Know Your History; Understanding Racism in the US

There will never be an acceptable explanation for what happened between Michael Brown and Darren Wilson in Ferguson but we will never fully grasp why the stage was set for such an encounter unless we know American history.

We cannot fully comprehend why Dylan Roof murdered nine parishioners at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston unless we study the Civil War and the Confederacy.

We cannot truly fathom how a minor traffic stop in Cincinnati could result in a white campus police officer blowing out the brains of an unarmed black man unless we delve into the role race has played in law enforcement from the enactment of the federal Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 to today's mandatory minimum sentencing statutes.

Examining American history provides us with the tools to analyse how the death of Michael Brown and the demonstrations on Florrisant Avenue became a tipping point and sparked a movement. Connecting the dots between the past and the present helps us to see the origins of our current national debate - about race, police misconduct, white supremacy, white privilege, inequality, incarceration and the unfinished equal rights agenda.

The pendulum

A colour-coded map illustrates the 'Free States,' 'Slave Holding States,' and 'Territories Open To Slavery Under The Principle Of Popular Sovereignty,'. It was published in 1898 [Getty Images]
The history of people of African descent in America - which is to say the history of America - is a pendulum of progress and setbacks, of resilience and retaliation, of protest and backlash. There have been allies and there have been opponents. There have been demagogues, who would divide Americans on the basis of colour and class, and visionaries who would seek to lead us to common ground.

The quest for "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" has been an American aspiration since the Declaration of Independence, but black Americans, Native Americans and women were not at the table in 1776. Forty of the 56 signers owned other people.

Lest there be any doubt about where the young nation's sentiments lay, the Supreme Court's 1857 Dred Scott decision made clear that people of African descent - whether enslaved or free - would not be considered American citizens and had no legal standing in the courts. It mattered not that some of their grandfathers had served in George Washington's Continental Army during the Revolutionary War.

Last month in Washington, DC, at the third annual March on Washington Film Festival, Clarence B Jones, a confidant and personal legal counsel to Martin Luther King, Jr., said "a definitive discussion and description of the institution of slavery, the concomitant supporting ideology of white supremacy and the impact it has had on subsequent generations" are missing from the history curriculum of most American high schools and colleges.

Without that knowledge, he said, it is impossible to understand America today.

"Our history has never taught the centrality of race as the key barometer to how well we are doing with the American Experiment," added Pulitzer Prize winning historian Taylor Branch that same evening. "If you don’t have race at the forefront of an investigation of how America is fulfilling its goals, then something is wrong. And unfortunately right now we are paying the price for 50 years of trying to avoid and hide that subject."

Indeed every time we see another video - of Sandra Bland, of Freddie Gray, of Tamir Rice - we witness the horrifying evidence of our national failure to confront this legacy.

What used to be called "the Negro problem", really is a matter of the intransigence of white supremacists who are mired in the past.

Slavery was not the benign, paternalistic system described in the history textbooks of my youth. Instead, it was a brutal, often sadistic, form of domination over the bodies and minds of people who were kidnapped, whipped, beaten and raped. Generations of human beings toiled against their will without pay or legal rights.

For 246 years - from 1619, when 20 Africans were forced into indentured servitude in Jamestown, Virginia, until the end of the Civil War in 1865 - most people of African descent in America were enslaved. Those who had purchased or otherwise been granted their freedom lived a precarious, circumscribed existence.

Slavery and the slave trade were essential to the American economy and to the development of American capitalism, especially after Native Americans were driven off their ancestral land in the Deep South in the 1830s to make way for vast cotton plantations. The wealth of the nation was inextricably dependent upon uncompensated labour, which enriched not only the planters, but universities, banks, textile mills, ship owners and insurance companies, who held policies on their bodies. To settle a debt, an owner merely needed to sell one of his slaves.

By 1850, enslaved Americans, who were listed in their owners' inventory ledgers alongside cattle and farm equipment, were worth $1.3bn or one-fifth of the nation's wealth. When the first shot of the Civil War was fired at Fort Sumter in April 1861, the value of that human collateral exceeded $3bn and was worth more than the nation’s banks, railroads, mills and factories combined. Now numbering four million souls, they were, as Ta-Nehisi Coates has written, America's "greatest financial asset".

Immediately after the Civil War, during the hopeful, but brief period of Reconstruction, black people were finally recognised as citizens with rights. But just as quickly as the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments abolished slavery, provided equal protection under the law and granted black men the right to vote, Reconstruction ended with retaliatory Redemption.

When federal troops abandoned their posts in the South after the Compromise of 1877, the defeated Confederates regrouped as the Ku Klux Klan and the Knights of the White Camellia. They regained control of their workforce, not by owning them, but by circumscribing their lives through terror, violence and voter suppression.

READ MORE: Reflections of a former white supremacist

In Louisiana, the number of registered black voters plummeted from 130,334 in 1896 to 5,320 in 1898. Fraudulent voting schemes pushed black elected officials from state legislatures and from Congress. During the late 19th century, there were 20 black members of Congress . When North Carolina's George Henry White left in 1901, there would not be another until 1928, when Oscar DePriest was elected in Chicago. For virtually the first half of the 20th century the 15th Amendment had no value for blacks in the former Confederate states, where they were denied the right to vote through the cynical artifice of poll taxes, literacy tests and grandfather clauses.

