Whites have never had the Constitution state they are 3/5th a person, never had the Supreme Court rule they do not have privileges, immunities, due process, and equal protection. While whites were given 160 acres of land for free, Black Americans couldn’t own land. While whites were given free university educations they broke their promise of 40 acres (1/4 of the Homestead Act) and a mule. While white former confederates were being pardoned for insurrection, Black American veterans were being killed by domestic terrorists. While Whites created generational wealth on handed down farmland, Black Americans were forced into the Great Migration as their schools, businesses, and homes were burned to the ground. Whites have yet to see an organization that has murdered and lynched them march down the streets of Washington in the name of free speech. White people never had to be forced into redlined districts when buying a home. Whites never had to deal with exclusionary covenants. During the Great Depression the American government bailed out whites with socialism through Public Works programs. After WWII whites were given government handouts through federally guaranteed mortgages. Whites did not have their communities completely demolished to make room for suburban highways. White’s never had to march in the streets for their right to vote or serve in a jury. White churches were not bombed and burned with children inside. Whites have not had their neighborhoods torn apart from over policing, families separated through a dog whistle ‘war on drugs.’
While it has been 158 years since emancipation, black people have intentionally been uprooted and displaced again and again while white communities enjoyed centuries of roots, wealth, homeownership and stability. The point of this isn’t to ignite white guilt or worse, pity. The objective here is to see, not how bad it has been for black people in America, but how unbelievably privileged and socialist it has been for whites. The point isn’t that what has happened to black Americans was passive or a streak of bad luck. These were intentionally racist systems created at every turn of progress. This wasn’t just a few racist politicians, or even a few racist states, this wasn’t the fault of founding fathers two centuries ago. This is America. America has chosen for centuries to ACTIVELY, not passively or incidentally, hate her citizens while creating socialist systems for whites.
If the colonists had reason for revolution what do black American’s have? The original colonies declared independence because they were sick of taxation without representation. How should black Americans feel with their votes suppressed for centuries and forced labor without representation? Would King George have pulled the troops if only the colonists had simply taken a knee? Would the British have granted independence if the colonists had only peacefully protested? Should the Sons of Liberty not have destroyed private property by dumping tea into the Boston Harbor? If 5 being killed in the Boston Massacre was enough to ignite a revolution what should 3,446 lynched, dozens of communities burned to the ground, centuries of rape, child trafficking, murder after murder, whippings, slavery, and psychological terror ignite?
Many white Americans are confused and angry at the Black Lives Matter movement. But what is the movement due and what does the movement demand? BLM isn’t asking for nearly what the movement is owed but merely to be left alone. The bare minimum socialism white America has enjoyed for centuries. The opportunity to vote, a fair mortgage, and be left alone by racist murderous police. Essentially what the colonists wanted, what the nation was founded on. If the idea that what BLM is asking is too extreme then we need to take a look in the mirror and see how absolutely racist and how hateful we truly truly are here in the land of the free.
For those privileged white people who need convincing, I’ve created a brief history of White Socialist America. This is by no means an exhaustive list it is only a few things that came to the my mind, enjoy:
In August of 1619 a ship carrying more than 20 enslaved Africans arrived at Point Comfort in the British colony of Virginia. 157 years later America declared independence. The White House was built by slaves along with the Capitol and other iconic buildings. 12 of this country’s first 18 presidents benefited from slave labor, two took office after the Civil War. The North never legalized slavery but did have The Black Codes, laws governing the conduct of African Americans. These codes included vagrancy laws that targeted unemployed black people, apprentice laws that made black orphans and dependents available for hire to whites, commercial laws that excluded black people from certain trades and businesses, and restricted ownership of property. Northern states also passed anti-miscegenation laws, banning the marriage of white and black people, yes even Ohio. In 1844 Oregon banned African Americans from the territory. In 1857 The Supreme Court ruled in Dred Scott v. Sandford the US Constitution was not meant to include the rights and privileges of American citizenship for black people.
The Civil War for the South was of course about slavery but as for the North it was only about preserving the Union. There’s a reason it was called the Union Army and not the Abolitionist Army. Before Abraham Lincoln was president he stated, "I am not, nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people.” Later as president during the war Lincoln wrote, “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it…What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union...” He even gave a speech to a black audience blaming them for the Civil war and thus the deaths of white Americans. “I need not recount to you the effects upon white men, growing out of the institution of Slavery. I believe in its general evil effects on the white race. See our present condition---the country engaged in war!---our white men cutting one another's throats, none knowing how far it will extend; and then consider what we know to be the truth. But for your race among us there could not be war, although many men engaged on either side do not care for you one way or the other. Nevertheless, I repeat, without the institution of Slavery and the colored race as a basis, the war could not have an existence.” He then floats the idea of sending all black Americans out of the country.
