Part 1: Why are we still talking about slavery?

*This post is part of a three-part series. Click here to start from the beginning. Note that some posts in this series directly quote offensive racist language and they all describe upsetting historical realities that may be triggering to readers.

Part 1 | Introduction

In the mind of many Americans, slavery is a remnant of the distant past that has little bearing on today’s America. Unfortunately, the reality is that slavery was just the first of several systems of oppression — the end result being an America that was and still is unequal.

In 1619, a group of African people were kidnapped from their parents, brothers, sisters and children and loaded onto ships headed to the Americas, never to see their loved ones again — this was the beginning of two and a half centuries of enslavement in what would become the United States. For 250 years, enslaved Black people were tortured, raped and murdered at the hands of white landowners, for profit. It was common for Black families to be torn apart when children or spouses were sold to other plantation owners. Over many decades, extreme violence was used to drastically increase cotton production and therefore profit. This violence had few limits; for example, in order to whip pregnant female slaves, slaveholders dug holes in the ground for them to lay their stomachs in, so as not to disturb the babies (which were viewed as valuable property).

Despite being viewed by some Americans as a distant memory, slavery is, historically, very recent. The last living American who had been enslaved is believed to have died in the 1940s and children of some enslaved Americans are still alive today. Since the first enslaved African people were brought to America in 1619, far more of American history has passed with slavery than without it.

Slavery also created the foundation of white wealth in America — it was cotton picked by enslaved people that built the U.S. economy. By the time of the Civil War, raw cotton made up more than 60% of the value of all U.S. exports; previously, America had been a marginal player in the global economy. Slavery was so profitable for white Americans that it sprouted more millionaires per capita in the Mississippi River Valley than existed anywhere in the nation. Further, it enriched whites in the north and worldwide through cotton manufacturing, shipping, and financial institutions, which made significant investments in cotton plantations.

Slavery also allowed white slave owners to leverage their enslaved people as assets to further enrich themselves. An enslaved teenage boy (18–20 years old) was worth between $230,000 and $250,000 in today’s dollars to his owner; slave owners were able to leverage the people they owned to buy more land and more people. At the height of slavery, the combined value of the 4 million enslaved people to their slaveholders was more than $3.5 billion, making them the largest single financial asset in the entire U.S. economy, worth more than all manufacturing and railroads combined. Because of the enormous wealth it created, slavery grew rapidly. By the time of Thomas Jefferson, the U.S. had enslaved fully one fifth of its population. In some states, like South Carolina, more than 60% of people were enslaved.

In the case of many of history’s other atrocities such as the Holocaust, South African Apartheid, and Japanese Internment by the American government during WWII, victims or their descendents were later compensated financially for their trauma and loss. The economic power of today’s America was built on the backs of enslaved Black people — and although generations of white Americans benefited from this wealth creation, Black enslaved people and their descendents received nothing. While many of us learned in school that freed slaves were promised “40 acres and a mule,” the fact is that this promise went unfulfilled. Although Congress passed a bill setting aside 3 million acres of land for this purpose, President Andrew Johnson — who took office after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln — vetoed it.

The lack of compensation of former slaves in the form of land or money supported the rise of a new system of exploitation, sharecropping, an arrangement in which mostly Black tenants lived on and farmed white-owned land, in exchange for a share of their crops. This system was manipulated by white land owners to keep Black families severely indebted to them. Laws favoring landowners made it difficult or even illegal for sharecroppers to sell their crops to others besides their landlord and prevented sharecroppers from moving if they were indebted to their landlord.

President Johnson also granted amnesty to former Confederate soldiers and allowed southern states to form new governments — often led by former Confederate officials — which quickly enacted the black codes, oppressive laws meant to ensure continued free labor for white southerners. Because it was still legal to enslave anyone convicted of a crime, the codes appeared throughout the South as a legal way to put Black citizens back into servitude, take voting rights away, control where they lived and how they traveled, and ensure an ample supply of forced labor. In addition to vagrancy laws that criminalized being homeless or jobless, the black codes prevented Black people from breaking labor contracts and punished anyone who offered higher wages to Black workers already under contract. Black people who broke labor contracts were subjected to arrest, beating, and forced, unpaid labor, often for white planters. Convict leasing — a system in which southern states leased prisoners to private railways, mines and large plantations — entrapped thousands of Black people during the postwar era, subjecting them to inhumane and often deadly working conditions.

