Top Quotes: “The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story” — Nikole Hannah-Jones

Introduction

“African people had lived here, on the land that in 1776 would form the United States, since the White Lion dropped anchor in the year 1619. They’d arrived one year before the iconic ship carrying the Enplish people who got the credit for building it all.

Why hadn’t any teacher or textbook, in telling the story of Jamestown, taught us the story of 1619? No history can ever be complete, of course. Millions of moments, thousands of dates weave the tapestry of a country’s past. But I knew immediately, viscerally, that this was not an innocuous omission. The year white Virginians first purchased enslaved Africans, the start of American slavery, an institution so influential and corrosive that it both helped create the nation and nearly led to its demise, is indisputably a foundational historical date. And yet I’d never heard of it before.”

“One of the reasons American children so poorly understand the history and legacy of slavery is because the adults charged with teaching them don’t know it very well, either. A 2019 Washington Post-SSRS poll found that only about half of American adults realize that all thirteen colonies engaged in slavery. Even educators struggle with basic facts of history, the SPLC report found: only about half of U.S. teachers understand that enslavers dominated the presidency in the decades after the founding and would dominate the U.S. Supreme Court and the U.S. Senate until the Civil War.””

“On Sunday, August 18, the day we published the magazine in print, tweets and Instagram posts and videos began popping up all over the country. People were telling stories of going to store after store in search of it only to find all the copies of the Sunday New York Times sold out. A man in North Carolina posted a video of himself looking giddy, his fingers wrapped around the magazine, saying he’d driven miles but he’d finally snagged a copy. Parents stashed copies away to pass on to their children. Incarcerated people wrote to me, seeking the issue. Over the coming weeks, readers started holding 1619 reading clubs, and the #1619 hashtag on Instagram showed teachers decorating their classrooms with 1619 Project art and families baking 1619 Project cookies. Across the country, at libraries, museums, cultural centers, and schools, people gathered to talk about the 1619 Project and slavery’s impact on America. Then-U.S. Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer spoke about the project in the Capitol Visitor Center’s Emancipation Hall. He related a story I told in my opening essay about my father and the American flag. In the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, Democrats seeking the nomination mentioned the project in their speeches.

Educators in all fifty states began teaching a curriculum based on the project, and I met hundreds of high school students who, somewhat breathlessly, recounted the same off-kilter sense of exhilaration while reading the 1619 Project that I had felt reading Before the Mayflower. Black students, especially, told me that for the first time in their lives, they’d experienced a feeling usually reserved for white Americans: a sense of ownership of, belonging in, and influence over the American story. Arterah Griggs, who attended a public high school in Chicago, the first district in the country to make the project part of its curriculum, told a reporter from the Chicago Sun Times what the project helped her realize:

“We were the founding fathers. We put so much into the U.S. and we made the foundation.” Another student, Brenton Sykes, said,

“Now that I’m aware of the full history of America without it being whitewashed or anything, it kind of makes me see things in a different light. I feel like I have to carry myself better because I know what my ancestors went through.””

“”Conveniently left out of our founding mythology,” that paragraph began, 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.”

“8 in 10 black people would not be in the US were it not for the institution of slavery in a society founded on the ideals of freedom.”

“Before the abolition of the international slave trade, more than 400,000 of those 12 million enslaved Africans transported into the Americas would be sold into [the US].”

The Colonies

“Over the last two and a half centuries, [the Declaration of Independence’s] fierce assertion of the fundamental and natural rights of humankind to freedom and self-governance has defined our global reputation as a land of liberty. As Jefferson 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-Black brother of Jefferson’s wife, Martha, born to her father and a woman he enslaved. It was common and profitable for white enslavers to keep their half-Black children in slavery. Jefferson, who would later hold in slavery his own children by Hemings’s sister Sally, had chosen Robert Hemings, from among about 130 enslaved people who worked on the forced-labor camp he called Monticello, to accompany him to Philadelphia and ensure his every comfort as he drafted the text making the case for a new republican union based on the individual rights of men.”

“The wealthy, educated men who led the revolt against Britain needed to unify the disparate colonists across social class and region. For those leaders, the comparison to slavery constituted a powerful rhetorical tool. “The Crisis is arrived when we must assert our Rights, or Submit to every Imposition that can be heap’d upon us; till custom and use, will make us as tame, & abject Slaves, as the Blacks we Rule over with such arbitrary Sway.” Washington warned in an August 1774 letter to his friend and neighbor Bryan Fairfax.

It was precisely because white colonists so well understood the degradations of actual slavery that the metaphor of slavery held so much power to consolidate their disparate interests: no matter a colonist’s politics, background, or class, by being white, he could never fall as low as the Black people who were held in bondage.

As the scholar Patricia Bradley puts it in Slavery, Propaganda, and the American Revolution, “Once transposed into metaphor, slavery could serve to unite white colonists of whatever region under a banner of white exclusivity.” The decision to deploy slavery as a metaphor for white grievances had devastating consequences for those who were actually enslaved: it helped ensure that abolition would not become a revolutionary cause, Bradley argues. Instead, the true institution of slavery would endure for nearly a century after the Revolution.”

“Their resentment had already been stoked by a British high court ruling about slavery three years earlier. In 1772, the court decided the case of James Somerset, an enslaved man from Virginia, who claimed freedom when his owner brought him to Britain. The British judge decided in Somerset’s favor, proclaiming that British common law did not allow slavery on the soil of the mother country — even as Britain was investing in it and profiting from it in her Caribbean and North American colonies.

Though limited, the Somerset ruling sent reverberations through the colonies, where newspapers reported it widely. “Although the ruling did not apply there, colonial masters felt shocked by the implication that their property system defied English traditions of liberty,” the historian Alan Taylor writes in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772–1832. The colonists took the ruling as an insult, as signaling that they were of inferior status, and feared that it would encourage their most valuable property to stow away to Britain seeking freedom.

In early 1775, James Madison, who operated a slave-labor camp in Orange County, Virginia, reported hearing a rumor that British Parliament had introduced a bill to emancipate the colonies’ enslaved. In addition, a report from the Virginia House of Burgesses accused British officials of contemplating a “most diabolical” scheme to “offer Freedom to our Slaves, and turn them against their Masters.” Both further enflamed colonists already worried about the British encroaching on their “property” rights.

At first, founders such as Jefferson, Washington, John Hancock, and John Adams had constituted “restorers and not reformers,” Holton told me. “There is a huge difference between being angry and joining a protest and wanting to declare independence. Two events in 1775 turn the rebellion into a revolution. For men like John Adams, it was the battles of Lexington and Concord. For men like Washington, Jefferson, and Madison, the Dunmore Proclamation ignited the turn to independence.”

Virginia’s slaveholding elite had grown paranoid. Fears of enslaved people plotting and executing revolts ran rampant, and an alliance between the British and the enslaved men and women who the white colonists already feared would seek every opportunity to slit their throats proved too much. White Virginians morphed from “restorers” to revolutionaries. “If we never had slavery, that takes away many of the things that push the South to independence,” Holton told me, “I think they would have done what other British colonies did, which was stay in the empire.” The specter of their most valuable property absconding to take up arms against them “did more than any other British measure to spur uncommitted white Americans into the camp of rebellion,” wrote the historian Gerald Horne in The Counter-Revolution of 1776.

And yet none of this is part of our founding mythology.”

