- table tax legislation and laws that prohibited discrimination in pub- lic transportation, accommodation and housing. Perhaps their biggest achievement was the establishment of that most democratic of Ameri- can institutions: the public school. Public education e� ectively did not exist in the South before Recon- struction. The white elite sent their children to private schools, while poor white children went without an education. But newly freed black people, who had been prohibited from learning to read and write during slavery, were des- perate for an education. So black legislators successfully pushed for a universal, state- funded system of schools — not just for their own children but for white children, too. Black legislators also helped pass the fi rst compulsory educa- tion laws in the region. Southern children, black and white, were now required to attend schools like their Northern counterparts. Just fi ve years into Reconstruction, every Southern state had enshrined the right to a public education for all children into its constitution. In some states, like Louisiana and South Carolina, small numbers of black and white children, briefl y, attended schools together.

Led by black activists and a Republican Party pushed left by the blatant recalcitrance of white Southerners, the years directly after slavery saw the greatest expansion of human and civil rights this nation would ever see. In 1865, Congress passed the 13th Amendment, mak- ing the United States one of the last nations in the Americas to outlaw slavery. The following year, black Americans, exerting their new political power, pushed white leg- islators to pass the Civil Rights Act, the nation’s fi rst such law and one of the most expansive pieces of civil

rights legislation Congress has ever passed. It codifi ed black American citizenship for the fi rst time, pro- hibited housing discrimination and gave all Americans the right to buy and inherit property, make and enforce contracts and seek redress from courts. In 1868, Congress rati- fi ed the 14th Amendment, ensuring citizenship to any person born in the United States. Today, thanks to this amendment, every child born here to a European, Asian, African, Latin American or Middle Eastern immigrant gains automatic citizen- ship. The 14th Amendment also, for the fi rst time, constitutionally guaranteed equal protection under the law. Ever since, nearly all other marginalized groups have used the 14th Amendment in their fi ghts for equality (including the recent successful arguments before the Supreme Court on behalf of same- sex marriage). Finally, in 1870, Con- gress passed the 15th Amendment, guaranteeing the most critical aspect of democracy and citizen- ship — the right to vote — to all men regardless of ‘‘race, color, or previ- ous condition of servitude.’’

For this fl eeting moment known as Reconstruction, the majority in Congress seemed to embrace the idea that out of the ashes of the Civil War, we could create the multiracial democracy that black Americans envisioned even if our founding fathers did not.

But it would not last. Anti- black racism runs in the

very DNA of this country, as does the belief, so well articulated by Lincoln, that black people are the obstacle to national unity. The many gains of Reconstruction were met with fi erce white resistance throughout the South, including unthinkable violence against the formerly enslaved, wide-scale voter suppression, electoral fraud and even, in some extreme cases, the overthrow of democratically elect- ed biracial governments. Faced with this unrest, the federal government decided that black people were the cause of the problem and that for unity’s sake, it would leave the white South to its own devices. In 1877, President Rutherford B. Hayes, in order to secure a compromise with Southern Democrats that

would grant him the presidency in a contested election, agreed to pull federal troops from the South. With the troops gone, white South- erners quickly went about eradi- cating the gains of Reconstruction. The systemic white suppression of black life was so severe that this period between the 1880s and the 1920 and ’30s became known as the Great Nadir, or the second slavery. Democracy would not return to the South for nearly a century.

White Southerners of all econom- ic classes, on the other hand, thanks in signifi cant part to the progres- sive policies and laws black people had championed, experienced sub- stantial improvement in their lives even as they forced black people back into a quasi slavery. As Waters McIntosh, who had been enslaved in South Carolina, lamented, ‘‘It was the poor white man who was freed by the war, not the Negroes.’’

