A Brief History of American Racism

A Brief History of American Racism
Slavery in the United States
African American Population Demographics 2016
By Population By Percentage of Population

1. New York 1. Mississippi (38%)
2. Texas 2. Louisiana (34%)
3. Florida 3. Georgia (33%)
4. Georgia 4. Maryland (32%)
5. California 5. S. Carolina (29%)
6. N. Carolina 6. Alabama 28%)
7. Illinois 7. N. Carolina (23%)
8. Maryland 8. Virginia (21%)
9. Virginia 9. New York (19%)
10. Pennsylvania 10. Florida (18%)
11. Ohio 11. Tennessee (16%)
12. Louisiana 12. Illinois (16%)
13. Michigan 13. New Jersey (16%)
14. New Jersey 14. Michigan (15%)
15. S. Carolina 15. Ohio (14%)

The Legal Status of Blacks Before the Civil War
By 1776, the number of persons living in the U.S. excluding Native Americans was approximately 3,900,000. Free and enslaved Africans accounted for approximately 20% (about 760,000) of the population.

When the Civil War began in 1861, approximately 4 million African slaves lived in the South. The number of free blacks in the South is estimated to have been approximately 262,000, whereas the free black Northern population is estimated to have approximately 226,000. A major difference between free blacks in the North and enslaved and free blacks in the South is that Northern blacks could legally consider themselves Americans. Slavery in the Northern states was outlawed by 1804. According to the 1860 census, 13% of the American population was enslaved. And 90% of those slaves lived in the South.
The Legal Status of Blacks Before the Civil War
The Legal Status of Blacks Before the Civil War
The number of slave states expands, so that by 1820 the architecture of the Confederate South is complete. Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin in 1793, which mechanized seed removal from picked cotton, turned cotton production into a license to print money. Southern planters wanted all the slave labor they could acquire. They did so with abandon.

Here are the changes are the changes in the free/slave population from 1750 through 1860. Note the concentration of slaves in Mississippi, particularly the Delta, southern Alabama, southern Georgia and South Carolina.

The Legal Status of Blacks Before the Civil War
1816: Rev. Richard Allen founds the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), the first all-black denomination in the United States. The Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, the one Dylan Roof attacked in June 2015, is the oldest black Southern congregation in the United States.

It was burned to the ground before the Civil War shortly for its abolitionist activities, held in secret. After 1834, as the result of the Nat Turner uprising, Charleston banned all-black congregations. It would rebuild after the Civil War.
The Civil War: Prologue

The main objective of the Black Codes was to maintain the social, economic and political subjugation of the Southern black population. Restricting social mobility and freedom were major objectives of the Southern states – whites and blacks were not permitted to marry outside their race; the free speech and assembly rights of blacks were restricted, to the extent that blacks had the courage to demonstrate in public; and equal access to public accommodations was neither expected or enforced.

The right to vote was not extended to blacks in the South, so they had little opportunity to affect legislative outcomes during this period.

Perhaps the most important tools to enforce black subjugation were vagrancy laws and labor contracts that bound black men to white employers.
Reconstruction: Rise and Fall
Black Codes

Through their vagrancy laws and labor contract mandates, Southern whites exercised near complete control over the black work force. Black men – and it was almost always men – could be arrested by white authorities for any reason whatsoever. Rather than incarceration, “convicted” black men would be “leased” to private companies, plantations and any other white-owned enterprise to perform difficult, menial and often life-risking jobs. Under slavery, slave owners had little economic incentive to work their slaves to death, since that was the equivalent of disposing of property. Under the Black Codes, black men often died during labor, a minor inconvenience for their employers, who were able to draw from a near endless supply of black labor. The convict lease system of labor was so widespread and successful in the South that many Southern states did not build large prisons until the early 20th century, when the practice was outlawed (but not necessarily stopped).

Jim Crow: The Law and Culture of Racial Apartheid
• Jim Crow refers to the social, economic and political system established in the South after the collapse of Reconstruction (1863-1877). The purpose was to establish a racial caste system in the South in which “whites” were superior to all “persons of color.” Jim Crow allowed whites to exercise complete control over the lives of African-Americans in the South. By the early 20th century, all the former Confederate states, including “border” states such as Maryland, Tennessee, Delaware, Kentucky and West Virginia, had established meticulous systems of racial segregation under the pretense of “separate but equal” facilities. Some states west of the former Confederacy also established Jim Crow laws; although in some states the option to mandate racial segregation was a local decision.

• In 1870, Virginia passes the first law requiring separate schools based on race. The other Southern states soon follow suit; by 1900, every Southern state has established separate schools for whites and “persons of color.” This applied to every level of education, including colleges and professional schools.

• In 1876, Texas passes the first poll tax, aimed at disenfranchising blacks and, secondarily, poor whites.
Jim Crow: The Law and Culture of Racial Apartheid
Legal segregation soon expands into every conceivable area of public and private life. Some Southern legislatures are slower than others to pass segregation laws; but even in those places where segregation was not a matter of law, there was no social integration between white and black, except as blacks were necessary to serve the white Southern economy or provide domestic assistance.
Jim Crow: The Law and Culture of Racial Apartheid
• Blacks were even barred from white hospitals, a rule that had a dramatic impact on black physical and mental health. Police and firefighters would not, as a matter of custom, respond to the needs of African-Americans, unless the matter involved whites. Blacks were responsible for policing themselves and providing social services through private institutions, primarily churches and benevolent associations, that state and local government were required to do by law but, in fact, did not.