“Having justified a bloody revolution on the grounds of a national belief in human freedom, Americans call their history a freedom story,” the historian James Oliver Horton writes in Slavery and Public History. “For a nation steeped in this self-image, it is embarrassing, guilt-producing, and disillusioning to consider the role that race and slavery played in shaping the national narrative.”

To address these discomfiting facts, we have created a founding mythology that teaches us to think of the “free” and “abolitionist” North as the heart of the American Revolution. Schoolchildren learn that the Boston Tea Party sparked the Revolution and that Philadelphia was home to the Continental Congress, the place where intrepid men penned the Declaration and Constitution. But while our nation’s founding documents were written in Philadelphia, they were mainly written by Virginians.

White sons of Virginia initiated the drafting of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. The primary authors were all enslavers. For the first fifty years of our nation, Southerners served as president for all but twelve years, and most of them were Virginians. No place shaped the Revolution and the country it birthed more than Virginia. And no place in the thirteen colonies was as strongly shaped by slavery. At the time of the Revolution, Virginia stood as the oldest, largest, wealthiest, and most influential of the colonies. It was Virginia that introduced African slavery into British North America, just twelve years after the first English settlers arrived.”

“The founders were deeply conflicted over slavery. So when it came time to draft the Constitution, the framers carefully constructed a document that preserved and protected slavery without ever using the word. In the key texts for framing our republic, the founders did not want to explicitly acknowledge their hypocrisy. They sought instead to shroud it. The Constitution contains eighty-four clauses. Six deal directly with the enslaved and their enslavement, as the historian David Waldstreicher demonstrates, and five more hold implications for slavery. The Constitution protected the “property” of those who enslaved Black people, prohibited the federal government from intervening to end the importation of enslaved people from Africa for a term of twenty 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 who had escaped and sought refuge there.”

The Civil War

“Civil War had been raging for more than a year, and Black abolitionists had been pressuring Lincoln to end slavery. Entering the White House, these men must have felt a sense of great anticipation and pride.

The war was not going well for Lincoln. Britain was weighing whether to intervene on the side of the Confederacy, and the Union struggled to recruit enough new white volunteers. Meanwhile, enslaved people were fleeing their forced-labor camps, serving as spies, sabotaging Confederate installations, and pleading to take up arms for the Union cause as well as their own. Inspired by Black Americans’ self-emancipation, the president decided he was going to issue a proclamation to emancipate all enslaved people in the Confederate states as a tactic to deprive the Confederacy of its labor force.”

“After exchanging a few niceties, Lincoln informed his guests that Congress had appropriated funds — some $600,000- to ship Black people, once freed, to another country. “Why should they leave this country? This is, perhaps, the first question for proper consideration,” Lincoln told his visitors. “You and we are different races…. Your race suffers very greatly, many of them, by living among us, while ours suffer from your presence. In a word, we suffer on each side.””

“An astounding 78 percent of free Black military-age men living in free states would serve in the Union army, even as they faced greater risk than white soldiers.”

“The president had been deeply moved by the valor of the Black men who’d helped save the Union and had been influenced by Black men such as Douglass, whom he held in high esteem. Though the first version of his Emancipation Proclamation advocated colonization, by the end of the Civil War, Lincoln had abandoned these efforts and advocated for the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery. In his final speech before his assassination, Lincoln expressed an openness to enfranchising a limited number of Black men — particularly educated men and those who’d fought in the war.

“That last speech calling for partial inclusion of Black Americans, that’s an evolution, and among the many tragedies of Lincoln’s death is that he did change so much in such a short period of time,” Bonner said. “Still, the final stage of Lincoln is still a person who only believes in partial Black inclusion and who is only advocating for inclusion of certain Black people on certain terms. It’s valid to expect that he would have continued to evolve, but what we do know is that in the unfortunately short period of his presidency, Lincoln wasn’t an advocate for full equality.””

Reconstruction

“Through speeches, pamphlets, conferences, direct lobbying, and newspaper editorials, Black Americans pushed an all-white Congress to enshrine equality into the Constitution, powerfully shaping what the country would be like after its second founding. Once the Constitution had been “shorn of its proslavery features” with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, the historian Eric Foner writes, Black people moved to recast it to reflect the liberatory assertions of the Declaration of Independence, a document they had long admired and looked to for inspiration.

Within months of slavery’s end, in fall of 1865, a Black newspaper called the New Orleans Tribune put forth a radical plan for an America that had been purged by fire. The paper called for suffrage for Black men, equality before the law, the redistribution of land from the former labor camps to the formerly enslaved, and equal access to schools and transportation. The plan advocated that the Constitution be amended to prohibit states from making “any distinction in civil rights and privileges” based on race.

Black activists like Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Martin Delany, Douglass, and Mary Ann Shadd Cary, as well as a small group called the Radical Republicans — rare white men such as Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner who truly believed in Black equality — viewed Reconstruction as “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to purge the republic of the legacy of slavery. “ Thanks to their efforts, the years directly after slavery saw the greatest expansion of human and civil rights ever witnessed in this nation. A year after Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment, outlawing slavery, Black Americans, exerting their new political power, lobbied white legislators to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the nation’s first such law and one of the greatest pieces of civil rights legislation in American history. The law codified Black American citizenship for the first time, prohibited housing discrimination, and provided all Americans the legal right to buy and inherit property, make and enforce contracts, and seek redress from courts.

In 1868, Congress ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, ensuring citizenship to Black Americans and all people born in the United States.”

“Black men served in Congress — including Hiram Revels of Mississippi, who became the first Black man elected to the U.S. Senate in 1870. (Demonstrating just how brief this period would be, Revels and Blanche Bruce, who was elected four years later, would go from being the first Black men elected to the last for nearly a hundred years, until Edward Brooke of Massachusetts took office in 1967.) More than six hundred 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 and believed that abolition would also expand the rights of white Americans, to write the most egalitarian state constitutions the South had ever seen. They helped pass more equitable tax legislation and laws that prohibited discrimination in public transportation, accommodations, and housing. Perhaps their biggest achievement was the establishment of that most democratic of American institutions: the public school.

Public education effectively did not exist in the South before Reconstruction. 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 desperate for an education, which they saw as integral to true liberty. 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 first compulsory education laws in the region. Southern children, Black and white, were now required to attend schools, the way their Northern counterparts did. Just five 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, briefly, attended schools together. Remarkably, in 1873 the University of South Carolina became the only state-sponsored college in the South to fully integrate, becoming majority Black — just like the state itself — by 1876. (When white former Confederates regained power a year later, they closed the university. After three years, they reopened it as an all-white institution; it would remain that way for nearly a century, until a court-ordered desegregation in 1963.”

“White Southerners of all economic classes, on the other hand, thanks in significant part to the progressive policies and laws Black people had championed, experienced substantial improvement in their lives even as they forced Black people back into 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.””

“Many white Southerners saw black men in the uniforms of the armed forces not as patriotic but as exhibiting a dangerous pride. Hundreds of black veterans were beaten, maimed, shot and lynched.”

Racial Classification

“When the couple asked if there was a way to apply without identifying a race, they were told that their only option was to select “Other.” “I didn’t want to pick ‘Other,’” Ramkishun would recall. “I’ve been having to pick ‘Other’ all my life. None of it defines who I am.” Because she and her fiancé refused to click on a race category, the computer system couldn’t process their license application. They could not get married without specifying their race.