So why did Lincoln issue the Emancipation Proclamation? To keep Britain from sending aid to The Confederacy. Britan had abolished slavery back in 1807. If Lincoln made the war about slavery Britan couldn’t back the South. On September 22, 1862 Lincoln announced the Emancipation Proclamation. That’s when the North showed its true colors. Thousands of white soldiers deserted over the issue of emancipation. All but thirty-five men of an Illinois regiment went home, saying that they would “lie in the woods until moss grew on their backs rather than help free the slaves.” Newspapers across the North encouraged other soldiers to do the same. A group of Kentucky women whose sons were serving in the Union army urged their boys to desert as well. Likening Lincoln to the devil, they said that his Emancipation Proclamation showed “the cloven foot.” A midwestern father wrote to his son in the army, “I am sorry you are engaged in this unholy, unconstitutional and hellish war...which has no other purpose but to free the negroes and enslave the whites. Come home, If you have to desert, you will be protected.” Many Northerners, including Ohioans, were willing to fight to reunite the nation but they were unwilling to fight a war to terminate slavery. Several Ohioans deserted from the Union army in protest. Groups with names like the Knights of the Golden Circle, Sons of Liberty, and Copperheads met in secret and muttered of forcing an end to the war. Their leader was Congressman Clement Vallandigham of, you guessed it, Ohio. The Civil war ended in the Spring of 1865. Despite the Emancipation Proclamation taking effect in January of 1863 and the war ending in May of 1865 the last slaves were not freed until June 19th in Galveston, Texas. After 88 years of White people celebrating “Independence Day'' finally all Americas could celebrate independence on the first Juneteenth.
During the Civil War Lincoln signed the Land-Grant Bill into law. The law gave every state and territory 30,000 acres per member of Congress to be used in establishing a "land grant" university. Over 17 million acres, mostly taken from Indigenous peoples through violence-backed land cessions. These were publicly funded institutions for white Americans. One of those socialist schools was Ohio State founded in 1870. In addition to the land grant law the Homestead Act of 1862 granted 160 acres of stolen Native People’s land in the West to any American who applied and worked the land for 5 years. Over the course of the next 60 years, 246 million acres of western land were given to individuals for free. About 1.5 million families were given this crucial economic foundation, but only about 0.3% of those were Black. Not only did this country give free college education to white Americans but also a free 160 acres to anyone who applied. Socialism in White America.
After the war, the next step was reconstructing America. Free black people were promised 40 acres and a mule (a quarter of the land given by the Homestead Act). However, after Lincoln's assassination his successor, Vice President Andrew Johnson, explicitly reversed and annulled the proclamation. The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime on December 18th 1865. As soon as slavery was abolished the south implemented Black Codes similar to those in the North. They were broad vagrancy laws, which allowed local authorities to arrest freedpeople for minor infractions and commit them to involuntary labor. This period was the start of the convict lease system, "slavery by another name.” Every adult black person was required to sign a labor contract for the year with a white employer. If they didn’t do that they would be considered a vagrant and they could be fined and if they couldn’t pay the fine they could be auctioned off to someone who would pay the fine and then they’d have to work off the fine for that person. In 1898, some 73% of Alabama's entire annual state revenue came from convict leasing. Convict leasing provided prisoner labor to private parties, such as plantation owners and corporations. The Black Codes also denied Black people the right to vote, serve on juries, or testify against white people in court. The Codes outlawed interracial marriage and established capital punishment for Black people convicted of raping white women. They also prohibited Black people from owning or carrying firearms or other weapons unless they obtained a license one year before the purchase.
One year after America’s bloodiest war, the vice president of the insurrectionist Confederate States responsible for the deaths of 364,511 American soldiers, Alexander H. Stephens, was elected to the United States Senate by the first legislature convened under the new Georgia State Constitution. He was not allowed to take his seat because of restrictions on former Confederates. However, pardons for ex-Confederates were given by Presidents Lincoln and Johnson. Johnson declared "unconditionally, and without reservation, ...a full pardon and amnesty for the offence of treason against the United States, or of adhering to their enemies during the late civil war, with restoration of all rights, privileges, and immunities under the Constitution and the laws.” In 1873, Stephens was elected to the United States House of Representatives. He was re-elected 4 times. Stephens was later governor of Georgia. He wasn’t the only former insurrectionist to later decide the country's laws 63 Confederate traitors became U.S. senators. As White Confederate insurrectionists were being pardoned it was another story for black veterans who fought to keep this country united. The Memphis massacre of 1866 left 46 black and 2 white people killed (not a single white person had been killed by a black person), 75 black people injured, over 100 black persons robbed, 5 black women raped, and 91 homes, 4 churches and 8 schools (every black church and school) burned in the black community. In the New Orleans Massacre of 1866, 38 were killed and 146 wounded, with 34 of the dead and 119 of the wounded black. The Camilla massacre took place September 19, 1868 killing an estimated 9 to 15 black protest participants while wounding 40 others. "Whites proceeded through the countryside over the next two weeks, beating and warning black men that they would be killed if they tried to vote in the coming election." After the Colfax massacre of 1873, An estimated 62-153 black militia men were killed while surrendering to a mob of former Confederate soldiers, members of the domestic terrorist organizations Ku Klux Klan, and the White League. In 1874 another domestic terrorist attack happened. The Coushatta massacre was the result of an attack by the White League, a paramilitary organization composed of white Southern Democrats, on Republican officeholders and freedmen. They assassinated six white Republicans and 5-20 freedmen who were witnesses. The Hamburg Massacre happened in July 1876, over 100 white men attacked about 30 black servicemen of the National Guard at the armory, these terrorists killed two American National Guard soldiers as they tried to leave that night. Later, the Red Shirts, another terrorist organization, tortured and murdered 4 of the militia while holding them as prisoners, and wounded several others. In total, the events in Hamburg resulted in the death of one white man and 6 black men with several more blacks being wounded. Although 94 white men were indicted for murder by a coroner's jury, none were prosecuted. The Wilmington insurrection of 1898 was a mass riot and insurrection carried out by white supremacists in Wilmington, North Carolina It has been characterized as a coup d'état, the violent overthrow of a duly elected government, by a group of white supremacists. They killed an estimated 60 to more than 300 people. The same week as the horrific events in Wilmington, a Durham County mob lynched a Black man, Manly McCauley. Pardons for White Confederate Traitors. Death and the burning of communities for Black Union veterans.
