The New York Times Magazine has recently published an on-going series by Nikole Hannah-Jones called the 1619 Project that seeks to reframe our country's crucial history and its democratic ideas beginning in 1619 when African slaves were first introduced to the English settlement at Jamestown and the subsequent effect of slavery on American history and the formulation of American democratic ideas. The first of the series was published August 14, 2019 and is called : "Our Democracy's Founding Ideals Were False When They Were Written. Black Americans Have Fought to Make Them True."
Every American needs to read this and so I have reprinted it here in case you do not have access to the NY Times.
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| A demonstrator at the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, led by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to fight for black suffrage. Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos |
My dad always flew an American flag in our front
yard. The blue paint on our two-story house was perennially chipping; the
fence, or the rail by the stairs, or the front door, existed in a perpetual
state of disrepair, but that flag always flew pristine. Our corner lot, which
had been redlined by the federal government, was along the river that divided
the black side from the white side of our Iowa town. At the edge of our lawn,
high on an aluminum pole, soared the flag, which my dad would replace as soon
as it showed the slightest tatter.
My dad was born into a family of sharecroppers on a white
plantation in Greenwood, Miss., where black people bent over cotton from
can’t-see-in-the-morning to can’t-see-at-night, just as their enslaved
ancestors had done not long before. The Mississippi of my dad’s youth was an
apartheid state that subjugated its near-majority black population through
breathtaking acts of violence. White residents in Mississippi lynched more
black people than those in any other state in the country, and the white people
in my dad’s home county lynched more black residents than those in any other
county in Mississippi, often for such “crimes” as entering a room occupied by
white women, bumping into a white girl or trying to start a sharecroppers
union. My dad’s mother, like all the black people in Greenwood, could not vote,
use the public library or find work other than toiling in the cotton fields or
toiling in white people’s houses. So in the 1940s, she packed up her few
belongings and her three small children and joined the flood of black
Southerners fleeing North. She got off the Illinois Central Railroad in
Waterloo, Iowa, only to have her hopes of the mythical Promised Land shattered
when she learned that Jim Crow did not end at the Mason-Dixon line.
Grandmama, as we called her, found a house in a segregated
black neighborhood on the city’s east side and then found the work that was
considered black women’s work no matter where black women lived — cleaning
white people’s houses. Dad, too, struggled to find promise in this land. In
1962, at age 17, he signed up for the Army. Like many young men, he joined in
hopes of escaping poverty. But he went into the military for another reason as
well, a reason common to black men: Dad hoped that if he served his country,
his country might finally treat him as an American.
The Army did not end up being his way out. He was passed
over for opportunities, his ambition stunted. He would be discharged under
murky circumstances and then labor in a series of service jobs for the rest of
his life. Like all the black men and women in my family, he believed in hard
work, but like all the black men and women in my family, no matter how hard he
worked, he never got ahead.
So when I was young, that flag outside our home never made
sense to me. How could this black man, having seen firsthand the way his
country abused black Americans, how it refused to treat us as full citizens,
proudly fly its banner? I didn’t understand his patriotism. It deeply
embarrassed me.
I had been taught, in school, through cultural osmosis, that
the flag wasn’t really ours, that our history as a people began with
enslavement and that we had contributed little to this great nation. It seemed
that the closest thing black Americans could have to cultural pride was to be
found in our vague connection to Africa, a place we had never been. That my dad
felt so much honor in being an American felt like a marker of his degradation,
his acceptance of our subordination.
Like most young people, I thought I understood so much, when
in fact I understood so little. My father knew exactly what he was doing when
he raised that flag. He knew that our people’s contributions to building the
richest and most powerful nation in the world were indelible, that the United
States simply would not exist without us.
In August 1619, just 12 years after the English settled
Jamestown, Va., one year before the Puritans landed at Plymouth Rock and some
157 years before the English colonists even decided they wanted to form their
own country, the Jamestown colonists bought 20 to 30 enslaved Africans from
English pirates. The pirates had stolen them from a Portuguese slave ship that
had forcibly taken them from what is now the country of Angola. Those men and
women who came ashore on that August day were the beginning of American
slavery. They were among the 12.5 million Africans who would be kidnapped from
their homes and brought in chains across the Atlantic Ocean in the largest
forced migration in human history until the Second World War. Almost two
million did not survive the grueling journey, known as the Middle Passage.