This would have been true in any of Virginia’s ninety-five counties, all of which required applicants to identify their race in order to obtain a marriage license. In Rockbridge County, for example, applicants were required to choose a racial identification from a list of 230 terms that includes “Mulatto,” “Quadroon,” “Nubian,” and “Aryan.” And Virginia was not alone. Soon after they’d attempted to wed in Arlington County, Ramkishun landed a job in the state attorney’s office in Miami and the pair moved to Florida. Once there, they again applied for a marriage license.

To their surprise, the application in Miami-Dade County also included the race question. After Ramkishun called county officials to complain, however, the couple was able to print out the form and complete it without identifying themselves by race. Ramkis-hun and Sarfo wed in December 2019.

By that time, they had also decided to join two other couples in Virginia who had been denied marriage licenses for refusing to racially identify and filed a lawsuit challenging the state’s requirement in federal court. In late 2019, Judge Rossie D. Alston, Jr., handed down a decision: there was no compelling reason to maintain the racial-identification law, which burdened the plaintiffs’ fundamental right to marry and therefore violated the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Consti-tution.

In deciding for the plaintiffs, Judge Alston traced the racial-classifications requirement to a Virginia law passed in 1924 entitled “An Act to Preserve Racial Integrity.” This law required local and state registrars to keep certificates of “racial composition” for everyone born in the state and to require accurate “statements as to color of both man and woman” on applications for marriage licenses.” It also strictly prohibited interracial marriages.

In 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the act’s interracial marriage ban in its celebrated Loving v. Virginia decision, but it left intact the racial-classification system itself.”

“The bedrock of this statutory scheme was a network of laws passed in the colonial era governing sex and race. These laws, which created the racial-classification systems we still live with today, were primarily concerned with policing interracial sex. They maintained a clear line between who was Black and who was white, who was enslaved and who was free, by banning interracial intercourse and enforcing a rule of matrilineal descent: if a mother was Black and enslaved, so was her child. Though these laws were partly aimed at preventing miscegenation, they also incentivized the rape of Black women by their white enslavers, who could profit from their sexual assaults by enslaving any resulting children.”

Sexual Assault

“The only legal recourse existed when an enslaved woman was raped by a man other than her enslaver. In that case, the enslaver could sue the abuser for trespass to chattel, a civil violation of the enslaver’s property rights.”

“A 2020 study sampling the DNA of fifty thousand people — thirty thousand with African ancestry- reinforced the historical record. Spurred by Joanna ‘Mountain, the senior director of research at 23andMe, scientists used DNA in the company’s direct-to-consumer database to trace the ancestry of customers whose grandparents were born in one of the regions touched by the transatlantic slave trade. The researchers found that although a majority of the more than 12 million enslaved people who arrived in the Americas were men, enslaved women contributed more to the current gene pool. The genetic contribution of European men to the ancestry of African Americans is three times greater than that of European women. This means that enslaved men were more likely to die before they were able to have children and that enslaved women were often raped by white men and forced to bear their children.”

“Now that a white elite no longer profited from the child Black women bore, they painted Black women’s procreation as stealing money from white taxpayers.”

“A review of prosecutorial decisions in sexual-assault cases in Kansas City and Philadelphia discovered that prosecutors were 4.5 times more likely to file charges in rapes by strangers involving white victims than Black victims. For cases that go before a jury, if the plaintiff is Black, the accused has a better chance of being acquitted and, if convicted, receiving a lighter sentence.

It is not surprising then that according to Blackburn Center, which provides services to survivors of sexual violence in Westmore-land County, Pennsylvania, for every fifteen Black women who are raped, only one reports the assault.”

Justice

“From the first time Royal African Company slavers set sail for North America, through the years of the American Revolution, until the abolition of the international slave trade in 1808, roughly three million souls, many of them forever branded with the company’s initials, RAC, on their bodies, would be forcibly removed from their homes, their kin, and their way of life, the majority of them to feed demand for a sweetener. Countless fortunes were made. In Liverpool, the Martins Bank Building, opened in 1932, and the former home of Barclays, memorialized the role of banks in financing the trade with a relief sculpture of two African boys fettered about the neck and ankles and holding bags of money.”

“John Newton, a slave trader turned abolitionist, wrote the song “Amazing Grace.””

“In a 2015 study of healthful food available in Topeka, researchers found that even low-income white neighborhoods were twice as likely to have a food store as black ones.”

“There has never been a time in United States history when Black rebellions did not spark existential fear among white people, often leading to violent response. Even when resistance has been peaceful or purely symbolic such as Black fists raised during the medal ceremony at the 1968 Olympics or a knee taken on the football held during the national anthem nearly fifty years later — any sign of rebellion has frequently resulted in threats or acts of violence perpetrated by white vigilantes, militia groups, and the police, often culminating in the creation or strengthening of systems of racial and social control.

The reflexive impulse to respond to Black people with severe punitiveness is traceable to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when white people desperately sought to control a large unfree population who refused to submit to their enslavement. The deep-seated, gnawing terror that Black people might, one day, rise up and demand for themselves the same freedoms and inalienable rights that led white colonists to declare the American Revolution has shaped our nation’s politics, culture, and systems of justice ever since.”

“[The Constitution begins with] “certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” But relatively few children or adults today are as familiar with the right to revolt that follows: “Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it…When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

“The first official slave patrol was created in South Carolina in 1704, following rumors of a planned rebellion. As the historian Sally Hadden writes in her comprehensive study Slave Patrols, colonists already fearful of attack by the Spanish in Florida concluded that they needed two military forces: “a militia to repel foreign enemies, and a patrol to leave behind as a deterrent against slave revolts.” Every militia captain would select a group of men under his command to serve as patrollers, a separate unit that was responsible for enforcing slave codes. Patrollers were required to hunt fugitives and rebellious enslaved people and to visit every plantation at least once a month; there they invaded slave cabins, confiscating any items they believed to be stolen, as well as anything they judged could be used as a weapon.

By the late 1720s, slave patrolling in the Carolina colony had become a fundamental part of the militia’s regular duties. Virginia and North Carolina soon created their own slave patrols, and by the mid-eighteenth century, colonial authorities there had transformed groups of white settlers, who were recruited and handsomely rewarded, into a militarized law enforcement organization that, as Hadden notes, was primarily engaged in “watching, catching, or beating black slaves.” Patrollers enforced slave codes and routinely broke into the homes of enslaved people, aggressively searching them and their quarters and subjecting women to sexual violence.”

“South Carolina’s Negro Act became a model for slave codes throughout the colonies, governing Black lives for more than a century. Such laws existed in the Northern colonies as well, even though the enslaved population was comparatively small. In New York, for example, authorities banned enslaved people from gathering in groups larger than three, holding funerals at night, being out after sunset without a lantern, selling food in the streets, playing musical instruments, or associating with free Black people. Enslaved Black people weren’t even allowed to simply ride a horse, for fear they would use the horse to escape. Northerners also implemented strict curfew laws, which targeted all Black people, enslaved and free. Legislation in Connecticut and Rhode Island, for example, explicitly encouraged anti-Black vigilantism by authorizing any white person to capture an enslaved person who appeared to be out after nine without specified permission.”

“Slavery in Saint-Domingue had provided France with nearly half of its global trade profit, and by 1791 Saint-Domingue was the world’s largest producer of coffee and sugar.”