Along with the convict lease system and the required labor contracts there was sharecropping. Sharecropping is when a landowner allows a tenant to use the land in return for a share of the crops produced on that land. The laws entitled property owners to set the worth of a crop at settling time and did not obligate landlords to put contracts in writing or require tenants to have access to ledgers or records. Beyond that, poor farmers without money to buy the fertilizer, tools, animals, and machinery necessary to farm had to borrow from landowners or merchants on credit, often at exorbitant interest rates. Sharecropping and tenant farmers were barely able to make ends meet, and many became indebted to their landlords. ...For newly freed people, many of whom worked the same land, lived in the same housing, and worked under close supervision of the same overseers, sharecropping was like “slavery under another name.” Undefined ‘gross misconduct’ could result in tenants being made to leave and completely forfeit their share of crops. Sharecroppers were prohibited from selling crops on their own, without notifying the landowner and having a superintendent present.
In 1872 the new congress wasted no time. They created the United States Congress Joint Select Committee on the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States. The committee put together a 13-volume collection of reports and testimonies from witnesses and investigated the domestic terrorist organization Ku Klux Klan and other insurrectionary movements in the former Confederacy after the close of the Civil War. The report was over 8,000 pages. Despite having representation in the House and Senate the third branch of government flexed its power. The Slaughter-House Cases was a landmark Supreme Court decision that held the Fourteenth Amendment only protects the legal rights that are associated with federal U.S. citizenship, not those that pertain to state citizenship. State legislatures were able to once again suspend the rights of black citizens. The Civil Rights Act of 1875 outlawed discrimination for blacks in public accommodations, schools, transportation, and selecting juries. The law was overturned by the Supreme Court in 1883. The Court also ruled in United States v. Cruikshank 1876, that the Bill of Rights did not apply to private actors or to state governments despite the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment. It reversed criminal convictions for the civil rights violations committed in aid of anti-reconstruction murders. With every step forward through democracy the Supreme Court would overturn it.
Then came the final nail in the coffin of reconstruction hammed by an Ohioan. The Compromise of 1877 was an unwritten deal, informally arranged among U.S. Congressmen, that settled the intensely disputed 1876 presidential election. It resulted in the United States federal government pulling the last troops out of the South, and ending the Reconstruction Era. Through the Compromise, Ohio Republican Rutherford B. Hayes was awarded the White House. Hayes had lost the popular vote but in a desperate grasp for power agreed to leave the southern black voters completely vulnerable by pulling the troops. As white domestic terrorist organizations ran wild Hayes chose to leave Black Americans without federal protection. Just 12 short years after 246 years of slavery America, the North included, was tired of reconstruction.
With their Supreme Court actively working to strip constitutional rights, neighbors joining terrorist groups, and the president pulling troops, Black Americans seemed to only have one option. Exodusters was a name given to Black Americans who migrated to Kansas in 1879. As many as 40,000 Exodusters left the South. Almost all who attempted to homestead in the countryside settled in the Kansas uplands. The uplands were the only lands available for purchase after the squatters, railroads, and speculators had taken the best farmland. Given the agricultural challenge of farming these lands, many were still destitute a year after their arrival. Black American veterans were fleeing as refugees from where they had lived their whole lives from domestic terrorists. The Supreme Court continued to chip away at the American Constitution ripping rights away from citizens. The Civil Rights Cases held if private individuals want to discriminate, assault, or murder someone based on race that is none of the federal government’s business. This ruling in the midst of America’s worst domestic terrorist violence that ten years ago could fill an 8,000 page report.
In the 1890s and prior, many all-white municipalities or neighborhoods in the United States were known as Sundown towns. This practice was a form of racial segregation by excluding non-whites via some combination of discriminatory local laws, intimidation or violence. Entire sundown counties and sundown suburbs were also created by the same process. The term came from signs posted that "colored people" had to leave town by sundown. The practice was not restricted to the South, at least until the 1960s northern states could be as inhospitable to black travelers. Since I’m sure you're curious, here are the Ohio sundown towns I could find: Fairborn, Greenhills, Marion, Niles, Reading, Shelby, Utica, Waverly, and I’m sure that isn’t the complete list.
