Apr 2, 2022
Amid all the focus right now on the injustice being wrought on the people of Ukraine, a significant step in correcting the injustices in our own country was taken in the White House Rose Garden this past week. With the massive task at hand of supporting the Ukrainians in their fight for their rights and freedom while threading the nuclear needle, President Joe Biden has understood and acknowledged that a fight has been waged here on our land since it was a colony of Great Britain.
Our fight to be free from King George ended in victory and independence which we celebrate to this day. But that did not include a large subset of the inhabitants of this new country. In a census taken shortly after the United States was formed, there were almost 700,000 slaves, which made up 18% of the total population.
When slavery began in America is a hot political topic right now, with the right using it to gain points in the polls. The year 1619 and “Critical Race Theory” are the current catch-phrases for the support of white nationalism, cloaked in the guise of protecting our white children from horror stories of the past and the guilt of their ancestors. If history is to be taught, it should be the truth.
Although 1619, when an English ship called the White Lion brought 20-some Africans to the Virginia colony, is used as a reference point for the first slaves brought to this country; in actuality the European slave trade began in the 1400s. Spanish expeditions brought enslaved Africans to what is now South Carolina and Florida in the early 1500s. In the timeline of America, African-Americans have been enslaved longer than they have been free.
With such a long, ingrained history, racism in America has been hard to extinguish. Abraham Lincoln’s emancipation of the slaves via the 13th amendment in 1865 did not give black Americans automatic equality. In the southern states, racist oppression remained very strong. In the south, “Jim Crow” laws kept black Americans the lowest of the lower class, akin to India’s Untouchables, and gave the southern white class freedom to terrorize black people and their communities.
A 1922 book on white supremacy written by American Lothrop Stoddard afforded the Nazis a catch phrase of their own – “untermenschen” or sub-humans. We have been told about the segregation in the south, that blacks and whites had separate drinking fountains, blacks couldn’t sit at the lunch counter with whites, and we know that there was the KKK and lynching. We want to think that the horrible brutality was just kept to isolated incidents and Nazi-like terrorism couldn’t happen here. But it did, and it does.
In 1955, a young 14-year-old black teen from Chicago was visiting relatives in Mississippi. He was used to racism, but his mother warned him how much worse it was down south and to be very careful. According to the story, he was a fun-loving teen and had bragged to his cousins that he had a white girlfriend back home, a huge status symbol to make them jealous. They challenged his boast, and dared him to go up to the young white woman behind the counter of the store they were at and ask her for a date. He went inside and how much he actually flirted with her is unclear but she told a story to her husband of a sexual attack.
He and his half-brother broke into the home of the boy’s uncle and abducted the teen, beat him and shot him in the head, tied a 75-pound cotton gin fan which he had been made to carry, to his body with barbed wire and tossed him in the river.
When his body was found three days later, a quick burial was attempted by the authorities, but the teen’s mother insisted on him being brought back to her in Chicago. She wanted the world to see what they did to her son and held an open casket funeral. A picture was published in Jet, and from there, the mainstream media. A trial of the two men was held. They were promptly acquitted by an all-white-male jury, on the grounds that the identity of the severely mutilated body could not be proven beyond a doubt. Afterward, the men owned up to the murder. Many years later, the woman who had set her husband off on a raging revenge admitted that the young man never did anything to deserve what was done to him.
Fast forward through two or three generations of racial struggles to February 2020. A 25-year-old young black man was jogging through a neighborhood in Georgia. A white man, his son, and their neighbor pursued the jogger in their truck, overtook him, assaulted and shot him. But this time, the attackers were found guilty, a hopeful sign that we in America are making progress in recognizing that African-Americans are not sub-human but are equal.
There is no biological basis for skin pigmentation to differentiate classes of human beings. The black population in America today numbers around 42 million people who still feel the lingering effects of being forced into the lowest caste in the hierarchy of the American population, a hierarchy that needs to be dissolved. Inherited impressions and suspicions which were built into a system developed to keep slave property under control need to be debunked.
Last week in the Rose Garden, President Biden remembered that 14-year-old whose senseless murder occurred 67 years ago with the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act. Finally, a federal statute, after having been first considered in Congress 120 years ago, and with 200 attempts over the years, the bill passed by unanimous consent in the Senate, and by a vote of 422-3 in the House. This law defines “lynching” as a hate crime that leads to death or serious bodily injury and comes with a penalty of 30 years in prison and fines. The killing of jogger Ahmaud Arbery among scores of others shows us that we still have to deal with this deep-seated racial hate. In his speech, Biden said “Racial hate isn’t an old problem – it’s a persistent problem. Hate never goes away, it only hides.”.
While it is heartening to see the outpouring of support for the people in Ukraine who are fighting valiantly for the right to be a sovereign nation, independent of a Russian dictator, the reason behind that support should never be “they look like us.”
Susan Bigler is a Sheridan resident.
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