Collective Amnesia: American Apartheid: African Americans’ 400 Years in North America, 1619–2019

By Eugene DeFriest Bétit

Collective Amnesia: American Apartheid is a comprehensive study of the treatment African Americans have encountered since their arrival in Virginia in 1619, a saga of racism and white supremacy. It is actual history, not the popular mythology about the Civil War and its aftermath taught in our schools. Numerous tables, photographs, maps, and charts make the study easy to read. The topic is extremely pertinent due to the four hundredth anniversary of African Americans’ presence in North America in 2019 and encouragement of racism from the White House.

Chapters cover white supremacy and racism, slavery, the service of US Colored Troops in the Civil War, devastation of the South, evolution of emancipation, and Reconstruction and the Freedman’s Bureau. Other chapters address “redemption” and the “lost cause,” Jim Crow, blacks’ significant military contributions in the two world wars, the Great Migration, the civil rights movement, and the backlash that continues today.

The book also addresses contemporary issues, including white supremacy, Confederate statuary, and evaluates the status of blacks compared to other groups in society. Note is taken of Professor James Whitman’s observation that Hitler admired Jim Crow and antimiscegenation laws, as well as Richard Rothstein’s study of federal and local housing law, documenting whites’ responsibility for creating inner-city ghettos.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 14, 2019
• ISBN: 9781796011050

Book preview

Copyright © 2019 by Eugene DeFriest Bétit.

Library of Congress Control Number:      2019900620

ISBN:                  Hardcover                          978-1-7960-1107-4

                            Softcover                            978-1-7960-1106-7

                            eBook                                  978-1-7960-1105-0

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Cover Images

Enslaved person named Gordon or Whipped Peter, severely beaten by overseer, escaped to Union lines near Baton Rouge, Louisiana and enlisted in USCT. Harpers Weekly, July 4, 1863. Photograph by McPherson & Oliver. Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ds-05099.

Assault by 26th US Colored Troops Regiment – Rick Reeves, Tampa. Florida. Used with artist’s permission.

Rosa Parks – National Archives and Records Administration, Record ID: 306-PSD-65-1882 (Box 93).

Martin Luther King – Pixabay.com, non-violence-1158316_960_720.

Harriett Tubman – Abolitionist and activist, scout and spy for Federal forces. Suffragette. US National Archives (NARA), 200-HN-PIO-1.

President Barak Obama – Barak Obama Presidential Library.

General Colin Powell —Louis F. Bachrach Studios, Boston. Used under license.

Rev. date: 02/13/2019

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CONTENTS

Preface

Appreciation

Chapter 1     White Supremacy and Racism: America’s Original Sin?

Chapter 2     Slavery: America’s Peculiar Institution

Chapter 3     United States Colored Troops and Black Confederates

Chapter 4     Devastation of the Confederacy

Chapter 5     Emancipation and Reconstruction

Chapter 6     The Freedmen’s Bureau

Chapter 7     The Lost Cause and Redemption

Chapter 8     Jim Crow: Race Laws and Segregation

Chapter 9     World Wars I & II and the Great Migration

Chapter 10   The Civil Rights Movement (1947 - 1980): Redeeming the Soul of America

Chapter 11   Make America Hate Again

Chapter 12   Conclusions: Whither America?

Appendix 1: UN Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent

Appendix 2: Shadrack Thompson: Virginia’s Last Lynching?

Bibliography

Dedicated to African Americans,

Freedmen and slave

Who stood by the Union in her time of trial

And to their descendants

Who kept the faith

Despite segregation and hate

The first step to enlightenment is awareness of the darkness…

Unknown

Fondly do we hope and fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled up by the handman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn by the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.

Abraham Lincoln

Second Inaugural Address, 1864

We must always take sides. Neutrality

helps the oppressor, never the victim.

Silence encourages the tormentor,

never the tormented.

Elie Wiesel

Preface

Enslavement of blacks, America’s one of original sins, fatefully sowed the seeds of a great national dilemma, a problem entirely of America’s making. More than four hundred years after the introduction of slavery in Virginia, the solution of the Negro problem remains a complex issue and is just as acute today as ever due to a resurgence of white supremacy. We are a long way from living up to Thomas Jefferson’s famous pronouncement in our Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal. It is not clear how the issue of racism can be resolved, but surely awareness and education are an important first step forward. Then we might consider embracing the central tenet of all major religions and see each other as sisters and brothers — and resolve to make a serious effort to live up to the vision of our Founders as well as our national motto — e pluribus unum. We claim this as the great strength of our country, but in reality, this has often been mere hypocrisy.