• Jim Crow laws ranged from the more well-known – separate public facilities (pools, parks, community centers, etc.) if they were provided at all, separate waiting rooms in public places, separate entrances to all public buildings (that blacks were permitted to enter), public transport; separate sections in restaurants, movie theatres and other public accommodations – to the less well-known: whites and blacks were not permitted to play games in public; no white nurse could provide medical assistance to a black man for any reason whatsoever; blacks were not permitted to try on clothes in department stores; share sidewalks with whites or use the same vending machines; in some factories or businesses where blacks worked in menial and dangerous jobs, blacks could not look out the same windows as whites.

August 8th, 1925: The Ku Klux Klan Marches in Washington D.C
And Now . . .
Jim Crow: Consequences
Jim Crow: Consequences
Party Alignment
115th Congress

Party Total Seats Black Hispanic Asian N. American
Republican 293 (93%) 3 (1%) 14 (5%) 1 (<1%) 2
Democrat 242 (60%) 48 (20%) 32 (13%) 16 (7%) -

House
Republican 241 (7%) 2 (<1%) 12 (5%) 1 (<1%) 2
Democrat 194 (46%) 46 (24%) 30 (15%) 13 (7%) -

Senate
Republican 52 1 2 - -
Democrat 48 2 2 3 -

Jim Crow: Consequences
Education and Employment

After the Civil War, the education of blacks was directly related to the needs of the Southern white economy. By 1900, six in 10 black men in the South worked on farms or were bound to white landowners as sharecroppers. Three in 10 black women worked in domestic service, as maids, cooks, laundresses and nursemaids. The remaining ten percent of black men and women worked in shops and factories. Less than two percent of blacks in the South had professional jobs, and these were mostly ministers and teachers. Approximately fifty percent of white Southern families employed a black woman in their home.

Blacks were also excluded from all government jobs. These were reserved for whites. Literacy levels were also dramatically different between blacks and whites. By 1900, six in 10 blacks were illiterate, compared to three in ten whites.

Jim Crow: Consequences
Education and Employment

By the early 1930s, basic levels of literacy among blacks had improved but lagged considerably behind whites. There was also a strong relationship between the needs of the Southern economy and amount of time black children spent in school. In Mississippi, for example, where ninety percent of black farmers worked as sharecroppers for white land owners, black children spent about 74 days each year in school. In Virginia, where the tenant sharecropper rate was around 40%, black children spent about 130 days each year in school.

There was also a separate issue, one that affected Southern whites as well: the poverty that dominated the region. Many children were forced to work by economic necessity. Child labor remained legal in the United States until the late 1930s.
Jim Crow: Consequences
Jim Crow: Consequences
Education and Employment
Jim Crow: Consequences
Education and Employment

In 1912, Booker T. Washington approached Sears Roebuck CEO and Chicago-based philanthropist Julius Rosenwald about the possibility of building schools for black students in the rural South. Between then and 1932, Julius Rosenwald funded, in part, the construction of approximately 5300 schools, workshops and homes for black educators across the country, including the North, where many black students attended all-black schools due to restrictive real estate practices. These facilities, known as “Rosenwald Schools,” allowed many black students to receive an education that would not have otherwise been available. The formula was simple: Rosenwald supplied one-third of the costs; state and local government was responsible for another third; and local black communities were responsible for raising the final third. Black architects, tradesmen, skilled labors and unskilled workers built the schools. The Tuskegee Institute provided many of the architects and engineers for the proejct.
“The Rosenwald Schools”
The “Rosenwald Schools”
Jim Crow: Consequences
Education and Employment

More than three million school-age black children lived in the 17 states that continued to operate separate schools, along with 81 percent of all the nation's black population. In the Jim Crow states that stretched from Delaware to Texas, local school boards spent almost three times as much on each white student as they did on blacks. The funding disparities in the Deep South states, where blacks outnumbered whites in hundreds of rural countries, were far greater. Alabama spent $37 on each white child in 1930 and just $7 on those who were black; in Georgia the figures were $32 and $7, in Mississippi they were $31 and $6, and those in South Carolina were $53 and $5, a disparity of more than 10-1.
Jim Crow: Consequences
Education and Employment

In the late 1930s, the American Council on Education released the following report. Investigators, at the behest of black educators and sympathetic whites, did extensive field research into the state of schools for blacks in the South. Here is an excerpt:

A typical rural Negro school is at Dine Hollow. It is in a dilapidated building, once whitewashed, standing in a rocky field unfit for cultivation. Dust-covered weeds spread a carpet all around, except for an uneven, bare area on one side that looks like a ball field. Behind the school is a small building with a broken, sagging door. As we approach, a nervous, middle-aged woman comes to the door of the school. She greets us in a discouraged voice marked by a speech impediment. Escorted inside, we observe that the broken benches are crowded to three times their normal capacity. Only a few battered books are in sight, and we look in vain for maps or charts. We learn that four grades are assembled here. The weary teacher agrees to permit us to remain while she proceeds with the instruction. She goes to the blackboard and writes an assignment for the first two grades to do while she conducts spelling and word drills for the third and fourth grades. This is the assignment:

• Write your name ten times.

• Draw an dog, an cat, an rat, an boot.
Jim Crow: Consequences
Education and Employment

White landowners had little interest in educating the children of their black tenants. "It just isn't safe for me to go on a plantation to bring students to school," said a white truant officer in Shelby County. “The landowners show absolutely no concern and they tell me to let the ‘niggers' work.”