Then came Jim Crow around 1892. Jim Crow laws were state and local laws that enforced racial segregation in the South. These laws were enacted to disenfranchise and remove political and economic gains made by black people. The laws made voter registration and electoral rules more restrictive. Poll taxes, literacy and comprehension tests, and residency and record-keeping requirements. The grandfather clause created an exception to the literacy requirement if a person or their direct ancestor could vote on January 1, 1867. Voter turnout dropped drastically through the South as a result. In Louisiana, by 1900, black voters were reduced to 5,320, although they comprised the majority of the state's population. By 1910, only 730 black people were registered, less than 0.5% of eligible black men. In North Carolina black voters were completely eliminated from voter rolls from 1896 to 1904. Those who could not vote were not eligible to serve on juries and could not run for local offices. Then came Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation laws for public facilities as long as the segregated facilities were equal in quality, a doctrine that came to be known as "separate but equal". The decision protected the many state laws re-establishing racial segregation.
On March 21, 1915, President Woodrow Wilson attended a special screening at the White House of ‘The Birth of a Nation,’ The film presented a distorted portrait of the South after the Civil War, glorifying the Ku Klux Klan and denigrating blacks. After seeing the film, an enthusiastic President Wilson reportedly remarked: "It is like writing history with lightning, and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true." Thanks to the film glorifying domestic terrorism the Klan saw a second wave of members and violence. The KKK was especially strong in Ohio during the 1910s and 1920s. For example, in Summit County, the Klan claimed to have fifty thousand members, making it the largest local chapter in the United States. Many of the county's officials were members, including the sheriff, the Akron mayor, several judges and county commissioners, and most members of Akron's school board. The Klan was also very popular in Licking County, where the group held its state konklave in 1923 and 1925. More than 70,000 people attended each event. The konklaves were held at Buckeye Lake.
After the Supreme Court stripped all the fourteenth amendment rights from black Americans and as the President of the country condoned domestic terrorism, black people again were left with one choice, flee their own home states as refugees. The Great Migration was the movement of 6 million African Americans out of the rural South to the urban Northeast, Midwest, and West between 1916 and 1940. For black Americans this meant leaving what had always been their economic and social base and finding a new one. But even out of the south black Americans again found only violence in this country. The Springfield race riot of 1908 were events of mass racial violence committed in 1908. At least 16 people died as a result of the riot: 9 black residents, and 7 white residents who were associated with the mob, 5 of whom were killed by state militia and 2 committed suicide. Personal and property damages, suffered overwhelmingly by blacks, amounted to more than $150,000 (approximately $4 million in 2018), as dozens of black homes and businesses were destroyed, as well as 3 white-owned businesses of suspected black sympathizers. The East St. Louis Massacre was a series of outbreaks of labor- and race-related violence by White Americans who murdered between 40 and 250 African-Americans in 1917. Another 6,000 black people were left homeless and the burning and vandalism cost approximately $400,000 ($7,982,000 in 2021) in property damage. The Red Summer is the period from late winter through early autumn of 1919 during which white supremacist terrorism took place in more than three dozen cities across the North and South. The highest number of fatalities occurred in the rural area around Elaine, Arkansas, where an estimated 100–240 black people and 5 white people were killed. The Ocoee massacre occurred in 1920, the day of the U.S. presidential election. Most estimates total 30–35 Black people killed. Most African American-owned buildings and residences in northern Ocoee were burned to the ground. Other African Americans living in southern Ocoee were later killed or driven out on threat of more violence. Ocoee essentially became an all-white town. The Tulsa massacre took place in 1921. Mobs of white residents, many of them deputized and given weapons by city officials, attacked Black residents and businesses of the Greenwood District. It has been called "the single worst incident of racial violence in American history". The attack, carried out on the ground and from private aircraft, destroyed more than 35 square blocks of the district—at that time the wealthiest Black community in the United States, known as "Black Wall Street". A state commission gave several estimates ranging from 75 to 300 dead. It was the first use of an airplane to bomb a U.S. town, the second was Pearl Harbor. After all of these domestic terrorist attacks on August 8th 1925 the Ku Klux Klan marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC. The event brought 25,000 members in full regalia to the city. One year later in 1926 the terrorists paraded in our nation’s capital with 15,000 Klansmen and again in 1928.