No Comfort at Point Comfort

English settlers first arrived in North America aboard the Susan Constant on April 28, 1607. They anchored near what is today Hampton, Virginia and put out a boat which rowed to a channel on a tip of a Virginia peninsula which put them in good comfort. Named Cape Comfort, this area formed part of the boundary of colonial Virginia. London’s Virginia Company soon founded the first North American English settlement at Jamestown, less than forty miles away.

Life in the New World was initially extremely difficult. Many of the first colonists lacked the necessary skills for farming and hunting and adjusted poorly to their new environment. Unbelievable hardships were endured in the winter of 1609-1610, including extreme starvation and cannibalism.¹ Although the local Kecoughtans, a branch of Algonquin Native Americans, were helpful at first, they were driven off by the colonists in 1609. The growing need for low-cost labor was met by a system familiar in England, indentured servitude, in which poor youth were bound to an owner for periods of up to seven years in return for passage to the New World. Although they were not slaves, indentured servants’ status as semi-property was manifest. Owners could sell their contracts, they could be punished for various infractions by extension of their service terms, and they were not allowed to marry until the completion of their term of service.

The Company established a headright system in 1619 which provided fifty acres of land to planters each time they paid passage for an indentured servant, encouraging wealthy colonists to provide a low-income work force. Laborers who paid their own way could obtain fifty acres as well. Once their terms of service were completed, servants could obtain land and start small farms, although some remained landless. Of course, this necessitated taking additional land from Native Americans, leading to periodic outbursts of warfare. By the 1660s, conditions changed markedly in England. Suddenly, the labor supply dried up. Furthermore, limited terms of service meant that planters had to import new workers to maintain their workforce. Efforts were made to enslave native peoples, but they did not adapt well, and either died or frequently escaped.

Chattel Slavery

The history of African Americans in North America also began in August 1619, when the White Lion, an English privateer based in the Netherlands, traded 20 and Odd Negroes captured from a Portuguese slave ship for food. Because these first blacks were Christians, probably from Angola, they appear to have been treated initially as indentured servants.² The earliest known legal sanctioning of slavery in Virginia occurred in 1640, when John Punch, an African indentured servant, escaped with two whites to Maryland. Although all three were recaptured, Punch alone was sentenced to servitude for life; his two white companions merely had their terms of service extended by four years.³ During the 1600s, planters began to realize that permanent chattel (tangible personal property) slavery was far more profitable than hiring indentured servants, who had to be replaced at regular intervals. Blacks became life-long slaves in part because they were readily identifiable and could not simply blend in with the general populace if they ran away.

Slavery had been a pervasive system of coerced labor in all thirteen colonies before the Revolution.⁴ During the early years of the republic, most mainline religious denominations denounced slavery, causing some to split into northern and southern branches. While many of our founding fathers recognized the moral problem which this peculiar institution posed, and some condemned the practice, very few colonists emancipated their slaves due to economic considerations. Among George Washington’s fondest wishes was to see a plan adopted for the abolition of slavery, but he noted that this could be accomplished only through legislation. He was concerned enough to emancipate his own slaves upon his death.

After the Revolutionary War, slavery was an extremely controversial topic, judiciously skirted by avoiding use of the word anywhere in the Constitution. As a result, the famous three fifths compromise found in the Article 1, Section 2 of the US Constitution reads:

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three-fifths of all other Persons.

The slave trade was also obliquely addressed in Article I, Section 9, which again used the word person, as did Article IV, Section 2, addressing fugitive slaves. Although all three of these sections of the Constitution make it clear that slaves were persons, Southern Black Codes dehumanized and treated blacks as mere property. There can be little doubt that most Americans — along with most of the Western world — found slavery abhorrent, since the Constitution mandated the termination of international slave trading by 1808.

Thomas Jefferson, the principal author of the American Declaration of Independence, whose essential premise is that all men are created equal, expressed his belief that slavery corrupted both master and slave alike. He noted in his Notes on the State of Virginia, published in 1785:

The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submission on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it… The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances.⁵

In the same document, Jefferson mused quite prophetically and with considerable insight:

(Can) the liberties of a nation be thought more secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever.

Deep-seated prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained, new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions, which will probably never end but in the extermination of one or the other race.⁶

Thankfully, Jefferson was wrong about race war, but in 1861 slavery predictably caused the rupture of the Republic in a bitter, four-year-long Civil War which pitted father against son, brother against brother, neighbor against neighbor.