“A wave of Black rebellion rocked the United States in the months and years that followed. Roughly two thousand uprisings occurred between May 1968 and December 1972, nearly all of which were sparked by routine police violence. As the historian Elizabeth Hinton explains in America on Fire, virtually every major urban center burned during those four years: “Violence flared up not only in archetypal ghettoes including Harlem and Watts, and in majority-Black cities such as Detroit and Washington, D.C.; it appeared in Greensboro, North Carolina, in Gary, Indiana, in Seattle, Washington, and countless places in between — every city, small or large, where Black residents lived in segregated, unequal conditions.””

Indigenous Intersectionality

“Europeans in the Southeast established towns that thrived, in large part, on a virulent slave trade. These colonists, who possessed deadly weapons, traded manufactured English goods to Native hunters for deerskins. They also demanded to enslave Indigenous people in exchange for goods and as payment for debts that Native hunters had accrued in past transactions. As they sought to survive in a maelstrom of change set in motion by modern European capitalism, colonialism, and racial slavery, Native Americans began actively raiding and seizing people from other tribes in order to establish strong trade relations with the English, to service debts, and to avoid being hunted themselves. As the historian Alan Gallay has documented, at least thirty to fifty thousand Indigenous Southerners were enslaved by Anglo colonists before the year 1715. Many of these Native people were traded to enslavers in the Caribbean and Europe; a large number were transported to New England; and some were sold to operations in the Upper South, particularly Virginia. Even as an African diaspora was taking shape, as Africans were tracked down in their own regions and brought to others through the Middle Passage, an “American diaspora,” writes the anthropologist Jack Forbes, was developing as Indigenous Americans were also violently relocated.”

“These captives stood on the same auction blocks, traversed the Atlantic on the same ships, and finally ended up in the same North. ern households or Southern or Caribbean plantations, where they lived, labored, suffered, and surely dreamed together.

These shared circumstances of enslavement led to the merger of families, cultures, and fates. Indigenous American people intermarried with Africans and their American-born descendants. Corn-based and leafy green-intensive Indigenous diets fused with African American cooking that relied on sweet potatoes, black-eyed peas, and pork to form a fundamental part of Southern regional culinary culture. Black women became expert basket weavers, most notably along the Carolina and Georgia coasts, using Native American plant preferences, even as Black men likely learned to build dugout canoes from Indigenous men.

Enslaved Black people used local plants as herbal medicines in accordance with Indigenous knowledge, and both groups developed a rich and perhaps mutually informed folklore centering on trickster rabbit stories. Enslaved Black and Native Americans produced a distinctive pottery style known by archaeologists as colonoware. Many of these earthen vessels, which have been discovered on Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia estates, are marked with hybrid circle and cross symbols believed to be reflective of West African, Native American, and Christian religious beliefs.

Black and Native people also ran away together and had families. Their mixed-race and bicultural children were both African and Indigenous American but were often recorded simply as “Negro” in private and colonial ledgers.”

“Descendants of freedpeople in the Five Tribes have been organizing for political inclusion, for cultural recognition, and for economic parity with tribal citizens since the late 1800s. Decades of meeting, fundraising, political campaigning, and vocal speech are now yielding major results, at least in one of the nations in question. Members of the Descendants of Freedmen of the Five Civilized Tribes Association were party to a decisive legal suit that ended in a 2017 federal court ruling requiring the Cherokee Nation to extend civil rights to descendants of formerly enslaved people after decades of resistance on the part of the tribe.”

“In the last decade, Indigenous, Black, and Afro-Native activists have joined forces in notable ways. In 2015–16, when thousands of Indigenous people and allies from around the world gathered in South Dakota to protest the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline through Sioux homelands, Black Lives Matter activists joined them there and staged a rally in Chicago. In the Black Lives Matter wave of national protests in the pandemic summer of 2020, Native activists and tribal leaders marched, painted murals, and issued statements of solidarity.”

Policy

“The OECD, an international consortium of democratic countries with market-based economies, scores nations along a number of economic indicators, such as how countries regulate temporary work arrangements and how easy it is to terminate employees. Scores in these categories run from 5 (“very strict”) to 1 (“very loose”). When it comes to regulations on temporary workers, Brazil scores 4.1 and Thailand 3.7, signaling that in those countries, workers enjoy a range of toothy protections; farther down the list are Norway (3.4), India (2.5), and Japan (1.3). The United States scores 0.3, tied for second-to-last place with Malaysia. What about how easy it is to fire workers? Countries like Indonesia (4.1) and Portugal (3) have strong rules about severance pay and reasons for dismissal. Those rules relax somewhat in places like Denmark (2.1) and Mexico (1.9). They virtually disappear in the United States, ranked dead last out of seventy-one nations, with a score of 0.5.”

“A 2011 study of twenty-three long-standing democracies identified the United States as the only country in the group that had four “veto points” empowered to block legislative action: the president, both houses of Congress, and the Supreme Court. Most other democracies in the study had just a single veto point.

In those nations, parties govern, pass policies, and get voted in or out. Things happen at the federal level. But the United States government is characterized by political inaction — and that was by design. By creating political structures that weakened the role of the federal government’s ability to regulate slavery, the framers hobbled Washington’s ability to pass legislation on a host of other matters.

Chief among these was taxation. If they wished to raise an army and fund the government, the framers also had to devise a way to levy taxes on the citizenry. But delegates couldn’t agree on the best way to do this because slavery kept getting in the way. It was impossible to debate taxes without also debating how to tax the enslaved. Should enslaved Black workers be taxed as people or property or not at all? The three-fifths clause provided a potential solution — treat enslaved Black workers as partial citizens for the purposes of taxation but Southern enslavers quickly realized that that would require them to pay more than Northerners who didn’t enslave people. For example, if the federal government established a poll tax levied on every person, in 1790 the three-fifths apportionment would have mandated that a Virginian be taxed $1.39 and a South Carolinian $1.45 for every $1 charged to a free Northerner. Predictably, Southerners rejected this plan. “Our Slaves being our Property,” argued South Carolina representative Thomas Lynch, “why should they be taxed more than the Land, Sheep, Cattle, Horses?” Lynch and other Southerners wanted their human property to count toward their congressional representation but not against their tax bill.

The delegates finally decided that imports should be taxed. It was a tax everyone could agree on. A tariff could be levied without reference to slavery because it didn’t require counting enslaved workers or estimating the value of their products exported to other countries. Merchants would foot the bill and pass the cost on to consumers. In this way, the tax was invisible and often optional, in the sense that you could decide to purchase an imported good or not.

Though politically palatable, the import tax stunted the bureaucratic infrastructure of the nation, allowing the United States to neglect developing the administrative systems necessary for progressive taxation and government services. The result was the creation of a financially and bureaucratically weak federal government. It was not until 1861, when the bill for the Civil War came due, that the nation was finally forced to establish an income tax and an Internal Revenue Service to collect it (originally called the Bureau of Internal Revenue). The American public, which had never been made to pay income tax, reacted unkindly to this fledgling agency, calling it inefficient and corrupt. After the war ended, so too did the national income tax. Congress passed a modest income tax almost thirty years later, in 1894, but in a 5-to-4 decision, the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional. The federal government didn’t acquire the power to lay and collect taxes on incomes” until 1913, when the Sixteenth Amendment was ratified.