Georgia pines flew past the windows of the Greyhound bus carrying Isaac Woodard home to Winnsboro, S.C. After serving four years in the Army in World War II, where Woodard had earned a battle star, he was given an honorable discharge ear- lier that day at Camp Gordon and was headed home to meet his wife. When the bus stopped at a small drugstore an hour outside Atlanta, Woodard got into a brief argument with the white driver after asking if he could use the restroom. About half an hour later, the driver stopped again and told Woodard to get o� the bus. Crisp in his uniform, Wood- ard stepped from the stairs and saw the police waiting for him. Before he could speak, one of the o� cers struck him in his head with a billy club, beating him so badly that he fell unconscious. The blows to Woodard’s head were so severe that when he woke in a jail cell the next day, he could not see. The beating occurred just 4� hours after his military discharge. At 26, Woodard would never see again.

There was nothing unusual about Woodard’s horrifi c maiming. It was part of a wave of systemic violence deployed against black Americans after Reconstruction, in both the North and the South. As the egalitarian spirit of post- Civil

War America evaporated under the desire for national reunifi ca- tion, black Americans, simply by existing, served as a problematic reminder of this nation’s failings. White America dealt with this inconvenience by constructing a savagely enforced system of racial apartheid that excluded black people almost entirely from main- stream American life — a system so grotesque that Nazi Germany would later take inspiration from it for its own racist policies.

Despite the guarantees of equal- ity in the 14th Amendment, the Supreme Court’s landmark Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896 declared that the racial segregation of black Americans was constitutional. With the blessing of the nation’s highest court and no federal will to vindi- cate black rights, starting in the late 1800s, Southern states passed a series of laws and codes meant to make slavery’s racial caste system permanent by denying black people political power, social equality and basic dignity. They passed literacy tests to keep black people from vot- ing and created all-white primaries for elections. Black people were prohibited from serving on juries or testifying in court against a white person. South Carolina prohibited white and black textile workers from using the same doors. Okla- homa forced phone companies to segregate phone booths. Memphis had separate parking spaces for black and white drivers. Baltimore passed an ordinance outlawing black people from moving onto a block more than half white and white people from moving onto a block more than half black. Geor- gia made it illegal for black and white people to be buried next to one another in the same cemetery. Alabama barred black people from using public libraries that their own tax dollars were paying for. Black people were expected to jump o� the sidewalk to let white people pass and call all white people by an hon- orifi c, though they received none no matter how old they were. In the North, white politicians implement- ed policies that segregated black people into slum neighborhoods and into inferior all-black schools, operated whites- only public pools

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and held white and ‘‘colored’’ days at the country fair, and white busi- nesses regularly denied black peo- ple service, placing ‘‘Whites Only’’ signs in their windows. States like California joined Southern states in barring black people from marry- ing white people, while local school boards in Illinois and New Jersey mandated segregated schools for black and white children.

This caste system was maintained through wanton racial terrorism.

And black veterans like Woodard, especially those with the audacity to wear their uniform, had since the Civil War been the target of a particular violence. This intensifi ed during the two world wars because white people understood that once black men had gone abroad and experienced life outside the su� o- cating racial oppression of Amer- ica, they were unlikely to quietly return to their subjugation at home. As Senator James K. Vardaman of

Mississippi said on the Senate fl oor during World War I, black servicemen returning to the South would ‘‘inevitably lead to disaster.’’ Giving a black man ‘‘military airs’’ and sending him to defend the fl ag would bring him ‘‘to the conclu- sion that his political rights must be respected.’’

Many white Americans saw black men in the uniforms of America’s armed services not as patriotic but as exhibiting a dangerous pride.

Hundreds of black veterans were beaten, maimed, shot and lynched. 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 abroad while brutally suppressing democracy for millions of Ameri- can citizens. During the height of racial terror in this country, black Americans were not merely killed but castrated, burned alive and

Slavery leapt out of the East and into the interior lands of the Old Southwest in the 1820s and 1830s. Cotton began to soar as the most lucrative product in the global marketplace just as the slaveholding societies of the Southeast and Mid- Atlantic were reaching limits in soil fertili- ty. To land speculators, planters, ambitious settlers and Northern investors, the fertile lands to the west now looked irresistible.