At the end of his life, Jefferson observed in his Autobiography, written in 1821:

…it was found that the public mind would not bear the proposition (of gradual emancipation), nor will it bear it even at this day. Yet the day is not far distant when it must bear it, or worse will follow. Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate that that these people are to be free. ⁷

Southern historian Wilbur J. Cash confirmed Jefferson’s worst fears in his classic study published in 1941, The Mind of the South, wherein he noted that slaves were considered chattel, (property) occupying the position of a mere domestic animal:

Just as plain was the fact that the institution was brutalizing—to white men. Virtually unlimited power acted inevitably to call up, in the coarser sort of master, that sadism which lies concealed in the depths of universal human nature—bred angry impatience and a taste for cruelty for its own sake… And in the common whites it bred a savage and ignoble hate for the Negro, which required only opportunity to break forth in relentless ferocity…⁸

After four years of bloody war and a contentious Reconstruction, the Jim Crow system that prevailed in the South from the end of the nineteenth century well into the twentieth did much to damage America’s reputation abroad. More to a point, it degraded blacks in a second-class citizenship based on notions of skin color alone, denying millions their potential as human beings. Not surprisingly, this was a favorite topic for Nazi and Communist propagandists, who rightly pointed out the inherent hypocrisy of such a caste system based on notions of white supremacy in a democracy where all were supposedly equal. Thus, as chilling as it may seem, American Jim Crow in a real way was the germ of Hitler’s Holocaust, a fact we seldom acknowledge. The costs of American Apartheid have been truly incalculable, and tragically the damage continues to this day with regular instances of police brutality, educational opportunities that are far from equal despite supposed desegregation, and the disproportionate incarceration of blacks in our bloated prison population.

It is time for white Americans to recognize our complicity in the plight of people of color and cease blaming the victim. To establish that they were inferior, white Americans determined that African Americans should be denied an education; after Emancipation, they did all they could to ensure that blacks received an inferior education. Separate was never equal. Federal housing policy and National Realtors’ Association guidelines, as much as individual whites’ bias, created black ghettos in our inner cities, while the War on Drugs has been used as a tool to create and maintain an underclass, individuals with felony convictions, which apply mainly to people of color.

Ironically, Old Point Comfort was one of the first destinations contrabands escaped to early in the Civil War. By then it was the site of Fortress Monroe, headquarters of a Yankee army commanded by General Benjamin Butler. Until it was deactivated in September 2011, Fort Monroe was the third oldest United States Army post in continuous active service. It is now a national monument under the National Park Service. Located near Hampton, Virginia, the 325- acre park includes an impressive fortification, but its connection to American slavery and African American history is often overlooked today. Nevertheless, Point Comfort is where American Apartheid began…

Endnotes

1.   J. Frederick Fausz, An ‘Abundance of Blood Shed on Both Sides: England’s First Indian War. 1609-1614," in Kevin R. Hardwick, and Warren R. Hofstra, editors. Virginia Reconsidered: New Histories of the Old Dominion. Charlottesville, Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 2003, 3.

The census of 1624 indicated that only1,300 of the roughly 8,000 colonists who had migrated to Virginia at that time were still living. Ronald L. Heinemann, John G. Kolp, Anthony S. Parent Jr., and William G. Shade. Old Dominion, New Commonwealth: A History of Virginia, 1607–2007, Charlottesville, Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 2007, 30.

2.   Ibid., 29.

3.   Rodney D. Coates, Law and the Cultural Production of Race and Racialized Systems of Oppression, in American Behavioral Scientist, Volume 47, No. 3, November 2003, 332, 333 and Paul C. Palmer, Servant into Slave: The Evolution of the Legal Status of the Negro Laborer in Colonial Virginia. The South Atlantic Quarterly, LXV (1966), 355-70.

4.   Slavery goes back to time immemorial. The Old Testament makes it clear that slavery was practiced by the Egyptians, Hittites, Israelites, Romans and Greeks. The Portuguese started the African slave trade fifty years before Columbus discovered the New World, but Africa had been a source for slaves for more than one hundred years before that time. Although the origin of the English word slave comes from Slav, reflecting the practice of enslaving Slavic peoples, the enslavement of blacks grew irresistibly over time. By 1619, more than a million blacks had been brought as slaves from Africa to Portuguese and Spanish colonies in South America and the Caribbean. The fact that the North American slave trade was a comparatively small part of the trade in human flesh does not make it any less detestable, or immoral.

There is no denying the advances the West has made on behalf of civilization, but the Arabs, Aztecs, Incas, Chinese and others also had advanced cultures. Most importantly, Americans appear to forget that whites comprise a small portion of the world’s population. There are consequences for such myopic vision.

5.   Jon Meacham, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power. New York: Random House, 2013, 10 and Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom. New York: History Book Club, 2005 (first edition in 1975), 375.