Decades earlier, the original southern police forces had arisen in the form of slave patrols, tasked with tracking down enslaved people who had escaped, and preventing slave revolts. These same all-white police and state militias, often made up of white supremacists and the Confederate army veterans who had fought to preserve slavery, enforced the black codes. Although 150 years have passed, police forces in every region of the country are still linked to white supremacist groups, and law enforcement officials have been tied to racist militant activities in more than a dozen states since 2000. The continued connections between law enforcement and white supremacists were brought to the forefront earlier this year, with the murder of a 25-year-old Black man, Ahmaud Arbery, by two white men in Georgia. Arbery was out for a run when the two men chased him down in their car and shot him, uttering a racial slur. The two men falsely told police that, suspecting Arbery of criminal activity, they followed him, and when they confronted him he violently attacked them. Police let the men go, and did not charge them until months later, in response to public outcry when a video of the murder surfaced. One of the murderers, Gregory McMichael, is a former Glynn County police officer and investigator with the local district attorney’s office.

Despite President Johnson vetoing 29 reconstruction bills, Congress was able to pass 15 bills over his veto, leading to a brief period of gains for formerly enslaved people in the south. Post-war legislative victories included the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery except as punishment for a crime, the Civil Rights Act, which bestowed full citizenship to African Americans, the 14th Amendment, which prohibited states from denying due process, the 15th Amendment, which ensured the right to vote was not denied on the basis of race, and the KKK Act, which declared interference with voting a federal offense. Federal troops were sent to the South during Reconstruction to limit local government interference with newly established rights for Black people. In 1867, at the start of Reconstruction, there were no Black men holding political office in the south. Three years later, 15% of all southern elected officials were Black. However, the victories of Reconstruction were short-lived. In 1877, to settle the results of the hotly contested presidential election, the Republicans agreed to remove federal troops from the South, thus ending Reconstruction and handing power back to local southern governments.

The backlash against Reconstruction came in the form of racial violence and terror. More than 4,000 African Americans were killed in lynchings between 1877 and 1950. In Newnan, Georgia, in 1899, at least 2,000 white people watched as a white mob mutilated and burned alive a Black man named Sam Hose, and then sold pieces of his organs and bones as souvenirs. In 1916, a white mob in Waco, Texas, tortured and lynched a mentally disabled 17-year-old Black boy named Jesse Washington in front of city hall, stripping, stabbing, beating, and mutilating him before burning him alive in front of 15,000 white spectators. Charred pieces of his body were dragged through town, and his fingers and fingernails were taken as keepsakes.

Public spectacle lynchings were most frequent in the South, but also occurred in Northern and Midwestern states as Black Americans migrated during the 20th century. In 1920, 10,000 white people attended the lynchings of three Black circus workers in Duluth, Minnesota. In Springfield, Missouri, in 1906, two Black men, Horace Dunn and Fred Coker, were hanged and shot to death for a crowd of 5,000 white people. Although these killings were widely attended and photographed, white people committed public spectacle lynchings with impunity.

The KKK was also born in the wake of the Civil War, originally as a private club for Confederate war veterans. By the end of WWI, it had grown greatly in popularity, with over 100,000 members and local chapters not only in the south, but throughout the north and midwest. In 1915, the film The Birth of a Nation, which portrayed the Klan as a sympathetic and heroic organization, and Black men as dangerous and violent, was hugely popular with American audiences, so much so that President Woodrow Wilson arranged for a private screening at the White House. The movie grossed $60 million but also faced backlash. The film’s Director used the First Amendment to justify his work, publishing a pamphlet titled “The Rise and Fall of Free Speech in America,” which warned that film’s power to educate and instruct the nation could be “muzzled by a petty and narrow-minded censorship.”

Sadly, white supremacy is not simply a remnant of the past. From 1989 to 1992, David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the KKK, served in the Louisiana House of Representatives. In 2017, white nationalists held the “Unite the Right” Rally in Charlottesville, VA to protest the removal of statues honoring the Confederacy. They marched chanting racist and anti-semitic slogans, carrying confederate and Nazi flags, and burning torches. One counter-protestor was killed when a self-identified white supremacist drove his car into the crowd. As of September 2020, the Department of Homeland Security considers white supremacists to be the deadliest domestic terror threat facing the U.S..