Then The Great Depression hit in the 1930s. To solve the depression President Franklin Roosevelt came up with the New Deal, a series of programs, public work projects, and financial reforms to recover the economy. The Civilian Conservation Corps was a program for unemployed, unmarried men ages 18–28. African American enrollment was capped at 10%, reflecting the racial profile of the national population, ignoring the fact that African Americans faced an unemployment rate two to three times that of whites. To appease citizens concerned about the placement of all-Black camps in their communities, only white supervisors were put in charge of such camps, leaving Black corpsmen little opportunity for advancement. The Agricultural Adjustment Act paid white farmers to not grow certain crops through government subsidies. The AAA reduced the need of farmers to hire sharecroppers. The evicted sharecroppers were often forced to migrate to northern cities as the southern countryside had no alternative to offer. The National Industrial Recovery Act regulated fair wages and prices that would stimulate economic recovery. The NIRA provisions covered the industries from which black workers were usually excluded. Neither farm nor domestic labor, two sectors where African Americans constituted a substantial labor force, were covered under NIRA. Thousands of black workers were thrown out of work and replaced by whites on jobs where they were paid less than the NRA's wage minimums because some white employers considered the NRA's minimum wage "too much money for Negroes". By August 1933, black Americans called the National Recovery Administration (NRA) the "Negro Removal Act". The NIRA put 500,000 African Americans out of work. The National Housing Act of 1934 contributed to limiting the availability of loans to urban areas, particularly those areas inhabited by African Americans. The housing programs were a "state-sponsored system of segregation." The government's efforts were "primarily designed to provide housing to white, middle-class, lower-middle-class families." African Americans were left out of the new suburban communities, pushed instead into urban housing projects. Even the original version of the Social Security Act did not provide old-age pensions for farm and domestic workers, which automatically excluded a substantial number of senior African Americans. In the South, that number was nearly 40%. The Resettlement Administration relocated struggling urban and rural families to communities planned by the federal government. Of the 200 RA communities only 13 were set aside for African Americans. The Farm Service Agency made efforts to empower African Americans by appointing them to agency committees in the South. But, after feeling national pressure FSA was forced to release the Black Americans from their positions. Lastly, thanks to the loophole in the 13th amendment, the Federal Prison Industries, Inc. was created. A government corporation created in 1934 as a prison labor program for inmates within the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Under federal law, all physically able inmates who are not a security risk or have a health exception are required to work, either for, now called, UNICOR or at some other prison job. As of 2021, inmates earned between $0.23 to $1.15 per hour.
As the Great Migration progressed northern cities had to find ways of excluding black people from their communities, neighborhoods, and jobs. So in the 1920s White Americans came up with exclusionary covenants. They prohibited a buyer of real property from allowing use or occupancy by members of a given race, ethnic origin, and/or religion as specified in the title deed. Such covenants were to "protect'' entire subdivisions, with the primary intent to keep "white" neighborhoods "white." 90% of the housing projects built in the years following World War II were racially restricted by such covenants. Real-estate developers and agents drafted deed restrictions to keep out minorities. Some had language like, “exclusively for the White Caucasian Race” or “American Citizens” and excluded people “of the negro race or blood” in at least Allen and Athens County Ohio. In 1935 during the depression White Northerners also used redlining. Redlining was utilized in the housing industry by mortgage companies to suppress minority populations from receiving home loans to buy homes in other neighborhoods as well as to deny them the funds to improve their current homes. Due to redlining, African-Americans usually did not qualify for mortgages from banks and savings and loan associations. Instead, they resorted to land installment contracts at above market rates to buy a house. Land installment contracts were historically predatory agreements in which buyers made payments directly to sellers over a period of time in order to obtain the legal title to the home only when the full purchase price had been paid. The harsh terms of these contracts and inflated prices often led to foreclosure, so these houses had a high turnover rate. Redlining happened in Ohio. Even today the Ohio Department of Insurance allows providers to use maps and collection of demographic data by ZIP code in determining insurance rates.
In 1954 the Supreme Court ruled state laws establishing racial segregation in public schools are unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. However as schools desegregated building staff was not. School districts had to lay off teachers. Over 38,000 black teachers in the South and border states lost their jobs after the ruling. The remaining Black teachers couldn’t use the teachers’ bathroom. They had to use the children’s bathroom. To this day, the ranks of Black teachers in the United States have not recovered from the mass firings of the 1950s and 60s. As a percentage, there are far fewer Black teachers than there are Black students. After the Great Migration, exclusionary covenants, the National Housing Act, redlining, and the desegregation of schools White people began to leave the cities. White flight was the migration of white people from areas more ethnoculturally diverse starting in the 1950s. Suburban expansion was reserved for middle-class and working-class white people, facilitated by their increased wages incurred by the war effort and by federally guaranteed mortgages (VA, FHA, HOLC) available only to whites. Aided by the construction of highways, many Whites began leaving industrial cities for suburbs shifting the tax base away from the city. New municipalities were established beyond the city's jurisdiction to avoid the legacy costs of maintaining city infrastructures; instead new governments spent taxes to establish suburban infrastructures. The federal government contributed to the decay of non-white city neighborhoods by withholding maintenance capital mortgages, thus making it difficult for communities to retain or attract middle-class residents and upkeep their properties. Beginning in the 1960s, there was a large influx of Black Veterans and their families moving into suburban White communities. As Blacks moved in, Whites moved out and the market value of these homes dropped dramatically. In observation of said market values, bank lenders were able to keep close track by literally drawing red lines around the neighborhoods on a map. These lines signified areas that they would not invest in. Not only banks but savings and loans, insurance companies, grocery chains, and even pizza delivery companies. Banks would often deny people who came from these areas bank loans or offered them at stricter repayment rates. As a result, there was a very low rate at which Black people were able to own their homes; opening the door for slum landlords, who could get approved for low interest loans, to take over.