6.   Notes on Virginia, 1781 - 1782, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, H. A. Washington, editor. New York: H. W. Derby, 1861. Vol. 8, 403, 404.

7.   Kaarl Gunnar Myrdal. An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, Volume I. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 1999 (originally published in 1944), 85.

8.   Wilbur J. Cash, The Mind of the South. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1941, 82 & 83.

Acknowledgements

It is impossible to write a book of this scope without the advantage of scholarship completed by many others. As reflected by both Endnotes and Bibliography, I have benefitted from a wide range of work others completed, as well as documentation that would not have been readily available were it not for the internet.

The germ of an idea for this book came from a course in Virginia history which Professor Warren Hofstra graciously allowed me to audit at Shenandoah University. To my surprise, Dr. Hofstra emphasized the role racism played in the Old Dominion’s development, sparking my curiosity as a Civil War buff as to how African Americans could have been disenfranchised for nearly 100 years, despite the Fifteenth Amendment. Apparently, reverence for the Constitution has its limits. The story I have discovered is not a pretty one, and friends have asked why I chose to write it. My answer: you cannot learn from a past about which you are willfully ignorant.

Not being an academic, I did not have as much research and critical support as I might have otherwise had, but I am deeply indebted to the stalwart efforts of Dennis J. Quinn, a college classmate, Army comrade, and all around best friend who provided essential critical insight.

It’s my pleasure to acknowledge the support and encouragement of another best friend, my wife Sheila Ambrose Bétit. She has tolerated more hours of my pounding away on my laptop than I care to contemplate. Without her patient endurance and support this book would not exist.

My talented niece, Norma Haddad, designed the cover and my website.

It goes without saying that all errors herein are mine.

Gene Bétit

Winchester, Virginia

Appreciation

I sincerely hope that you enjoyed reading Collective Amnesia, if that is the appropriate word for a topic as thought-provoking as this. Hard history is not particularly entertaining, but I hope that you feel that the enlightenment this book imparted made your time spent reading it worthwhile. Each of the twelve chapters stands on its own and although there is a chronological progression, it is not essential that the chapters be read sequentially. Read it at your own pace, as dictated by your interests.

Because I’m aware that not everyone will agree with my interpretation of history, I have a website and blog, genebetit.com. I would love to hear from you! There is always more to learn, and respectful dialogue is in short supply these days. So, too, it appears, are those who appreciate history and enjoy reading.

A final thought: the slew of books flooding the market makes it critical that a book receive endorsements (blurbs) and reviews, which can be posted on places like Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble or my blog. Even if you did not particularly like the book, I would appreciate your evaluation, with reasons pro and con. This book addresses a critical topic and I am always open to new information because I prefer to get history right. What has gone on before tends to predict our trajectory into the future. One hopes that we can learn from our past mistakes…

Thank you for buying this book!

Gene Bétit

October 2018

Graphics

1. New Orleans, Louisiana lynching announcement, Jackson Daily News, June 26, 1869, reprinted in Crisis, NAACP’s magazine in August 1919. #1168432, General Research and Reference Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the New York Public Library.

2. Cover of Ida B. Wells’ Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases, published October 26, 1892.

3. Vigilante Justice, Scene from the movie Birth of a Nation (1915).

4. French view of lynching in the United States, front cover of Le Petit Journal, October 7, 1906.

5. Tulsa’s Little Africa burning (1921).

6. Dylann Storm Roof, Getty Images, used under license.

7. Lower level of a slave ship, New York Public Library Digital Collections.

8. Wealthy planters rarely performed physical labor, Belle Grove Plantation, Middletown Virginia. Used by permission.

9. Enslaved Population and Secession

10. Slave sale poster, New York Public Library, in the public domain.

11. Inspection and sale of a Negro, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-15392, LOT 4422-A-1.

12. The Cotton Kingdom, Map 6-1, Cotton Production in the South, Sam Bowers Hillyard, Atlas of Antebellum Southern Agriculture, LSU Press, 1984, used under license.

13. Picking Cotton in Louisiana, Harpers New Monthly Magazine, March 1864.

14. Number of slaves and freedmen in first and last slave census, James J. McDonald, Life in Old Virginia: A Description of Virginia, More Particularly the Tidewater Section, Narrating Many Incidents Relating to the Manners and Customs of Old Virginia So Fast Disappearing as a Result of the War between the States, Together with Many Humorous Stories, Norfolk, Virginia: The Old Virginia Publishing Company, 1908.