The Native American nations that possessed the bulk of those lands stood in the way of this imagined progress. President Andrew Jackson, an enslaver from Tennessee famous for brutal ‘‘Indian’’ fighting in Georgia and Florida, swooped in on the side of fellow enslavers, championing the Indian Removal Act of 1830. When Congress passed the bill by a breathtakingly slim margin, Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws and Seminoles in the South as well as Potawatomis, Wyandots, Odawas, Delawares, Shawnees and Senecas in the Midwest were relocated to an

uncharted space designated as Indian Territory (including present- day Oklahoma and Kan- sas). ‘‘Removal,’’ as the historian Claudio Saunt argues in a forth- coming book on the topic, was far too quiet a word to capture the violation of this mass ‘‘expulsion’’ of 80,000 people.

As new lands in the Old South- west were pried open, white enslavers back east realized that their most profitable export was no longer tobacco or rice. A complex interstate slave trade became an industry of its own. This extractive system, together with enslavers moving west with human property, resulted in the relocation of approximately one million enslaved black people to a new region. The entrenched practice of buying, selling, owning, renting and mortgag- ing humans stretched into the American West along with the white settler- colonial popula- tion that now occupied former indigenous lands.

Slaveholding settlers who had pushed into Texas from

the American South wanted to extend cotton agriculture and increase the numbers of white arrivals. ‘‘It was slavery that seemed to represent the soft underbelly of the Texas unrest,’’ the historian Steven Hahn asserts in ‘‘A Nation With- out Borders.’’ Armed conflict between American- identified enslavers and a Mexican state that outlawed slavery in 1829 was among the causes of the Mexican- American War, which won for the United States much of the Southwest and California.

Texas became the West’s cotton slavery stronghold, with enslaved black people making up 30 percent of the state’s population in 1860. ‘‘Indian Ter- ritory’’ also held a large popu- lation of enslaved black people. Mormons, too, kept scores of enslaved laborers in Utah. The small number of black people who arrived in California, New Mexico and Oregon before mid- century usually came as proper- ty. Even as most Western states banned slavery in their new

constitutions, individual enslav- ers held onto their property- in- people until the Civil War.

Enslaved men who had served in the Union Army were among the first wave of African- Americans to move west of their own free will. They served as soldiers, and together with wives and children they formed pocket communi- ties in Montana, Colorado, New Mexico and Texas. It is a painful paradox that the work of black soldiers centered on what the historian Quintard Taylor has called ‘‘settler protection’’ in his classic 1998 study of African- Americans in the West, ‘‘In Search of the Racial Frontier.’’ Even while bearing slavery’s scars, black men found themselves carrying out orders to secure white res- idents of Western towns, track down ‘‘outlaws’’ (many of whom were people of color), police the federally imposed boundaries of Indian reservations and quell labor strikes. ‘‘This small group of black men,’’ Taylor observes, ‘‘paid a dear price in their bid to earn the respect of the nation.’’

�hained �igration: How Slavery Made Its Way West

By Tiya Miles

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dismembered with their body parts displayed in storefronts. This vio- lence was meant to terrify and con- trol black people, but perhaps just as important, it served as a psycholog- ical balm for white supremacy: You would not treat human beings this way. The extremity of the violence was a symptom of the psychologi- cal mechanism necessary to absolve white Americans of their country’s original sin. To answer the ques- tion of how they could prize liberty abroad while simultaneously deny- ing liberty to an entire race back home, white Americans resorted to the same racist ideology that Je� er- son and the framers had used at the nation’s founding.

This ideology — that black people belonged to an inferior, subhuman

race — did not simply disappear once slavery ended. If the former- ly enslaved and their descendants became educated, if we thrived in the jobs white people did, if we excelled in the sciences and arts, then the entire justifi cation for how this nation allowed slavery would collapse. Free black people posed a danger to the country’s idea of itself as exceptional; we held up the mir- ror in which the nation preferred not to peer. And so the inhumanity visited on black people by every generation of white America justi- fi ed the inhumanity of the past.

