9781422272701

COVID-19 DRONES AND SURVEILLANCE ENTERTAINMENT AND VIDEO GAMES LEGALIZING MARIJUANA MEDIA BIAS

REPARATIONS FOR SLAVERY CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM EDUCATION GUN CONTROL HEALTH CARE IMMIGRATION JOBS AND ECONOMY MENTAL HEALTH POVERTY AND WELFARE PRIVACY AND SOCIAL MEDIA RACE RELATIONS RELIGIOUS FREEDOM THE ENVIRONMENT GENDER EQUALITY

JENNIFER L. ROWAN

PH I L ADELPH I A | MI AMI

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contents

Chapter 1: Overview of Slavery and

Racial Discrimination in America.............................. 7 Chapter 2: Should the Government Pay Reparations?...............33 Chapter 3: Will Reparations Close the Wealth Gap?..................53 Chapter 4: Should Reparations Be Limited to the Descendants of Slaves?.......................................69 Chapter 5: Should Relief Programs and Economic Initiatives Prioritize Black Americans?. ...................83 Series Glossary of Key Terms....................................................100 Organizations to Contact.........................................................101 Further Reading.......................................................................102 Internet Resources...................................................................103 Chapter Notes. .........................................................................104 Index........................................................................................108 Author’s Biography and Credits...............................................112 K E Y I C O N S T O L O O K F O R : Words to Understand: These words with their easy-to-understand definitions will increase the reader’s understanding of the text while building vocabulary skills. Sidebars: This boxed material within the main text allows readers to build knowledge, gain insights, explore possibilities, and broaden their perspectives by weaving together additional information to provide realistic and holistic perspectives. Educational videos: Readers can view videos by scanning our QR codes, providing them with additional educational content to supplement the text. Examples include news coverage, moments in history, speeches, iconic sports moments, and much more! Text-Dependent Questions: These questions send the reader back to the text for more careful attention to the evidence presented there. Research Projects: Readers are pointed toward areas of further inquiry connected to each chapter. Suggestions are provided for projects that encourage deeper research and analysis. Series Glossary of Key Terms: This back-of-the-book glossary contains terminology used throughout this series. Words found here increase the reader’s ability to read and comprehend higher-level books and articles in this field.

WORDS TO UNDERSTAND

chattel slavery— a system in which persons are enslaved for the entirety of their lives, and whose children and grandchildren are automatically enslaved. Freedmen’s Bureau— formally the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, an agency established by Congress in 1865 to help former Black slaves and poor Whites in the South after the American Civil War. lynching— a mob action in which a person is put to death without proper legal proceedings; carried out disproportionately against Black Americans in the decades following the American Civil War. segregation— the enforced separation of different racial groups in a county, state, or country. Three-fifths Compromise— a provision of the original US Constitution that counted slaves as three-fifths of a person for determining a state’s population, and therefore its representation in Congress; the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) eliminated this provision.

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OVERVIEW OF SLAVERY AND RACIAL DISCRIMINATION IN AMERICA

1

When European merchants first took captured Africans across the Atlantic Ocean in the early

1500s to provide a labor force for Spanish colonies in the New World, they planted the first seeds of a legacy that still affects America today. Although the United States abolished slavery in 1865, the century that followed remained fraught with systemic racism that kept Black Americans from achieving full citizenship and equality under the law. In the decades since abolition, Black Americans have struggled, fought, and died in their attempts to secure the equality promised to them by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the US Constitution. The civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s legally ended segregation . But systemic racism has continued to pervade American culture and caused continued social, economic, and political strife for Black Americans. To understand how America might make amends for the legacy of slavery, it is necessary to examine the history that has shaped the reality of Black Americans today.

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AMERICA’S “PECULIAR INSTITUTION” The story of slavery and racial discrimination in America began in 1619, when the first African slaves arrived at Jamestown, Virginia. Prior to this, the transatlantic slave trade had prospered for decades, due to the demand for cheap manual labor in Portuguese and Spanish colonies in

UNDERSTANDING RACISM

Racism is the belief that human beings can be divided into separate groups (races) based on certain biological characteristics, and that there are differences between those races in matters of physicality, mental ability, and so on. This belief has no basis in scientific fact; it is a cultural invention. Yet the impact of race theory on human society has been far reaching. Racism, when put into practice, serves to identify a particular group of people as inferior and subservient to another group. With the establishment of the African slave trade, White Europeans, and later White Americans, used the belief in the racial superiority of White people to justify the enslavement of Black Africans and their descendants. In many parts of the world and in multiple historic eras, the concept of race has resulted in public and governmental policies that have perpetuated systemic racism. In South Africa, for example, the apartheid system developed in the early 1900s, forcing Black South Africans to exist in a society in which they were second-class citizens.