15. Frederick Douglass, U.S. National Archives, Local Identifier: FL-FL-22, catalog.archives.gov/id/558770.

16. Army Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas, Mathew Brady, Library of Congress, DIG-cwpbh-03166.

17. Colored Troops furnished by the States and DC Totals, William L. Fox, Regimental Losses in the Civil War, 1861-1865, Appendix X, published 1888.

18. Robert Gould Shaw, Whipple Studio, 1863, from the Boston Athenaeum.

19. US Colored Troops Medal of Honor winners, Find A Grave.com and Congressional Medal of Honor Society, http://www.cmohs.org/recipient-archive.php.

20. Contrabands coming into Federal lines, Harpers Weekly Magazine, 1864.

21. Deaths of Colored Troops, Frederick H. Dyer, A Compendium of the War of the Rebellion, The Dyer Publishing Co., 1908.

22. 1st US Colored Infantry Regiment veterans at 1915 reunion. Howard University, Moorland Springarn Research Center.

23. The Lost Cause, a desolate home coming, Chicago Historical Society, used with permission.

24. Destruction in Richmond, Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ppmsca-08222.

25. Despair on the home front, Used under license of Maddison Bay Company (formerly Leib Image Archives), York, Pennsylvania.

26. Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, US Constitution.

27. The Sherman Reservation, Used under license of Louisiana State University Press.

28. Pennsylvania Democratic campaign flyer depicting liberated slaves and the Freedmen’s Bureau, Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-40764 DLC.

29. Freedmen’s Bureau Official arbitrating between former slaves and their ex-masters, Alfred R. Waud, Harper’s Weekly, July 25, 1868, Library of Congress.

30. Education, the greatest legacy of the Freedmen’s Bureau, James E. Taylor, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Magazine, November 17, 1866, Library of Congress.

31. Tally of the Bureau’s accomplishments in black education, using data on pages 648 – 664, Du Bois, Black Reconstruction. Table compiled by author.

32. Southerners burn a Freedmen’s Bureau school in Tennessee, Harpers Weekly, May 1866, Library of Congress.

33. Mob lynching a Negro during New York City Riots, July 1863. London Illustrated News, August 8, 1864.

34. Lieutenant General James Old Pete Longstreet, Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ppmsca-38007.

35. Battle of Lafayette Place, New Orleans, Harpers Weekly, October 1874.

36. South Carolina Senator Pitchfork Ben Tillman, Library of Congress, LC-B2- 2744-3.

37. The Original Jim Crow, Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-13935.

38. Six African American men lynched in Lee County, Georgia, 1916. Crisis magazine (published by NAACP), April 1916.

39. Booker T. Washington, Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ds-04383.

40. Poster for The Birth of a Nation, the nation’s first blockbuster movie (1915).

41. Ku Klux Klan Women marching in front of the Broome County Court House, Binghamton, New York, 1921. Used under license from Getty Images.

42. Colonel William Leland Hayward, 1917, Underwood Archives.

43. Two first-class Americans, W. A. Rogers, New York Herald, 1918.

44. 369th Infantry Regiment Hellfighters Marching past New York Public Library, February 18, 1919 War Department; US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) at College Park, MD.

45. Sheet music by Lt. James Reese Europe, Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake, published by M. Witmark & Sons, New York, 1919, Library of Congress, American Memory collection.

46. Black Engineer and Services of Supply Troops reburying the dead, US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) at College Park, MD RG 111-SC, 153215.

47. Red Summer, Burning Willie Brown Alive, September 28, 1919 in Omaha, Nebraska. Pubished in Chicago Tribune; holding of the Library of Congress.

48. Pilots of a P-51 Mustang group of the 15th Air Force in Italy, August 1944, U.S. Army Air Forces photo.

49. Colonel (Later General) Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., U.S. Army Air Forces photo.

50. The Chicago Daily Tribune erred! Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-115068.

51. General Colin Powell, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, later Secretary of State, Louis F. Bachrach, used under license.

52. Aniston, Alabama. Bus burning in attempt to stop Freedom Riders on Mother’s Day, The Birmingham News, May 14, 1961. Used by permission.

53. President Johnson signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Cecil Stoughton, White House Press Office, Library of Congress LC-U9-18984-24.

54. US Marshall convoy secures James Meredith’s admission to Ole Miss, Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-135522, cph.3c35522.

55. March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, August 28, 1963, US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) at College Park, MD, 306-SSM-4D (80)10.

56. Emmett Till’s open casket provoked international outrage, San Antonio Express, September 15, 1955. Used under license from Zuma Press.