Just as white Americans feared, World War II ignited what became black Americans’ second sustained e� ort to make democracy real. As the editorial board of the black

newspaper The Pittsburgh Courier wrote, ‘‘We wage a two- pronged attack against our enslavers at home and those abroad who will enslave us.’’ Woodard’s blinding is largely seen as one of the catalysts for the decades- long rebellion we have come to call the civil rights move- ment. But it is useful to pause and remember that this was the second mass movement for black civil rights, the fi rst being Reconstruction. As the centennial of slavery’s end neared, black people were still seeking the rights they had fought for and won after the Civil War: the right to be treated equally by public institutions, which was guaranteed in 1866 with the Civil Rights Act; the right to be treated as full citizens before the law, which was guaranteed in 1868

by the 14th Amendment; and the right to vote, which was guaranteed in 1870 by the 15th Amendment. In response to black demands for these rights, white Americans strung them from trees, beat them and dumped their bodies in muddy rivers, assas- sinated them in their front yards, fi rebombed them on buses, mauled them with dogs, peeled back their skin with fi re hoses and murdered their children with explosives set o� inside a church.

For the most part, black Amer- icans fought back alone. Yet we never fought only for ourselves. The bloody freedom struggles of the civil rights movement laid the foundation for every other mod- ern rights struggle. This nation’s white founders set up a decidedly

Ieshia Evans being detained by law enforcement officers at a Black Lives Matter protest in 2016 outside the headquarters of the Baton Rouge Police Department.

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undemocratic Constitution that excluded women, Native Ameri- cans and black people, and did not provide the vote or equality for most Americans. But the laws born out of black resistance guarantee the franchise for all and ban dis- crimination based not just on race but on gender, nationality, religion and ability. It was the civil rights movement that led to the passage of the Immigration and Nation- ality Act of 1965, which upended the racist immigration quota sys- tem intended to keep this country white. Because of black Americans, black and brown immigrants from across the globe are able to come to the United States and live in a coun- try in which legal discrimination is no longer allowed. It is a truly American irony that some Asian- Americans, among the groups able to immigrate to the United States because of the black civil rights struggle, are now suing universities to end programs designed to help the descendants of the enslaved.

No one cherishes freedom more than those who have not had it. And to this day, black Americans, more than any other group, embrace the democratic ideals of a common good. We are the most likely to support programs like universal health care and a higher minimum wage, and to oppose programs that harm the most vulnerable. For instance, black Americans su� er the most from violent crime, yet we are the most opposed to capital punishment. Our unemployment rate is nearly twice that of white Americans, yet we are still the most likely of all groups to say this nation should take in refugees.

The truth is that as much democ- racy as this nation has today, it has been borne on the backs of black resistance. Our founding fathers may not have actually believed in the ideals they espoused, but black people did. As one scholar, Joe R. Feagin, put it, ‘‘Enslaved African- Americans have been among the foremost freedom- fighters this country has produced.’’ For genera- tions, we have believed in this coun- try with a faith it did not deserve. Black people have seen the worst of America, yet, somehow, we still believe in its best.

They say our people were born on the water.

When it occurred, no one can say for certain. Perhaps it was in the second week, or the third, but surely by the fourth, when they had not seen their land or any land for so many days that they lost count. It was after fear had turned to despair, and despair to resigna- tion, and resignation to an abiding understanding. The teal eternity of the Atlantic Ocean had severed them so completely from what had once been their home that it was as if nothing had ever existed before, as if everything and everyone they cherished had simply vanished from the earth. They were no longer Mbundu or Akan or Fulani. These men and women from many di� er- ent nations, all shackled together in the su� ocating hull of the ship, they were one people now.

Just a few months earlier, they had families, and farms, and lives and dreams. They were free. They had names, of course, but their enslavers did not bother to record them. They had been made black by those people who believed that they were white, and where they were heading, black equaled ‘‘slave,’’ and slavery in America required turn- ing human beings into property by stripping them of every element that made them individuals. This process was called seasoning, in which people stolen from western and central Africa were forced, often through torture, to stop speak- ing their native tongues and practic- ing their native religions.