By 1900, an income tax supplied roughly 12 percent of government revenue in Italy and the United Kingdom and about 20 percent in Germany and the Netherlands.””

“If the United States had followed a similar path, establishing the Internal Revenue Service not in a moment of crisis but at the nation’s founding. In this alternative universe, the IRS could have been given adequate financial backing and administrative support, enabling it to function efficiently and fairly. Taxes would not have been hidden in American consumerism (as was the import tax); rather, they could have been transparently collected as a portion of each person’s income and seen as a patriotic duty, an investment in the nation. But, of course, this is not our history.”

“Historian Deena Berry [has shown] that enslaved workers even had monetary value in death, their bodies sold as cadavers to med schools and physicians.”

“In Iceland, 90% of wage and salaried workers belong to trade unions authorized to fight for living wages and fair working conditions. In Italy, 34% of workers are unionized, as are 26% of Canadian workers. But only 10% of American wage and salaried workers carry union cards. The US remains the sole advanced democracy missing a Labor Party, one dedicated, at least in original conception, to representing the interests of the working class.”

“The deliberations eventually turned to voting rights — this was, delegates agreed, an essential instrument in the ongoing struggle for equal protection and due process. They resolved to demand an additional constitutional amendment, one that would go beyond the Fourteenth Amendment’s penalty for states that denied voting rights. Black activists aimed to win a guarantee of access to the ballot box. As the convention discussions wrapped up, members organized into delegations and headed out from the meeting hall, crossing the nation’s capital to lobby federal officials about what freedom and citizenship should entail — which, they believed, included access to the polls.”

“In a matter of weeks, at the end of February 1869, Congress sent the Fifteenth Amendment to the states for ratification: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” President Ulysses Grant endorsed the change. States in New England and the Midwest came on board easily. Congress held the key to readmission to the Union for those Confederate states that had not yet been readmitted and, as with the Fourteenth Amendment, made ratification a condition of statehood. Black men were citizens and the Constitution now protected their votes.”

The Second Amendment

“Though it did not explicitly say so, the Second Amendment was motivated in large part by a need for the new federal government to assure white people in the South that they would be able to defend themselves against Black people.”

“In late 1865 to mid-1866, all the Black troops were removed from the South’s interior and sent to coastal fortifications, and by January 1867 they had been expelled altogether.

The result was catastrophic. After the war, President Andrew Johnson had sent a former general, Carl Schurz, to tour the South and report back on conditions there. Schurz unveiled a travelogue of death. He documented hunting parties where Black men were chased down and shot, with dogs left to devour their faces. Near Montgomery, Alabama, he wrote, “negroes leaving the plantations, and found on the roads, were exposed to the savagest treatment.” At Selma, he relayed the report from Major J. P. Houston that twelve “negroes were killed by whites.” In Choctaw County, Alabama, on separate occasions, Black men were roasted alive; one of them was “chained to a pine tree and burned to death.” Then there were the “gallant young men [who] make a practice of robbing (Black people]…. If any resistance is made, death is pretty sure to be the result.” Between 1865 and 1868, white people murdered more than one thousand African Americans in one area of Texas. In Pine Bluff, Arkansas, white people “set fire to a black settlement and rounded up the inhabitants. A man who visited the scene the following morning found a sight that apald (sic) [him] 24 Negro men woman (sic) and children were hanging to trees all round the Cabbins.” As Black people tried to defend themselves, white people massacred African Americans in Memphis; New Orleans; Colfax, Louisiana; and Hamburg, South Carolina.

The historian Annette Gordon-Reed called the carnage a “slow-motion genocide.””

“Things were no different in the twentieth century. In Atlanta in 1906, white men went on a killing spree against Black people in the city. On trolleys, in barbershops, in hotel lobbies, on street corners, African Americans were hunted down and slaughtered. State militia members, in their own way, were part of the mob. They rampaged through Atlanta, chanting,’ “We are rough, we are tough, we kill niggers and never get enough!” In the face of this terror, Black people had no stable right of self-defense. In Brownsville, a Black neighborhood, residents took up their guns and prepared to defend themselves from the onslaught. As policemen approached the neighborhood, African American sentries fired, thinking it was the mob attacking. Instead, one police officer died and four others were wounded. The state militia descended upon Brownsville and ransacked homes, terrorized the inhabitants, and confiscated every gun it could find.”

“In 1966, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale answered that call and formed the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP).

The BPP had a swagger and a militancy that resonated with a besieged community. Dressed in their “uniforms” of leather jackets and berets, the Panthers openly carried rifles and .45s while monitoring Oakland police officers making arrests. As an act of community self-defense, they policed the police. This was unsettling to many white people. A headline to a 1967 article in the San Francisco Examiner exclaimed, “Oakland’s Black Panthers Wear Guns, Talk Revolution.” Even more frightening: “It’s All Legal.” The police inveighed upon conservative California assemblyman David Donald “Don” Mulford to change the state’s gun laws to make the open carry of firearms illegal and, thus, undermine the Panthers’ community self-defense strategy. Mulford readily agreed. He was bolstered in his efforts by the National Rifle Association, the guardians of the Second Amendment.”

“In 2020, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights reported on the racial implications of Stand Your Ground laws: the criminal justice system is ten times more likely to rule a homicide justifiable if the shooter is white and victim is Black than the other way around. In fact, the report notes that when a white person kills an African American, it is 281 percent more likely to be ruled a “justifiable homicide” than a white-on-white killing.”

Justice

“September 15, 1883

A conductor on a train traveling from Memphis to Woodstock, Tennessee, insists that Ida B. Wells leave her seat in the first-class rear car and move to the rougher front car, where drinking and smoking are permitted. Wells refuses and is forcibly removed from the train. Afterward, she sues the Chesapeake, Ohio, and Southwestern Railroad Company. She wins and is awarded $500 in damages, but the Tennessee Supreme Court overturns the ruling. Afterward, she writes, “O God, is there no redress, no peace, no justice in this land for us?””

“A study from the 1980s found that in Georgia, Black defendants convicted of killing white people were almost twenty-two times more likely to be sentenced to death than people convicted of crimes against Black victims, a racial disparity that the United States Supreme Court accepted as “inevitable” in a controversial 1987 case, McCleskey v. Kemp. And determinations about whether children are prosecuted as juveniles or adults and what kind of punishments are imposed reveal some of the most dramatic racial disparities. In 2008, EJI established that all of the thirteen- and fourteen-year-old children in this country sentenced to life in prison without parole for non-homicide offenses were Black, Latino, or Native.

We began representing these children and challenging what we call “death in prison” sentences across the country. Eventually, two of the cases, Sullivan v. Florida and Graham v. Florida, ended up in the United States Supreme Court. In 2009, I argued to the justices that telling any thirteen-year-old child, “You are fit only to die in prison” is cruel and that these sentences cannot be reconciled with what we know about child development or basic human rights. The Court agreed and declared that life without parole sentences imposed on children convicted of non-homicide offenses are unconstitutional.”

“The Thirteenth Amendment is credited with ending slavery, but it stopped short of that. It made an exception for those convicted of crimes: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction” (emphasis added).”

“Today, in courtrooms across America, advocates and lawyers representing Black people cannot effectively assist many of their clients without recognizing that, contrary to the legal doctrine, those clients are presumed guilty and burdened by assumptions of criminality that have been shaped over centuries. The job of the advocate then becomes convincing the court and the jurors of a client’s innocence, rather than just defending the client against accusations of guilt, an inversion of the presumption of innocence written into American law. The advocate who fails to understand this reality can actually imperil the life of his or her client.”