57. FBI Poster Announcing Search for Andrew Goodman, James Cheney and Mickey Schwerner, Pinterest.

58. Ad for restrictive covenants, Used by permission of the Missouri Historical Society.

59. Kris Kobach, Trump and Pence after the first Voter Fraud Commission Meeting. Celeste Katz, Trump Disbands Voter Fraud" Commission, Blames States for Resistance, Newsweek, January 3, 2018. Used by permission.

60. Alt-Right protesters gathered around Robert E. Lee’s statue, Stephanie Keith, Reuters, used under license from Reuters News Agency, Thomson Reuters.

61. Alt-right entering Emancipation Park holding Nazi, Confederate, and Don’t Tread on Me flags. Anthony Crider (creativecommons.org/licenses), via Wikimedia Commons.

62. Median and Average Wealth by Race, Used with the permission of the Economic Policy Institute.

63. Rates of Incarceration per 100,000 Population, World Prison Brief, Institute for Criminal Policy Research, London.

64. US State and Federal Prison Population, Bureau of Justice Prisoners Series.

65. Percent of Black Students in Intensely Segregated Schools by Region, 2012. Used with the permission of Gary Orfield, UCLA Civil Rights Project.

66. Percentage of African American Students Attending Majority White Schools. Used with the permission of Gary Orfield, UCLA Civil Rights Project.

67. Child Poverty Rates in OECD Countries, Used with the permission of the Economic Policy Institute.

We’re all in the race game, so to speak, either consciously

or unconsciously… We can reject white supremacy and support

racial projects aimed at a democratic distribution of power and

a just distribution of resources. Or we can claim to not be interested

in race, in which case we almost certainly will end up tacitly

supporting white supremacy by virtue of our unwillingness to

confront it. In a society in which white supremacy has structured

every aspect of our world, there can be no claim to neutrality.

Robert Jensen

Journalist/Professor, University of Texas

Chapter One

White Supremacy and Racism: America’s Original Sin?

Perhaps the greatest paradox of the American experience has been the existence of castes of people excluded from the American Declaration of Independence’s central premise that all men are created equal. Second class citizenship has applied to African Americans, Native Americans and to a lesser degree to other people of color — Chinese, other Asians. Middle Easterners and Latinos. Of course, Jews, Irish, Italians and other immigrants not from Anglo-Saxon countries were initially reluctantly accepted on our shores — the inscription at the base of the Statue of Liberty has always been somewhat aspirational. And as activist and social critic Cornell West recently observed at Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, slavery was not America’s Original Sin. West noted that that distinction belongs to Native American genocide. Tragically, white supremacy is no longer the work of hot-headed demagogues, but remains a force so elemental to America that it is almost impossible to imagine the country without it. Founded by white Anglo-Saxon Protestants in the seventeenth century, the mass arrival of the Catholic Irish in the 1850s occasioned the rise of a new party and movement, the Know-Nothing nativists. But over time, the Irish and thousands from southern and eastern Europe were able to blend in and were eventually grudgingly accepted as part of the majority. So have Asians. Pigmentation is the sole factor that has insured that blacks remain beyond the pale. Dark skin makes blacks second-class citizens in America, while ironically it is fashionable to acquire a deep tan during the summer.

Theories of race and white supremacy justified slavery, although economic factors came to play as well in this gross injustice. After slavery was abolished, white Southerners retained the enslavers’ mindset, creating new exploitative labor arrangements and degrading blacks in a highly discriminatory social system labeled Jim Crow. Germany’s Nazis and the Soviet Union’s Communist Party never tired of pointing out American hypocrisy, which fundamentally belies our democratic ideals. Sadly, they had a point: bigotry has certainly split the American soul, dimming our shining beacon on a hill. It is difficult, in fact, impossible to argue that our history does not demonstrate that both racism and white supremacy are part of the warp and woof of America. Frustration, fear and hate are natural by-products of ignorance and hopelessness, something many of our politicians have come to rely on. Although we are reluctant to admit it, assumptions of ‘white supremacy" are absolutely identical to the Nazi concept of Herrenvolk, the existence of a master race — and just as nonsensical.

Terminology is sometimes thrown around rather casually, so it is worth defining racism. As Kaarl Gunnar Myrdal, Swedish politician, economist, sociologist and winner of the 1974 Nobel Peace Prize for economics, observed in his monumental study of racism in the United States, the very concept of race is little more than 250 years old.¹ Concepts of race were first suggested by a Frenchman named François Bernier, a physician for a Persian emperor in the mid-1600s. Five years later, a jeweler traveling through the Middle East encountered a beautiful light-skinned woman in the Caucasian Mountains, the present area of Chechnya and Georgia and by the 1720s pale skin was identified with beauty through European art and literature. White preeminence was reinforced by European missionaries and emigrants who saw native peoples as heathens and savages requiring conversion to Christianity, or extermination.