Jim Crow laws and Black Codes obliterated Reconstruction wins and codified racially based discrimination. The sharecropping system, which left black farmers in debt at the end of every harvest, was equivalent to slavery. Black children were allowed to attend school only during times of the year when there were no farm chores to do. Historian Rayford Logan called the period "nadir of American race relations".

Those who got too uppity were lynched, firebombed in their homes and chased from land they owned.

In 1915, DW Griffith's technically groundbreaking movie, Birth of a Nation, glorified the Klan and fed the trope of black inferiority and criminality. Around the same time, a migration wave began that would eventually see more than six million black Americans flee the brutality and deprivation of the South for the relative freedom of the North and the West.

Four years later, when black soldiers returned from World War I military duty in France, they were attacked during the "Red Summer" as resentful whites instigated riots in at least 34 cities, from Chicago and Washington, DC to Memphis and Charleston. Their goal was to put men who had received France's Croix de Guerre back in their place as the Klan had done after Reconstruction. The NAACP investigated and black newspapers editorialised. During the succeeding decades - through the Depression, the New Deal and World War II - the pendulum continued to swing between progress and setbacks.

The attitudes that informed Jim Crow laws and discriminatory public policy existed in the North as well as the South. The results are evident today in major American cities, where banks refused loans to black home buyers in the 1950s and 1960s, literally drawing on maps red lines around predominantly black neighbourhoods and ensuring that those homes would not appreciate in value at the same rate as comparable white neighbourhoods.

In 1957, when my parents were ready to finance a new home in an all-black development of newly constructed residences in a suburb of Indianapolis, they were unable to secure a loan from any of the city's large banks. Both were college graduates and business executives. Our neighbours were doctors, teachers, coaches, plumbers, entrepreneurs, realtors, nurses, ministers, architects, insurance salesmen and carpenters. Many of the men were veterans of World War II and the Korean War and therefore eligible for the GI Bill's home loan guaranty. In other words, people who normally would have had no trouble qualifying for mortgages. Instead, they went to Mammoth Life Insurance, a black-owned insurance company then based in Louisville, Kentucky, for their loans.

In 1954, the Supreme Court's Brown v Board of Education decision struck down so-called separate but equal education and mandated that American schools be racially integrated. As a post-Brown v Board child, I always attended integrated schools, encountering the occasional racist, but, like my parents, rolling with the punches, keeping perspective and finding progressive kindred spirits in the process. But in many communities - both in the South and the North - the diehard segregationists responded with paranoia and bitterness, decrying the evils of race-mixing and miscegenation.

In 1957, nine students at Little Rock High School were harassed and spit upon. In 1963, Alabama governor George Wallace tried, but failed, to block the enrollment of Vivian Malone and James Hood. Across the South, federal troops were called in to facilitate the process.

For a time, it seemed that American schools might be integrated, but that pendulum soon began to move in the other direction as all-white academies opened. Today, most Americans are enlightened enough not to oppose interracial marriage and are much more tolerant than their grandparents and great-grandparents, but American public schools in most areas are more segregated than ever, as Nikole Hannah-Jones' April 2014 ProPublica investigation of Tuscaloosa, Alabama schools so well illustrated.

Pressure from Martin Luther King, Jr., Fannie Lou Hamer, thousands of activists and a powerful cadre of civil rights leaders combined with the political muscle and willingness of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations to push for critical legislation during the mid-1960s. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 forbade discrimination on the basis of sex as well as race in hiring, promoting and firing. Today, our workplaces are undoubtedly more diverse than they were in the 1950s, with more people of colour employed as physicians, firefighters, attorneys, journalists, investment bankers and professors. But it is still true that when a white person and a black person with comparable credentials apply for a job, the white person is more likely to be hired.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlawed poll taxes and made it possible for thousands of formerly disenfranchised black Americans to vote. Now, throughout America, there are thousands of people of colour who are city council members, mayors, members of Congress, on school boards and of course, now in the White House. During the last two presidential elections, black voters turned out in record numbers because they were motivated and because many of the old obstacles to voting had been removed.

But a backlash has developed in that arena, too. Two years ago, in Shelby County v Holder, the Supreme Court gutted Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, removing the "preclearance" provisions that required states with a history of voter discrimination to seek permission for changes to electoral procedures. Despite no evidence of significant voter fraud, Republican legislators immediately passed new voter ID laws that groups like the Brennan Center for Justice and the Advancement Project argue will suppress voter turnout among black, Latino, elderly and young voters, who are more likely to vote for Democrats.

President Barack Obama's election in 2008 and re-election in 2012 provided evidence of how much the nation has changed in the last half a century . While arrival of the "post-racial" era was much overstated and a result of magical thinking, Americans rightly celebrated the progress on Inauguration Day 2009. The high of the moment, though, was accompanied by the rise of the Tea Party and the reminder of the strain of white supremacy that is baked into the American DNA.

Rattled by the presence of a black family in the White House, "birthers" emerged and fabricated a myth that America's first black president - by some amazing feat of molecular transference - had been born not in Hawaii, where his mother was located at the time, but in Kenya. In this age of social media, Youtube and cable television, their illogical stories took flight, promulgated not just by the poorly educated prone to conspiracy theories, but by people who clearly knew better.