Before the abolishment of the international slave trade,
400,000 enslaved Africans would be sold into America. Those individuals and
their descendants transformed the lands to which they’d been brought into some
of the most successful colonies in the British Empire. Through backbreaking
labor, they cleared the land across the Southeast. They taught the colonists to
grow rice. They grew and picked the cotton that at the height of slavery was
the nation’s most valuable commodity, accounting for half of all American
exports and 66 percent of the world’s supply. They built the plantations of
George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, sprawling properties
that today attract thousands of visitors from across the globe captivated by
the history of the world’s greatest democracy. They laid the foundations of the
White House and the Capitol, even placing with their unfree hands the Statue of
Freedom atop the Capitol dome. They lugged the heavy wooden tracks of the
railroads that crisscrossed the South and that helped take the cotton they
picked to the Northern textile mills, fueling the Industrial Revolution. They
built vast fortunes for white people North and South — at one time, the
second-richest man in the nation was a Rhode Island “slave trader.” Profits
from black people’s stolen labor helped the young nation pay off its war debts
and financed some of our most prestigious universities. It was the relentless
buying, selling, insuring and financing of their bodies and the products of
their labor that made
Wall Street a thriving banking, insurance and trading sector and New York City
the financial capital of the world.
But it would be historically inaccurate to reduce the
contributions of black people to the vast material wealth created by our
bondage. Black Americans have also been, and continue to be, foundational to
the idea of American freedom. More than any other group in this country’s
history, we have served, generation after generation, in an overlooked but
vital role: It is we who have been the perfecters of this democracy.
The United States is a nation founded on both an ideal and a
lie. Our Declaration of Independence, approved on July 4, 1776, proclaims that
“all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain
unalienable rights.” But the white men who drafted those words did not believe
them to be true for the hundreds of thousands of black people in their midst.
“Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” did not apply to fully one-fifth
of the country. Yet despite being violently denied the freedom and justice
promised to all, black Americans believed fervently in the American creed.
Through centuries of black resistance and protest, we have helped the country
live up to its founding ideals. And not only for ourselves — black rights
struggles paved the way for every other rights struggle, including women’s and
gay rights, immigrant and disability rights.
Without the idealistic, strenuous and patriotic efforts of
black Americans, our democracy today would most likely look very different — it
might not be a democracy at all.
The very first person to die for this country in the
American Revolution was a black man who himself was not free. Crispus Attucks
was a fugitive from slavery, yet he gave his life for a new nation in which his
own people would not enjoy the liberties laid out in the Declaration for
another century. In every war this nation has waged since that first one, black
Americans have fought — today we are the most likely of all racial groups to
serve in the United States military.
My father, one of those many black Americans who answered
the call, knew what it would take me years to understand: that the year 1619 is
as important to the American story as 1776. That black Americans, as much as
those men cast in alabaster in the nation’s capital, are this nation’s true
“founding fathers.” And that no people has a greater claim to that flag than
us.
In June 1776, Thomas Jefferson sat at his
portable writing desk in a rented room in Philadelphia and penned these words:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that
they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among
these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” For the last 243 years,
this 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
brother of Jefferson’s wife, born to Martha Jefferson’s father and a woman he
owned. It was common for white enslavers to keep their half-black children in
slavery. Jefferson had chosen Hemings, from among about 130 enslaved people
that 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 democratic republic based on the individual rights of men.
At the time, one-fifth of the population within the 13
colonies struggled under a brutal system of slavery unlike anything that had
existed in the world before. Chattel slavery was not conditional but racial. It
was heritable and permanent, not temporary, meaning generations of black people
were born into it and passed their enslaved status onto their children.
Enslaved people were not recognized as human beings but as property that could
be mortgaged, traded, bought, sold, used as collateral, given as a gift and
disposed of violently. Jefferson’s fellow white colonists knew that black
people were human beings, but they created a network of laws and customs,
astounding for both their precision and cruelty, that ensured that enslaved
people would never be treated as such. As the abolitionist William Goodell
wrote in 1853, “If any thing founded on falsehood might be called a science, we
might add the system of American slavery to the list of the strict sciences.”