Racism presumes that one color of people is superior to another; it results when prejudicial attitudes are combined with a power structure that dominates and controls systems and institutions of a political entity, or when one particular group of individuals aspires to retain control. In the United States, this has historically meant white supremacy, since white Anglo-Saxon Protestants were the first Europeans to colonize America. They were not alone in supposing that their civilization was superior to the savages they encountered, as the same delusion was shared by the Spanish and Portuguese in South America — even though individuals were being burned at the stake in Europe for professing different religious beliefs at the time.

Historically, white privilege was the result of advantaging the white upper class socially, politically and economically. Many rigorously deny the existence of white privilege, but it is analogous to oxygen — fundamental to our existence, although invisible. Both racism and white privilege are sensitive subjects, and our first impulse is to insist that we are open-minded, without a whiff of bigotry. In reality, most humans presume that their own tribe is somehow superior, harboring an implicit bias. In that sense, we are all racist, although some strains are far more virulent than others. But the modern science of DNA makes racist theories totally archaic.

When England founded its first North American colony at Jamestown, Virginia in 1607, indentured servants, who generally served a seven-year term, initially provided low-cost labor. In 1619, twenty odd Africans, captured from a Portuguese slaver by an English privateer ship, landed at Point Comfort, near Jamestown. These Africans appear to have been treated initially as indentured servants because they were Christian. The earliest known legal sanctioning of slavery in Virginia occurred in 1640, when John Punch, an African indentured servant, escaped with two whites to Maryland. All three were recaptured, but Punch was sentenced to servitude for life, whereas his two white companions merely had their terms of service extended by four years.² Around this time, planters began to realize that permanent chattel (tangible personal property) slavery was far more profitable than hiring indentured servants, who had to be replaced at regular intervals. Blacks became life-long slaves in part because they were readily identifiable and could not simply blend in with the general populace when they ran away. Efforts were made to enslave native peoples, but they did not adapt well to enslavement and either died or frequently escaped. Slavery was not a new institution, but racial and religious justification for and practices specific to America’s peculiar institution evolved which were unique to the American colonies. White supremacy was at the heart of the justification for American slavery.

Several factors differentiated American slavery from that practiced elsewhere. First, it was lifelong, eliminated family ties, and essentially denied all hope of freedom. Furthermore, the frenzy for profits tended to reduce the slave to a less than human condition by fostering a racial divide that often led to animosity, even hatred in a social system in which whites were masters and blacks were marked for life-long servitude with very few rights. Unfortunately, dehumanization of blacks survived long after slavery was abolished.

The most significant feature of the Black Codes, which originated in Virginia’s series of laws regarding slavery enacted in the seventeenth century codified in 1705, was the principle partus sequitur ventrem (a child’s status follows the mother’s). This meant that children had the status of the mother, not the father, in stark contrast to English common law. Previously, this principle had applied only to animals. This provision was important, because it was commonplace for masters to have sexual relations with their female slaves, who could not refuse. Although no one named it such, this was generally rape. The code clearly defined blacks as chattel (property), of a class analogous to livestock or household pets, and a coercive system was put in place to insure the security of masters’ costly investments, notably mandatory slave patrols. Slaves also had very few rights and existed at the whim of their master.

The Naturalization Act of 1790 limited U.S. citizenship to property-owning white males only. At the time of the American Revolution, twenty percent of the population in North America were enslaved Africans, although the percentages varied widely by both colony and county. The first Census of 1790 determined that forty percent of the slaves in the country resided in Virginia. In what proved to be a very significant fact, blacks came to outnumber whites in many Southern counties over time. In fact, at the time of the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, there were more blacks than whites in both South Carolina and Mississippi. Small wonder participation in slave patrols was required of all males of age in the South, since most Southerners lived in constant fear of slave uprisings, as happened in Haiti (1797 - 1804). Several relatively small-scale slave uprisings in several colonies — and later — states, enhanced these fears.