To help White Flight the government created the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956. In states around the country, highway construction displaced Black households and cut the heart and soul out of thriving Black communities as homes, churches, schools, and businesses were destroyed. In other communities, the highway system was a tool of a segregationist agenda, erecting a wall of high speed lanes that separated White and Black communities. The interstate highway system contributed to the residential concentration of race and poverty, along with physical, economic, and psychological barriers. It became known as “White Men’s Roads Through Black Men’s Homes.” In Columbus Ohio the I-70 interstate cut off Bowman Avenue, eradicated 60 homes and split the community. Bexley, a nearby predominantly white affluent city, remained unscathed by I-70, I-71 and I-670, which destroyed large parts of the redlined Near East Side. Thanks to redlining every city's black residents were consolidated, making the deliberate destruction of Black neighborhoods throughout the U.S. simple. “It played out across many different neighborhoods all the way up the East Side to Milo-Grogan and then to Linden. I-670 wiped out the Flytown neighborhood. And if you look at the old redlining maps of most cities — and Columbus is a good example — you can pretty much trace the highways right through those areas that were redlined,” said Jason Reece, an assistant professor at the Ohio State University. Pick any city in America. As White people were receiving federal subsidies for socialized mortgages and highways for their suburbs Black people were once again being displaced and tax money cut off.
During the postwar era after the black codes, the resurgence of racist domestic terrorist attacks, the Great Migration, the Great Depression, and The Federal Aid Highway Act with Jim Crow still very much alive the Civil Rights Movement began. Nearly a century after the Civil War. Nonviolent protests, boycotts, marches, and sit ins, expressions of Black American’s first amendment rights were met with more domestic terrorism. Birmingham Alabama became known as Bombingham due to the 50 dynamite explosions by domestic terrorists that occurred in the city between 1947 and 1965. The bombings were used against African Americans attempting to move into neighborhoods with entirely white residents. Later, the bombings were used against anyone working towards desegregation. One neighborhood experienced so many bombings it developed the nickname Dynamite Hill. On August 28th, 1955 a 14-year-old American, Emmett Till, was lynched in Mississippi. Thanks to Jim Crow, an all-white jury found Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam not guilty of the kidnapping and murder. Protected against double jeopardy, the two men publicly admitted in a 1956 interview that they had killed Till. Carolyn Bryant, the woman who claimed the child offended her, said she had fabricated parts of her testimony at the trial. Bryant retracted her testimony that Till had grabbed her around her waist and uttered obscenities, saying "that part's not true". The jury did not hear Bryant's testimony at the trial as the judge had ruled it inadmissible. The Harlem riot of 1964 left one dead rioter, 118 injured, and 465 arrested. The Selma to Montgomery marches were three protest marches, held in 1965. 17 marchers were hospitalized and 50 treated for lesser injuries. The Watts riots of Los Angeles happened in 1965. It resulted in 34 deaths and over $40 million in property damage. 3,446 African Americans were lynched in the United States between 1882 and 1968 by domestic terrorists.
Since the Reconstruction Era Black Americans hadn’t seen much progress until the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This law outlaws discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, and later sexual orientation and gender identity. It prohibits unequal application of voter registration requirements, racial segregation in schools and public accommodations, and employment discrimination. It was finally the end of Jim Crow. After Kennedy was assassinated Johnson pushed the bill forward after a 54-day filibuster. He also passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 which prohibits racial discrimination in voting 100 years after the civil war. In 2013 the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the coverage formula of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder reasoning that it was no longer responsive to current conditions. Five years after the ruling, nearly 1,000 U.S. polling places had closed, many of them in predominantly African-American counties. There were also cuts to early voting, purges of voter rolls and imposition of strict voter ID laws. A 2020 study found that jurisdictions that had previously been covered by preclearance substantially increased their voter registration purges after the Shelby decision. Also, in 1967 Loving v. Virginia ruled that laws banning interracial marriage violate the Constitution.
But as the 1960s showed so much promise and progress White America was still not ready to rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed. With southern black people finally able to vote for the first time in roughly three generations America had to find a new way to oppress black citizens. Enter Richard Nixon’s Southern strategy. The goal was to increase political support among white voters in the South by appealing to racism. In 1970 Republican strategist Kevin Phillips stated “From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don't need any more than that... but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.” Nixon began to campaign to restore “law and order” to America. Years later Nixon’s domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman summed up the plan, “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” After Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated a few months later Nixon won the election. The next year the FBI assassinated Fred Hampton.
With the new law and order president in the White House Nixon ended the war on poverty, a part of Johnson’s Great Society, and began the war on drugs, which according to his domestic policy chief was a tool for disrupting, arresting, and vilifying the black community. Enter the prison–industrial complex. Since the 1970s there has been a huge expansion of prisons that exist at the federal and state level. The Drug Enforcement Administration was established in 1973 by President Nixon. After 50 years of stability, the rate of incarceration in the United States began a sustained period of growth. In the early 1970s, when drug arrest rates were low, blacks were about twice as likely as whites to be arrested for drug crimes. This was also around the time the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male was leaked. The study was conducted between 1932 and 1972 by the Public Health Service and the CDC. The men who participated in the study were told that they were receiving free health care from the federal government, they were not. The study caused the deaths of 128 of its participants, either directly from syphilis or from related complications. Meanwhile the Supreme Court ruled in Penick v. The Columbus Board of Education (1977) The Columbus Board of Education knowingly kept white and black students apart from each other by creating school boundaries that sent black students to predominantly black schools and white students to predominantly white schools. This policy had existed since at least 1909. Once the federally ordered school desegregation began, whites who could afford private schools withdrew their children from the racially diverse public school system. This was of course more than two decades after Brown v Board and in the northern state of Ohio.