But as the sociologist Glenn Brac- ey wrote, ‘‘Out of the ashes of white denigration, we gave birth to our- selves.’’ For as much as white people tried to pretend, black people were not chattel. And so the process of seasoning, instead of erasing iden- tity, served an opposite purpose: In the void, we forged a new culture all our own.

Today, our very manner of speak- ing recalls the Creole languages that enslaved people innovated in order to communicate both with Afri- cans speaking various dialects and the English- speaking people who enslaved them. Our style of dress, the extra fl air, stems back to the desires of enslaved people — shorn

of all individuality — to exert their own identity. Enslaved people would wear their hat in a jaunty manner or knot their head scarves intricately. Today’s avant- garde nature of black hairstyles and fashion displays a vibrant refl ection of enslaved peo- ple’s determination to feel fully human through self- expression. The improvisational quality of black art and music comes from a culture that because of constant disruption could not cling to convention. Black nam- ing practices, so often impugned by mainstream society, are themselves an act of resistance. Our last names belong to the white people who once owned us. That is why the insistence of many black Americans, particular- ly those most marginalized, to give our children names that we create, that are neither European nor from Africa, a place we have never been, is an act of self- determination. When the world listens to quintessential American music, it is our voice they hear. The sorrow songs we sang in the fi elds to soothe our physical pain and fi nd hope in a freedom we did not expect to know until we died became American gospel. Amid the devastating violence and poverty of the Mississippi Delta, we birthed jazz and blues. And it was in the deeply impoverished and segre- gated neighborhoods where white Americans forced the descendants of the enslaved to live that teenag- ers too poor to buy instruments used old records to create a new music known as hip-hop.

Our speech and fashion and the drum of our music echoes Africa but is not African. Out of our unique iso- lation, both from our native cultures and from white America, we forged this nation’s most signifi cant origi- nal culture. In turn, ‘‘mainstream’’ society has coveted our style, our slang and our song, seeking to appropriate the one truly Ameri- can culture as its own. As Langston Hughes wrote in 1926, ‘‘They’ll see how beautiful I am/And be ashamed —/I, too, am America.’’

For centuries, white Ameri- cans have been trying to solve the ‘‘Negro problem.’’ They have ded- icated thousands of pages to this endeavor. It is common, still, to point to rates of black poverty, out- of- wedlock births, crime and college

attendance, as if these conditions in a country built on a racial caste sys- tem are not utterly predictable. But crucially, you cannot view those sta- tistics while ignoring another: that black people were enslaved here longer than we have been free.

At 43, I am part of the fi rst gen- eration of black Americans in the history of the United States to be born into a society in which black people had full rights of citizenship. Black people su� ered under slavery for 250 years; we have been legally ‘‘free’’ for just 50. Yet in that brief- est of spans, despite continuing to face rampant discrimination, and despite there never having been a genuine e� ort to redress the wrongs of slavery and the century of racial apartheid that followed, black Americans have made astounding progress, not only for ourselves but also for all Americans.

What if America understood, fi nally, in this 400th year, that we have never been the problem but the solution?

When I was a child — I must have been in fi fth or sixth grade — a teacher gave our class an assignment intended to celebrate the diversity of the great American melting pot. She instructed each of us to write a short report on our ancestral land and then draw that nation’s fl ag. As she turned to write the assignment on the board, the other black girl in class locked eyes with me. Slavery had erased any connection we had to an African country, and even if we tried to claim the whole continent, there was no ‘‘African’’ fl ag. It was hard enough being one of two black kids in the class, and this assignment would just be another reminder of the distance between the white kids and us. In the end, I walked over to the globe near my teacher’s desk, picked a random African country and claimed it as my own.

I wish, now, that I could go back to the younger me and tell her that her people’s ancestry started here, on these lands, and to boldly, proud- ly, draw the stars and those stripes of the American fl ag.

We 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.