During the late 1800s, slavery was replaced by the oppressive Jim Crow system, not only in the south but nationwide. Public Parks were forbidden for African Americans; theaters and restaurants were segregated; Black people could not live in white neighborhoods or attend white schools. Segregation was enforced for public pools, phone booths, hospitals, asylums, jails, residential homes for the elderly, and more. Jim Crow was used as a means to limit Black citizenship, relegating Black workers to lower paying jobs and their children to underfunded schools. Black people were also expected to demonstrate subservience to whites at all times and there were severe consequences for not doing so. A Black person with a successful business might find his or her shop burned to the ground or a Black man who had a relationship with a white woman might be hanged in the middle of town.

A prime example of this was the 1921 Tulsa Massacre. Following WWI Tulsa was recognized for its affluent African American community of Greenwood, with a thriving business district known as “Black Wall Street.” On June 1, in response to a white woman’s false claim of assault by a local Black man, thousands of white citizens poured into Greenwood, looting and burning over 1,200 Black homes, along with businesses, churches and schools. Historians estimate the total death toll to have been as high as 300. It is also estimated that white rioters destroyed $200 million in Black property in today’s dollars. None of these criminal acts was or has ever been prosecuted.

From the late 1800s through the 1970s, there were also thousands of “sundown towns” nationwide. These were white-only towns where Black people were not welcome, and could encounter deadly violence, especially if they found themselves there after sunset. As a result, travel for Black individuals and families was particularly dangerous, leading to the creation of The Negro Motorist Green Book, published from 1936 until 1966, detailing the few hotels, shops, restaurants and gas stations that were safe for Black travelers. The book was circulated widely, used by 2 million people in 1962 alone. If you think racism largely disappeared with the Civil Rights Movement, consider that the number of sundown towns in the U.S. didn’t reach its peak of approximately 10,000 until 1970. To put that number in context, there are fewer than 20,000 incorporated places (cities, towns, etc.) in the United States as of the 2010 census.

In 1955, Emmett Till, a 14-year old Black boy, was beaten and murdered in Mississippi after a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, accused him of flirting with her in a grocery store. After the incident in the store, the woman’s husband and his brother abducted the boy, beat and mutilated him, tied a cotton gin fan around his neck, and sunk his body in the Tallahatchie River. His body was discovered three days later. The two white men who kidnapped and killed Emmett Till were exonerated by an all-white jury, though they later publicly admitted to committing the murder. In 2017, Bryant admitted that she had lied about the interaction. Had he not been murdered, Emmett Till would have been 79 years old as of this writing.

For many, an incident in Central Park earlier this year brought to mind the murder of Emmett Till and the Tulsa Race Massacre, two incidents wherein the false testimony of a white woman motivated extreme violence against Black people. In early July, a black man, Christian Cooper, while birdwatching in Central Park, saw a white woman with her dog off leash, which was against the park’s rules. Cooper used his phone to record the encounter that ensued. In the video he calmly asked the woman to put her dog on a leash; she called police and falsely claimed, sobbing fake hysterical tears, that an “African American man” was threatening her life, as Cooper stood several feet away calmly recording the incident (video). Luckily for Cooper, he had video evidence in hand to counter the woman’s claim that he had been threatening her life; we can’t know what might have happened to him if he hadn’t. The same day, a few states away, another unarmed Black man, George Floyd, was killed at the hands of police.

Part 1 | Materials (1.5 hours)

• Listen: 1619 Episode 1 (here) (44 min)
• Listen: 1619 Episode 2 (here) (33 min)
• Read: The Roots of Route 66 (here) (10 min)
• Read: ‘This invokes a history of terror’: Central Park incident between white woman and black man is part of a fraught legacy (here) (5 min)

Part 1 | Reflection Questions

• How do the details presented here compare to the stories you grew up hearing about the origins of slavery and its modern day impacts? What surprised you? What do you want to know more about?
• What emotions did you feel when reading these materials? What most stuck out to you and why?
• What is national memory? How do we create it? How can we change it? What is the role of journalism and education in shaping national memory?
• A survey in late 2019 found that only half of white Americans said they believe the history of slavery continues to impact Black Americans “a great deal” while 83% of Black respondents said slavery still deeply affects them. What might account for that difference?
• In Episode of 1619, Journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones spends time with her Great-Aunt Charlotte, who grew up in the Jim Crow south. Jones’ father grew up on a sharecropping farm in Mississippi. There are children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of enslaved people who are still alive in America today. How do you think the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow continues to impact Black families?

This narrative relies heavily on research by Michelle Alexander in her book The New Jim Crow. If you would like to learn more about the drug war and mass incarceration, you can purchase the book here or from one of these Black-owned bookstores.