The great orator and theorist of slavery, Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, declared on the Senate floor in June, 1848, With us the two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black; and all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals, if honest and industrious; and hence have a position and pride of character of which neither poverty nor misfortune can deprive them.³

Historian Wilbur J. Cash confirmed that the slaves’ status was that of mere domestic animals in his classic 1941 study, The Mind of the South, echoing the fear which Jefferson had expressed:

Just as plain was the fact that the institution was brutalizing — to white men. Virtually unlimited power acted inevitably to call up, in the coarser sort of master, that sadism which lies concealed in the depths of universal human nature—bred angry impatience and a taste for cruelty for its own sake… And in the common whites it bred a savage and ignoble hate for the Negro, which required only opportunity to break forth in relentless ferocity; for all that rage against the white trash epithet…⁴

Leonard Bacon (1802 - 1892), an influential Connecticut clergyman and professor at Yale, declared that although slavery was an intolerable evil, blacks could never be raised from the abyss of their degradation. With the recent experience in Haiti in mind, Bacon was mindful of Southern fears of blacks bursting their chains asunder and seeking vengeance.⁵ Jefferson and Madison were both concerned about losing control of thousands of dehumanized human beings whose animal-like bondage had deprived them of self-discipline, not to mention the skills, knowledge, and moral virtues needed for responsible participation in society. Masters, of course, made sure to keep their slaves in ignorance, with a rigid prohibition against educating blacks. Jefferson supported the relocation of freed slaves to Africa and suspected that African-Americans were inferior in intelligence. He feared that emancipating large numbers of slaves would result in slave uprisings, as had happened in Haiti.⁶ Lincoln, too, favored colonization, although his administration was the first to recognize Haiti diplomatically. These attitudes were all manifestations of white supremacy.

Our fourth president, James Madison, the drafter of the first ten amendments to the US Constitution, and thus known also as the Father of the Bill of Rights, noted at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia on June 6, 1787, We have seen the mere distinction of color made in the most enlightened period of time, a ground of the most oppressive dominion ever exercised by man over man.⁷ Most of our founding fathers clearly saw the injustice and immorality of slavery, but those invested in the ownership of slaves found it impossible to do without slave labor because they were earning truly astronomical profits. Some rare individuals did emancipate their slaves, and the institution gradually died out in the North before the Civil War. The large plantations in the South which produced cash crops of cotton, tobacco, rice and sugar cane were too labor-intensive and lucrative to consider this option. Whatever emotions Jefferson felt for his paramour Sally Hemings and their children, he never failed to include them in his plantation inventory, along with their market value. In 1794 and 1796, as they became of age, Jefferson freed four of his and Sally’s children, who were seven eights European in ancestry. Three of their children passed as white.⁸

Myrdal compiled a mass of scientific and anecdotal data to buttress his findings, published in 1944 in a two-volume study of roughly 1200 pages. He observed that in the United States, blackness is defined by whites and noted, After the (Civil) war, the race dogma was retained in the South as necessary to justify the caste system which succeeded slavery in the social organization of Negro-white relations.⁹ His study eventually would be the catalyst for fundamental change, including the integration of the Armed Forces and the 1954 Supreme Court decision which mandated school integration, Brown v Board of Education. Alas, time has shown that court orders and legislation cannot entirely alter attitudes.

In the three decades immediately before the Civil War, an elaborate Southern ideology which dehumanized slaves was developed to defend the South’s peculiar institution, which at the time of war’s outbreak embraced about four million slaves. Increasingly, this system came to be seen as antithetical to the democratic creed that Jefferson and Madison developed, and our Founders adopted as the American system of government. As the Abolition movement began to grow in the North, slavery was a constant source of friction in the growing republic, as will be seen in Chapter Seven.

Throughout this study, it is important to remember that the South had no monopoly on bigotry, as thousands of emancipated slaves in the Northern states were barred from schools and respectable employment, causing them to sink into an underclass, itself a manifestation of white supremacy. Missouri’s Francis Blair, the Democratic vice-presidential candidate in 1868 and a former Union major general who commanded one of Sherman’s three armies on his March to the Sea, insisted that Republicans oppressed the South by subjecting Southerners to the rule of a semi-barbarous race of blacks who are…polygamists and likely to subject white women to their unbridled lust.¹⁰ Lamentably, this bias, seeing blacks as uneducated brutes, has not completely dissipated and is regularly reflected in police incidents, and occasionally, riots.

A large portion of Southerners refused to accept the outcome of the Civil War and the jarring loss of their slaves, the principal source of their wealth. They bitterly resented the presence of Union troops and the activities of the Freeman’s Bureau. As we will see, all three post-war amendments to the Constitution were effectively negated by the deal struck after the Presidential election of 1876, giving the Presidency to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes in return for withdrawal of federal troops from the South. Ultimately, Jim Crow, a racial caste system developed at the turn of the twentieth century, remaining in place well past the middle of the twentieth century. Jim Crow hung like a pall over the South — and throughout the Armed Forces — until the Civil Rights movement began in the 1950s. Jim Crow, or American Apartheid, was more than a series of rigid anti-black laws. It was a way of life and its results were far-ranging and oppressive for every black. Again, it is important not to lose sight of the fact that anti-black sentiment was often just as virulent in the North