Then came the 1980s with Reagan continuing the Republican racist southern strategy. Lee Atwater, Reagan’s campaign strategist, put it this way, “You start out in 1954 by saying, “N----, n-----, n-----.” By 1968 you can’t say “n-----,” that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N----, n-----.” The republican party was getting more and more coded with their dog whistles. Reagan won the 1980 election and declared 'War on Drugs.' The first comprehensive revision of the U.S. criminal code since the early 1900s was passed. The Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984, sponsored by Strom Thurmond, was signed into law by President Ronald Reagan. If a felon has three or more prior convictions for offenses that are "violent felony" offenses or "serious drug offenses," the Act provides a minimum sentence of 15 years imprisonment, instead of the 10 year maximum prescribed under the Gun Control Act. The Act provides for an implied maximum sentence of life imprisonment. It abolished federal parole. increased federal penalties for cultivation, possession, or transfer of marijuana. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 changed the system of federal supervised release from a rehabilitative system into a punitive system. It prohibited controlled substance analogs. The bill enacted new mandatory minimum sentences for drugs, including marijuana. This act mandated a minimum sentence of 5 years without parole for possession of 5 grams of crack cocaine (mostly young, African American men) while it mandated the same for possession of 500 grams of powder cocaine. A 100 to 1 possession disparity. In the entire history of the country up until that point, the legal system had only seen 55 minimum sentences in total. In the 1980s, the number of arrests for drug offenses rose 126%. The result of increased demand was the development of privatization and the for-profit prison industry.
Not surprisingly thanks to redlining, the highways, and the like, African Americans are more likely to live near landfills and industrial plants that pollute water and air and erode quality of life. More than half of the people living near hazardous waste sites are people of color, and black Americans are three times more likely to die from exposure to air pollutants than their white counterparts. In 1982 Warren County, North Carolina, a predominantly black community was selected by the state for the disposal of soil laced with PCBs, which then leaked into the local water supply. It started one of the earliest environmental justice actions in the United States. In 1987, when residents of one street in Louisiana, primarily African-American and low income, noticed the abundance of cancer cases within their community, “Cancer Alley” became the new name for Jacobs Drive. As similar incidents became more and more prevalent in surrounding areas, the “alley” grew to encompass an 85 mile stretch along the Mississippi River. The manufacturing plants in Cancer Alley disproportionately affect African American people while simultaneously excluding those same communities from employment opportunities. Because of the systematic denial of loans Black Americans had little choice where to live. Minorities who tried to buy homes continued to face direct discrimination from lending institutions into the late 1990s. The disparities are not simply due to differences in creditworthiness. With other factors held constant, rejection rates for Black and Hispanic applicants was about 1.6 times that for Whites in 1995.
On May 13th 1985, longstanding tensions between a black liberation group, and the Philadelphia Police Department erupted horrifically. That night, the city of Philadelphia dropped a satchel bomb, a demolition device typically used in combat, laced with Tovex and C-4 explosives on a West Philadelphia rowhome known to be occupied by men, women, and children. It went up in unextinguished flames. 11 people were killed, including 5 children. 61 homes were destroyed, and more than 250 citizens were left homeless. On April 29, 1992 after a trial jury acquitted four officers of the LAPD for usage of excessive force in the arrest and beating of Rodney King, unrest began. By the time the riots ended, 63 people had been killed, 2,383 had been injured, more than 12,000 had been arrested, and estimates of property damage were over $1 billion. With Reagan’s war on drugs incarcerating one million Americans each year and the police getting more and more violent with citizens they swore to protect 1994 saw the passing of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. The largest crime bill in the history of the United States, it consisted of 100,000 new ‘peace’ officers, $9.7 billion in funding for prisons and $6.1 billion in funding for prevention programs, which were designed with significant input from experienced police officers. Statistics from 1998 show that there were wide racial disparities in arrests, prosecutions, sentencing and deaths. African-American drug users made up for 35% of drug arrests, 55% of convictions, and 74% of people sent to prison for drug possession crimes. Nationwide African-Americans were sent to state prisons for drug offenses 13 times more often than other races, even though they only comprised 13% of regular drug users. At the end of the 1990s the black prison population was 878,400.
The mass incarceration of black Americans continued into the new century. From 2001 to 2010, Black people were 273% more likely to be arrested for cannabis possession than white people, despite using cannabis at similar rates. 1 in 5 black Americans spend time behind bars due to drug laws. Black Americans are 3.23 times more likely than white Americans to be executed by police, circumventing the constitutional right of due process. What about the instances where police do not murder? From 2003 to 2013 research found Black men and women were more likely to be touched 17%, handcuffed 16%, pushed to the ground 18% or pepper-sprayed by a police officer 25%, even after accounting for how, where and when they encounter the police. This research focused only on what happened once the police had stopped civilians, not on the risk of being stopped at all. Other research has shown that blacks are about 20% more likely to be stopped than white drivers. Once stopped, black drivers were searched about 1.5 to 2 times as often as white drivers, while they were less likely to be carrying drugs, guns, or other illegal contraband compared to their white peers.