“November 10, 1898

A mob of more than one thousand white men overthrows the elected biracial local government in Wilmington, North Carolina, in the only successful coup in American history. Organized by white supremacist politicians virulently opposed to the prospect of elected Black city officials, the mob destroys a thriving Black business district, kills scores of Black people, and drives thousands from their homes; many of them will never return.”

Inheritance

“Elmore Bolling was a one-man economy in Lowndesboro, where the family lived. He had a large house, a general store, a delivery service, a catering company, and a gas station, all of which were located on a property he leased off Highway 80, one of the most traveled routes between Selma and Montgomery; he grew cotton, corn, and sugarcane and owned a small fleet of trucks. At his peak, Bolling employed as many as forty people, all of them Black like him. And his family estimates that he had as much as $40,000 in the bank and more than $5,000 in physical assets, together worth more than $500,000 in today’s dollars.

Bolling came from a long line of Black entrepreneurs that stretched back to the early post-slavery days. From them, he learned how to be successful in the Jim Crow South. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, his father and grandfather had managed to acquire a large plot of land, on which they ran cattle. But just as they were getting ahead, a white man who’d been renting a parcel of land from them claimed that the land was his. Black people had no legal standing when it came to business matters with white folks, so he was able to simply take it from the Bollings. After that, the Bolling men vowed never to buy property again. Instead, they would lease it. On rented land, which could never be stolen from them, they could still set up numerous moneymaking ventures.

That’s how Elmore Bolling grew up, thinking a few steps ahead of white people, always weighing the risks of being Black and ambitious against new business opportunities. He leased his farmland and raised his animals and then got into transportation and deliveries, too. He started with a mule and a wagon and eventually upgraded to a Model T, which he converted into a truck. Bolling transported cattle and feed and anything that anyone wanted to move between Lowndes County and Montgomery. Soon, his Model T grew into three tractor-trailer trucks.

But it was the expansion of his little general store that changed his fortunes. Elmore and Bertha Mae started doing Friday night fish fries, serving Sunday dinners, and selling ice cream to the after-church crowd. Ice cream was a delicacy in their little patch of the county, where most folks still didn’t have electricity. They used a portable hand-cranked ice cream maker to churn out scoops of the cold stuff for eager customers. The shop became the center of the family’s operation, and they grew their business by adding a one-pump gas station out front. Elmore got the idea to sell gas after a white-owned station nearby refused to serve him. At the Bollings’ pump, Black drivers would have a safe, reliable place to fill up.

In addition to their successful businesses, Elmore and Bertha Mae had seven children. He sent his two oldest sons to live with their aunt in Montgomery during the week so they could attend school in the city instead of going to the local high school, where the focus was on working the land rather than book learning. “Our father decided that those schools offered a better education,” McCall says of her dad, who never learned to read or write. He always preached to his children that getting a good education and achieving financial independence were the only ways Black folks would ever experience any kind of freedom. He had very little of the former but was dead set on grabbing up as much of the latter as he could.

In the portrait in McCall’s living room, he almost pops from the frame. His rich brown skin glows against his white shirt and light tie. Bertha Mae leans into him as if he were a boulder. There’s a mix of pride and defiance on his face. It took a lot of both to survive and thrive as a Black man. But too much of either could just as easily be one’s undoing. And he knew it. They all did.

Not long after that portrait was taken, the Bollings and every Black man, woman, and child in the county would learn the cost of daring to be too successful, too free. On a mild December day in 1947, a deputy sheriff came to Elmore’s store while his twelve-year-old son, Willie D, was working and asked where his father was. Willie D told him that his father was away on a trip. A short time later, another white man entered and asked the same question. Willie D knew this meant trouble, but he didn’t know what to do. Sensing danger, he told the man that his father wasn’t in town. Soon after, Willie D saw the first man’s car following his father’s truck on the highway about two hundred yards from the store as Elmore, back from Montgomery, attempted to make some deliveries.

As Elmore got out of his truck, two white men confronted him, including one of the men who’d come into the store. It seemed that in buying a pump and selling gas, Elmore had stepped over some invisible line. Suddenly, gunfire rang out. The white men shot Elmore seven times — six times with a pistol and once with a shotgun blast to his back. His wife and three of his children — all under the age of thirteen — heard the terrifying sounds and rushed from the store to find him lying dead in a ditch.

McCall says the shooters didn’t bother to cover their faces; they didn’t need to. Everyone would know who had killed Elmore and why. “Enraged whites, jealous over the business success of a Negro, are believed to be the lynchers of Elmore Bolling,” reported The Chicago Defender on December 20, 1947; the story noted that “Bolling has long been a marked man.” One local who knew Elmore put it succinctly: he was “too successful to be a Negro.” His murder created a gaping wound in the family, which quickly lost everything he’d built. “Growing up, we never talked much about what happened,” McCall says all these years later, sitting on an orange velvet love seat in her meticulously kept living room, not far from the portrait of her parents. “We were all traumatized by it in our own way,” she said. The trauma reverberated over the years after her father’s lynching, and in addition to the emotional pain, there was the ongoing financial toll. “There was no inheritance,” says McCall, “nothing for my father to pass down, because it was all taken away.””

“There was also the promise that after generations of working land they could never own, the formerly enslaved would be compensated. During the war, the Union army had torn through the South and seized a bountiful amount of farmland and property owned by Confederate families. A contingent of so-called Radical Republicans in Congress, led by Thaddeus Stevens, argued that the seized land should be handed over to the formerly enslaved. It would be a form of poetic justice, but also retribution. They figured the redistribution of land would effectively break the back of the traitorous Southern aristocracy.”

“From the beginning of his presidency, Johnson insisted that land seized from Confederates must be returned to its former owners, effectively undoing Sherman’s order and returning to former enslavers the land that had been seized from them as punishment for taking up arms against the nation. Some forty thousand Black families had settled on confiscated “Sherman land.” In some cases, federal troops evicted them by force; in others, Black people fought off returning white people with guns. According to some accounts, about two thousand Black landowners held on to the land they’d been given after the war. But the majority stayed on land they no longer owned and worked as sharecroppers.

Reneging on the land was just one way the federal government betrayed these upstart Americans. The Freedmen’s Bureau, always meant to be temporary, was dismantled in 1872. More than sixty thousand Black people had deposited more than $3 million into the savings bank, but its all-white trustees used that money to begin issuing speculative loans to white investors and corporations. When the bank failed in 1874, Black depositors lost much of their savings.”

“In the same year as what came to be known as the Tulsa Race Massacre, a case in Georgia captured national attention. Federal officials were investigating a farmer in Jasper County for using peonage, a form of involuntary servitude based on indebtedness that was outlawed in 1867. Through this practice, the farmer had effectively enslaved a number of Black men. To conceal his actions from investigators, the farmer murdered the men working for him.”

“Within a year of Elmore Bolling’s murder, nearly all of the family’s wealth was gone. White creditors and people posing as creditors took the money the family made from the sale of their trucks and cattle after the killing. Some others, without a shred of proof, claimed that Bolling owed them money. Bertha Mae feared what would happen if she didn’t pay them. They even staked claims on what was left of the family’s savings. With Bolling gone, there was no one else to run the many arms of the family business. Seemingly overnight the Bollings went from prosperity to poverty.