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CONTEMPORARY ISSUES: REPARATIONS FOR SLAVERY

When we think of racism in America, what comes to mind is the ideology that Black Americans (and other minorities) are somehow “less than” their White counterparts. This is, in part, due to centuries of White people maintaining control and power in the United States, just as White Europeans did in the parts of the world they acquired during the Age of Imperialism. For Black Americans in particular, slavery was the manifestation of White control over the “other,” that those of White European descent were biologically superior and thus destined to rule over other races. The end of the American Civil War and the abolition of slavery gave birth to new attempts to create a system in the South to keep newly freed Black Americans and their descendants in a state of legal inferiority. The battle for civil rights in the mid-twentieth century resulted in legislation preventing the perpetuation of such oppression. But racism has continued to influence multiple areas in which Black Americans today struggle to obtain equal treatment under the law, achieve economic mobility, and access a higher quality of life through education, employment, and housing. the Caribbean, Central America, and South America. The British colonies on the Eastern coast of North America had, to this point, remained free of chattel slavery , even as British holdings in the Caribbean utilized the practice. But with the arrival of those twenty or so enslaved Africans, the legacy of slavery in America began in earnest. By the outbreak of the American Revolution, every colony allowed for the existence of slavery, particularly in the South, where the owners of large plantations raising labor-intensive cash crops depended on slave labor to

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Overview of Slavery and Racial Discrimination in America

maintain economic prosperity. Still, even slaveholders like Thomas Jefferson realized that slavery posed a conundrum as the colonies hurtled toward revolution and independence. In his original draft of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson listed the African slave trade as one of the colonists’ grievances against the British Crown. However, this reference was removed from the final document in order to appease slaveholders, who did not wish to address the issue of slavery. The founding of the United States as an independent nation brought another opportunity for slavery to be discussed and addressed. At the Constitutional Convention in 1787, some northern delegates wanted to see slavery abolished in the new Constitution. Again, however, delegates from the southern states decried the abolition of slavery as a blow to the agricultural economy on which their prosperity depended. The debate became one of representation in Congress, resulting in the Three-fifths Compromise . This compromise allowed for three-fifths of all slaves in a state to be counted toward representation in the House of Representatives. Another provision of the Constitution allowed Congress to ban the international slave trade, but only after a twenty-year period. The word “slavery” was never explicitly used in the original text of the Constitution. It would not be mentioned until the Thirteenth Amendment officially abolished s lavery in 1865. Over the next forty years, there were several attempts to control the spread of slavery in the growing United

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CONTEMPORARY ISSUES: REPARATIONS FOR SLAVERY

“Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.” 1

—abolitionist Frederick Douglass

States. The international slave trade was outlawed in 1808, although slaves in the United States could still be bought or sold. Slavery was banned in the territories identified in the Northwest Ordinance (1787). In 1820, the Missouri Compromise prohibited slavery north of latitude 36°30 ′ in the new lands acquired through the Louisiana Purchase (other than the new state of Missouri) and worked to keep the balance between slave and free states in the Union. Other agreements, like the Compromise of 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, sought to appease both sides of the growing divide over slavery’s expansion. Although lawmakers made many attempts to compromise on a legislative level and keep a balance between free and enslaved persons in the growing United States, tensions continued to grow between the regions of

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Overview of Slavery and Racial Discrimination in America

the country. The abolitionist movement increasingly called for a complete end to slavery in all parts of the country, and the nascent Republican Party adopted abolition as a major plank of its political platform. Abraham Lincoln, whose election to the presidency would spark a domino of state secessions in the winter of 1860–61, compared the tenuous situation to a house divided and unable to “endure permanently half slave and half free.” 2

Enslaved Blacks work in the cotton field on a Southern plantation, 1850s. On the eve of the Civil War, nearly 4 million Black Americans were enslaved in the fifteen states where the institution was legal. Their labor fueled the South’s economy, which was based on farming.

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CONTEMPORARY ISSUES: REPARATIONS FOR SLAVERY

In addition to the legal status of slavery in America, free Blacks faced another set of difficulties. Many southern states restricted the ability of free Blacks to remain within their borders, whether born free or manumitted by their owners. Mississippi, for example, required a free Black person to be sponsored in court by a White man—often his former owner—if he wished to remain in the state. The 1857 Dred Scott Supreme Court decision also solidified the legal status of Black Americans by confirming the belief that Blacks could not sue for their own freedom because they were not citizens of the United States. The ruling added fuel to the fire of division between N orth and South. Black Americans faced discrimination in the North, as well. Irish immigrants, in particular, felt animosity toward free Blacks, who they felt created competition for jobs in large cities. Anger over a military draft in 1863 led to protests and riots by working class New Yorkers that devolved into violence against the Black population of the city. Despite the challenges facing Black Americans in the years between America’s independence and the outbreak of civil war, many enslaved people risked their lives to reach freedom in northern states or Canada. They utilized the Underground Railroad to make their way north, and many also became active in the abolitionist movement and worked to pressure the federal government for a legislative end to slavery.

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Overview of Slavery and Racial Discrimination in America

THE CIVIL WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION The election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 became a flashpoint in American history, as it directly led several southern states, starting with South Carolina, to secede from the Union and form the Confederate States of America. By April 1861, tensions had grown to the point that war between the states was imminent. It began on April 12, when gun batteries in Charleston Harbor fired on Fort Sumter, held by a federal garrison that refused to surrender the fort and return to the North. Lincoln called for volunteers to fight against the rebellion, a move that prompted four more southern states to secede and join the Confederacy. What followed was four years of bloody fighting that left over 620,000 men dead and caused widespread destruction. The purpose of the Civil War changed from a fight to save the Union to a fight to end slavery in early 1863, when Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation went into effect. The Proclamation, issued in the fall of 1862, declared that all slaves in areas of the country currently in rebellion against the US government were free. This did not affect slaves in the border states that remained loyal to the Union, or those in areas already under the control of the Union army. The Emancipation Proclamation helped to deprive the South of its labor force. Upon learning about emancipation, many slaves made their way to the closest Union lines. The Proclamation also established the United States Colored Troops, allowing free Black Americans the

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CONTEMPORARY ISSUES: REPARATIONS FOR SLAVERY