Enslaved people could not legally marry. They were barred
from learning to read and restricted from meeting privately in groups. They had
no claim to their own children, who could be bought, sold and traded away from
them on auction blocks alongside furniture and cattle or behind storefronts
that advertised “Negroes for Sale.” Enslavers and the courts did not honor
kinship ties to mothers, siblings, cousins. In most courts, they had no legal
standing. Enslavers could rape or murder their property without legal
consequence. Enslaved people could own nothing, will nothing and inherit
nothing. They were legally tortured, including by those working for Jefferson
himself. They could be worked to death, and often were, in order to produce the
highest profits for the white people who owned them.
Yet in making the argument against Britain’s tyranny, one of
the colonists’ favorite rhetorical devices was to claim that they were
the slaves — to Britain. For this duplicity, they faced burning criticism both
at home and abroad. As Samuel Johnson, an English writer and Tory opposed to
American independence, quipped, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for
liberty among the drivers of Negroes?”
Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact
that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their
independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of
slavery. By 1776, Britain had grown deeply conflicted over its role in the
barbaric institution that had reshaped the Western Hemisphere. In London, there
were growing calls to abolish the slave trade. This would have upended the
economy of the colonies, in both the North and the South. The wealth and
prominence that allowed Jefferson, at just 33, and the other founding fathers
to believe they could successfully break off from one of the mightiest empires
in the world came from the dizzying profits generated by chattel slavery. In
other words, we may never have revolted against Britain if the founders had not
understood that slavery empowered them to do so; nor if they had not believed
that independence was required in order to ensure that slavery would continue.
It is not incidental that 10 of this nation’s first 12 presidents were
enslavers, and some might argue that this nation was founded not as a democracy
but as a slavocracy.
Jefferson and the other founders were keenly aware of this
hypocrisy. And so in Jefferson’s original draft of the Declaration of
Independence, he tried to argue that it wasn’t the colonists’ fault. Instead,
he blamed the king of England for forcing the institution of slavery on the
unwilling colonists and called the trafficking in human beings a crime. Yet
neither Jefferson nor most of the founders intended to abolish slavery, and in
the end, they struck the passage.
There is no mention of slavery in the final Declaration of
Independence. Similarly, 11 years later, 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 texts in which they were
making the case for freedom to the world, they did not want to explicitly
enshrine their hypocrisy, so they sought to hide it. The Constitution contains
84 clauses. Six deal directly with the enslaved and their enslavement, as the
historian David Waldstreicher has written, 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 Africans for a term of 20 years, allowed Congress to mobilize the
militia to put down insurrections by the enslaved and forced states that had
outlawed slavery to turn over enslaved people who had run away seeking refuge.
Like many others, the writer and abolitionist Samuel Bryan called out the
deceit, saying of the Constitution, “The words are dark and ambiguous; such as
no plain man of common sense would have used, [and] are evidently chosen to
conceal from Europe, that in this enlightened country, the practice of slavery
has its advocates among men in the highest stations.”
With independence, the founding fathers could no longer
blame slavery on Britain. The sin became this nation’s own, and so, too, the
need to cleanse it. The shameful paradox of continuing chattel slavery in a
nation founded on individual freedom, scholars today assert, led to a hardening
of the racial caste system. This ideology, reinforced not just by laws but by
racist science and literature, maintained that black people were subhuman, a
belief that allowed white Americans to live with their betrayal. By the early
1800s, according to the legal historians Leland B. Ware, Robert J. Cottrol and
Raymond T. Diamond, white Americans, whether they engaged in slavery or not,
“had a considerable psychological as well as economic investment in the
doctrine of black inferiority.” While liberty was the inalienable right of the
people who would be considered white, enslavement and subjugation became the
natural station of people who had any discernible drop of “black” blood.
The Supreme Court enshrined this thinking in the law in its
1857 Dred Scott decision, ruling that black people, whether enslaved or free,
came from a “slave” race. This made them inferior to white people and,
therefore, incompatible with American democracy. Democracy was for citizens,
and the “Negro race,” the court ruled, was “a separate class of persons,” which
the founders had “not regarded as a portion of the people or citizens of the
Government” and had “no rights which a white man was bound to respect.” This
belief, that black people were not merely enslaved but were a slave race,
became the root of the endemic racism that we still cannot purge from this
nation to this day. If black people could not ever be citizens, if they were a
caste apart from all other humans, then they did not require the rights
bestowed by the Constitution, and the “we” in the “We the People” was not a
lie.
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