“My father’s murder actually killed aspirations for Black people,” says McCall, referring to not just her family but all of the people who worked in their various enterprises. “Everyone had to go back to working for plantation owners. No one wanted to take over the business. My father had brothers, and when someone came in to ask my uncle, ‘Are you going to take over Elmore’s business?,’ he said, ‘No, that’s what got him killed.””

Less than two years later, the family fled Lowndes County in the dark of night, fearing for their lives. They found refuge in Montgomery, where Bertha Mae was employed in domestic work. Over the next few decades the family would remain financially and emotionally adrift. Eventually, some of the Bollings were drawn north by the Great Migration, while others joined the military and went overseas.”

Healthcare

“When she was growing up in Alabama, people still talked about their grandfathers, fathers, and brothers who had died of bad blood. That was the catchall term for syphilis, anemia, and just about anything that ailed you. The six hundred men who were enrolled in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study were told they’d get free medical care. In-stead, from 1932 to 1972, researchers watched as they developed lesions on their mouths and genitals. Watched as their lymph nodes swelled, as their hair fell out. Watched as the disease moved into its final stage, leaving the men blind and demented, leaving them to die. All this when they knew a simple penicillin shot would cure them. All this because they wanted to see what would happen. For years afterward, her grandmother refused to go to the hospital. Even at eighty-nine, perpetually hunched over in the throes of an endless cough, she’d repeat, “Anything but the doctor.” Bad blood begets bad blood.

She’s more trusting than her grandmother, but she still has her moments. Like many women, she was nervous about giving birth. All the more so because she was doing it in New York City, where Black women are twelve times as likely to die in childbirth as white women.”

“On November 29, Moore tested positive for Covid-19, and soon after, she was checked in to Indiana University Health North Hospital in Carmel, a suburban city near Indianapolis. On December 4, she posted a video on her Facebook page that showed her lying in her hospital bed, a breathing tube inserted in her nose. Her voice halting as she struggled to catch her breath, Moore detailed disrespectful treatment by a white physician, whose name she took the time to spell out. He had rejected her plea for additional doses of an antiviral medication used to treat Covid, she said, adding in the post accompanying the video, “He did not even listen to my lungs, he didn’t touch me in any way.” And despite what she described as excruciating neck pain, according to her account, he told her he was uncomfortable giving her additional pain medication and tried to send her home. “I was crushed,” a tearful Moore said in the video recorded on her cellphone, her eyes wide with a combination of frustration and fear. “He made me feel like I was a drug addict. And he knew I was a physician. I don’t take narcotics. I was hurting.”

Then, looking directly into the camera, her voice shaking with rage, Moore offered this scathing indictment of the American medical system, which had betrayed her: “I put forth and I maintain if I was white, I wouldn’t have to go through that. This is how Black people get killed.”

Moore died two weeks later at age fifty-two. In her assessment of the U.S. healthcare system, she was correct on two counts. First, as a Black American, she was more likely to contract Covid-19 than a white American; and second, she was more likely to die from the disease. Around the time of her death, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released data showing that Black Americans were 1.4 times more likely than white ones to contract the virus, 3.2 times more likely to be hospitalized, and 2.8 times more likely to die.”

“In April 2020, as the pandemic surged, researchers from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health conducted a study that linked long-term exposure to dirty air to higher risk of death from the virus.”

“A 2013 review of studies examining, racial disparities in pain management published in the American Medical Association Journal of Ethics found that Black and Hispanic people — from children with adenoidectomies and tonsillectomies to elders in hospice care — received inadequate treatment for pain, especially as compared with their white counterparts.”

“Physicians and scientists used their expertise and even empirical data to insist that enslaved Africans were “fit” for slavery and that the institution was not immoral or cruel, as many proclaimed. Over time, their theories became incorporated into and normalized in medical practice, and this racializing of medicine did not end after slavery. Two persistent physiological falsehoods — that Black people were impervious to pain and that they had weak lungs that could be strengthened through hard work — have wormed their way into the scientific consensus, and can still be seen in modern-day medical education and practice. A study of 222 white medical students and residents published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2016 showed that half of the students and residents endorsed at least one false idea about biological differences between Black people and white people, including that Black people’s nerve endings are less sensitive than those of white people.When asked to imagine how much pain white or Black patients experienced in hypothetical situations, the medical students and residents who held more false beliefs were more likely to maintain that Black people felt less pain, and thus they were less likely to recommend appropriate treatment.

This is how Black people get killed.”

“In the first half of 2020, owing to the pandemic, the Black-white gap in life expectancy increased to six years, from four in 2019.”

“Fallacies about Black immunity to pain, extra-thick skin, and weakened lung function that were introduced into the scientific literature by these and other racist doctors continue to show up in medical education today. Even Cartwright’s footprint remains. Today most commercially available spirometers, used around the world to diagnose and monitor respiratory illness, have a “race correction” built into the software, to control for the assumption that Black people have less lung capacity than white people. In her 2014 book Breathing Race into the Machine: The Surprising Career of the Spirometer from Plantation to Genetics, Lundy Braun, a Brown University professor of pathology and laboratory medicine and Africana studies, as well as a professor of medical science at Brown’s Warren Alpert Medical School, notes that the “race correction” is conventional practice, treated as fact in textbooks and still taught in many medical schools.”

“In the aftermath of the Civil War, the nation faced a full-blow humanitarian disaster. Freed people did not have enough food, clothing, shelter, or medical care. They were plagued by dysentery, cholera, and a bleak roster of other diseases. And they had no reliable help for addressing these problems. Hospitals were few and far between at that time, and most of them were either overwhelmed by the needs of white citizens — to whom hospital administrators granted priority — or unwilling to admit formerly enslaved people under any circumstances, or both. As a result, the death toll of Black people surpassed that of white people by an overwhelming and consistent margin. As the historian Jim Downs details in his 2012 book Sick from Freedom, the newly emancipated died in such high numbers that in some communities their bodies littered the streets.”

Reparations

“Suburbanites waged a sustained campaign against the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) from its inception. In a 1965 vote, residents of nearly all-white Cobb County resoundingly rejected extending the system to their neighborhoods. In 1971, Gwinnett and Clayton Counties, which were then also overwhelmingly white, followed suit, voting down a proposal to join MARTA by nearly 4-to-1 margins, and keeping MARTA out became the default position of many local politicians.”

“May 13, 1985

Philadelphia police end a standoff with MOVE, a Black liberation group, by dropping a bomb on the rowhouse where members live. MOVE was founded the previous decade by John Africa, born Vincent Leaphart, a Korean War veteran and animal rights activist. The group’s members took the surname Africa and agreed to live communally, practice strict vegetarianism, and resist various forms of modern life. The 1985 bombing kills eleven of them, including five children, and, because the fire department lets the resulting fire burn, destroys sixty-one houses and leaves 250 people homeless in the Black neighborhood of Cobbs Creek.”

“By 1832, every Northern state legislature had passed resolutions endorsing colonization.”

“Black families earning $75,000 or more a year live in poorer neighborhoods than white Americans earning less than $40,000 a year, according to research by John Logan, a Brown University sociologist.””

“According to research published in 2020 by scholars at Duke University and Northwester University, the average Black family with children holds just one cent of wealth for every dollar held by the average white family with children.”

“During Reconstruction, Black men serving in the U.S. Congress for the first time in history pushed for reparations in the form of federal aid for Black schools. By the late 1800s, Reconstruction had been abandoned and violently concluded and many formerly enslaved people, their bodies debilitated by decades of punishing manual labor for the enrichment of others, by poor nutrition, and by lack of healthcare, were struggling in poverty, often without even enough money to bury their dead. A woman named Callie House, herself born into slavery, widowed in adulthood, and working as a washerwoman in Tennessee, began organizing freedpeople in the early 1900s under the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association. Through this grassroots association, House organized tens of thousands of formerly enslaved people to push Congress to pass a bill to provide “slave pensions,” just as the federal government paid pensions to Union soldiers.

After years of organizing failed to pay off with Congress, in 1915, House took an extraordinary step for a Black, formerly enslaved woman living in the Jim Crow South: she retained Cornelius Jones, one of a tiny number of Black lawyers practicing in Washington, D.C., and sued the federal government for reparations. In the suit, Jones argued that the U.S. Treasury owed Black Americans $68,073,388.99 for the taxes it had collected between 1862 and 1868 on the cotton enslaved people had grown. The federal government had identified the cotton and could trace it, and the suit argued that this tax money should be paid in the form of pensions for those who against their will had grown, picked, and processed it.

The audacity of a Black woman demanding payment for her stolen labor and the stolen labor of millions of others, even if it would come directly from proceeds of the cotton they’d picked, brought down the full wrath of one of the most powerful governments in the world. The Treasury Department, under President Woodrow Wilson, first issued a press release insisting the United States owed nothing and that formerly enslaved people, if they had a claim at all, should seek reparations from “their masters.” A federal court then rejected the claim, citing government immunity — which says that the government must consent to being sued — and the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the decision.

Not content with crushing the lawsuit, the government went after both Jones and House, accusing them of mail fraud for soliciting funds from formerly enslaved people to help the effort with promises that reparations were coming. The same government that refused to give freedpeople a dime of financial assistance for their enslavement accused those trying to get them aid of “going through the country collecting hard-earned money from poor negroes.” Newspaper coverage perpetuated the basest stereotypes of people who’d spent a significant part of their lives working for free for the benefit of white people: “The members of the race have been prone from time immemorial to strive to get something for nothing,” an article in the Memphis Commercial Appeal announced. The federal government never produced any real evidence that showed that House had defrauded anyone, according to the historian Mary Frances Berry in her book My Face Is Black Is True, but it did not matter. Jones, a respected and well-connected civil rights attorney, was not convicted. House, a poor Black woman, was convicted then and sentenced to prison, where she served a year. “Mrs. House lacked Jones’s status of black male respectability,” Berry writes. “Mrs. House was just a black woman with the audacity — and no money to stand firmly on claims of citizenship rights for herself and freedmen and women. “

Black Americans would never give up their quest for reparations — for restitution and repayment for the centuries of stolen labor and robbed opportunities. The Black nationalist Marcus Garvey would call for reparations in the 1910s and for Black Americans to leave this country and resettle in a Black one. Like Callie House, Garvey found himself targeted by the federal government for mail fraud. He was imprisoned and then deported. In the 1950s, the activist “Queen Mother” Audley Moore launched a movement for reparations, appealing to the United Nations in 1957 and 1959. In 1968, activists formed the Republic of New Afrika, which claimed that since the United States had reneged on its promise of forty acres, Black Americans should be given territory in the Southeastern United States to form their own Black nation. Malcolm X called for reparations in 1963. In 1987, Adjoa Aiyetoro and Imari Obadele helped found the National Coalition for Reparations in America, known as N’COBRA. And in 2021, the last three survivors of the Tulsa Race Massacre, all centenarians, testified in Congress in support of a reparations bill for the survivors and their descendants, one hundred years after the slaughter that destroyed the prosperous Black neighborhood of Greenwood and killed hundreds,” and some twenty years after a state commission recommended reparations that were never given.

None of these efforts succeeded. To this day, the only Americans who have ever received government restitution for slavery were white enslavers in Washington, D.C., whom the federal government compensated after the Civil War for their loss of human property.”

“”If that many white Americans can trace their legacy of wealth and property ownership to a single entitlement program,” Merritt writes, “then the perpetuation of Black poverty must also be linked to national policy. “

The federal government turned its back on its financial obligations to four million newly liberated people, and then it left them without protection as well, as white rule was reinstated across the South starting in the 1870s. Federal troops pulled out of the former Confederacy, and white Southerners overthrew biracial governance using violence, coups, and election fraud.”

“It didn’t cost the nation anything to integrate lunch counters. It didn’t cost the nation anything to integrate hotels and motels. It didn’t cost the nation a penny to guarantee the right to vote. Now we are in a period where it will cost the nation billions of dollars to get rid of poverty, to get rid of slums, to make quality integrated education a reality. This is where we are now. Now we’re going to lose some friends in this period. The allies who were with us in Selma will not all stay with us during this period.”

“The racial wealth gap is in relative terms about the same as it was in the 1950s as well. The typical Black household today is poorer than 80 percent of white households. “No progress has been made over the past 70 years in reducing income and wealth inequalities between Black and white households,” according to the study.

And yet most Americans remain in an almost pathological denial about the depth of Black financial struggle. That 2019 Yale University study, discussed in “The Misperception of Racial Economic Inequality,” found that most Americans believe that Black households hold $90 in wealth for every $100 held by white households. The actual amount is $10. About 97 percent of the study participants overestimated Black-white wealth equality, and most assumed that highly educated, high-income Black households were the most likely to achieve economic parity with white counterparts. That is also wrong. The magnitude of the wealth gap only widens as Black people earn more income.”

“The Duke study shows that the racial wealth gap is not about poverty. Poor white families earning less than $27,000 a year hold nearly the same amount of wealth as Black families earning between $48,000 and $76,000 annually. It’s not because of Black spending habits. Black Americans have lower incomes overall but save at a slightly higher rate than white Americans with similar incomes. It’s not that Black people need to value education more. Black parents, when correlated by household type and socioeconomic status, actually offer more financial support for their children’s higher education than white parents do, according to the study. And some studies have shown that Black youths, when compared with white youths whose parents have similar incomes and education levels, are actually more likely to go to college and earn additional credentials.”

“Nor is it impossible to figure out who is eligible. Reparations would go to any person who has documentation that he or she identified as a Black person for at least ten years before the beginning of any reparations process and can trace at least one ancestor back to American slavery. Reparations should provide a commitment to vigorously enforce existing civil rights prohibitions against housing, educational, and employment discrimination, as well as including targeted investments in Black communities segregated through government policy and the segregated, high-poverty schools that serve a disproportionate number of Black children. But critically, reparations must include individual cash payments to descendants of the enslaved.”

“This country can be remarkably generous. Each year Congress allocates money — in 2020, $5 million — to help support Holocaust survivors living in America. In backing the funding measure in 2018, Representative Richard E. Neal, a Democrat from Massachusetts, said that this country has a “responsibility to support the surviving men and women of the Holocaust and their families.” And he is right. It is the moral thing to do. This country has also paid reparations to Japanese American victims of internment during World War II and to some Native American nations. And yet Congress has refused for three decades to pass H.R. 40, a bill introduced shortly after Congress approved reparations for Japanese Americans, which seeks to simply study the issue of reparations for descendants of American slavery.”