After police have profiled, harassed, and arrested black Americans next comes pre-trial. People who have not been found guilty of the charges against them account for 95% of all jail population growth between 2000–2014. Innocent until proven guilty is a luxury for the rich. Of the 11 million people who go to jail each year some are held for months or more, often because they are too poor to make bail. In 2017 there were 434,188 pre-trial unconvicted detentions. Black defendants are 2.4 percentage points more likely than white defendants to be detained while they await court hearings. The average bail for black defendants is $7,281 higher than for white defendants. 95% of elected prosecutors are white. Once convicted Americans are subject to mandatory sentences and slave labor at a private prison. Most of the private prison contracts in America require states to keep at least 90% prison beds filled or pay a penalty through tax money. The U.S. has less than 5% of the world’s population, yet almost 25% of the total prison population. In 2015 the U.S. had 2.3 million incarcerated. The lifetime likelihood of imprisonment for a white man is 1 in 17, for black men 1 in 3. Black men account for 6.5% of the population but make up 40.2% of the prison population. Once inmates have paid their debt to society they are often stamped with collateral consequences of conviction. Collateral consequences can include loss or restriction of a professional license, ineligibility for public funds including welfare benefits and student loans, loss of voting rights, ineligibility for jury duty, ineligibility for government contracts and debarment from program participation, exclusion from management and operation of regulated businesses, restrictions on family relationships and living arrangements, such as child custody, fostering and adoption, bond requirements and other heightened standards for licensure, registration, lifetime supervision and residency requirements, and publication of an individual’s criminal record or mandated notification to the general public or to particular private individuals. After the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act of the 1960s law and order politicians increased incarceration rates for black men to 1 in 3 and after serving that time added collateral consequences that look an awful lot like Jim Crow.
Generational wealth has been intentionally blocked from black Americans thanks to government programs, refugee migration, redlining, highways destroying neighborhoods, and pollution the effects are still seen today. A study from 2018 analyzed upward mobility trends in American cities. Black children born to parents in the bottom household income quintile have a 2.5% chance of rising to the top quintile of household income, compared with 10.6% for whites. Because of this intergenerational poverty, black households are less able to grow wealth. Even banks today are still racist. A 2009 survey of two districts of similar incomes, one being largely white and the other largely black, found that bank branches in the black community offered exclusively subprime loans. Studies found out that high-income blacks were almost twice as likely to end up with subprime home-purchase mortgages compared to low-income whites. Black people struggling with debts are also far less likely than their white peers to gain lasting relief from bankruptcy. Primarily to blame is a style of bankruptcy practiced by lawyers. Chapter 13 filing rates are extremely high in Black areas, with a larger racial gap. nationally, the odds of black debtors choosing Chapter 13 instead of Chapter 7 were more than twice as high as for white debtors with a similar financial profile. And once they chose Chapter 13 the odds of their cases ending with no relief from their debts were about 50% higher. For many people, the most important thing is keeping their car, a necessity because of little public transportation. Used car lots abound, offering subprime credit. When borrowers fall behind and lenders threaten repossession only Chapter 13 allows secured debts to be repaid over the course of the plan.
What about the school system? Among students with high standardized test scores, Black students are less likely to be assigned to gifted services, even when controlling for other background factors. White students have a predicted probability of gifted assignment of 6.2%, Black students have only a 2.8% probability, when taught by non-black teachers. With Black teachers the predicted probability of assignment to gifted programs for Black students is 6.2%, holding other variables at their means. All else equal, Black students are predicted to be assigned to gifted services 3 times more often in classrooms with Black teachers than with non-Black teachers. Black students who'd had just one black teacher by third grade were 13% more likely to enroll in college and those who'd had two were 32% more likely. Having at least one black teacher in elementary school reduced the probability of dropping out by 29% for low-income black students and 39% for very low-income black boys. Approximately 80% of Black elementary school students are taught by non-black teachers. This lack of black teachers can be traced back to the massive firings of black teachers after racist districts were forced to desegregate. Black students are also more likely to be seen as problematic and more likely to be punished than white students are for the same offense. Nationally, black girls are nearly 6 times more likely to get out-of-school suspension than white counterparts and more likely to be suspended multiple times than any other gender or race of student. Black girls are 3 times more likely to be referred to juvenile court than white girls and 20% more likely to be detained. As for higher education, in 2007 a class action lawsuit was brought against student loan lender Sallie Mae. Sallie Mae discriminated against African American and Hispanic private student loan applicants. The factors Sallie Mae used to underwrite private student loans caused a disparate impact on students attending schools with higher minority populations. Sallie Mae failed to properly disclose loan terms to private student loan borrowers. The lawsuit was settled in 2011.
The Ferguson unrest in Missouri, involved protests in 2014, the day after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown by a police officer. As of 2019, Ferguson protesters have continued to receive threats to their lives or wellbeing. A number have died under circumstances viewed as suspicious by the community. Continuing mistrust between the police and the community may have resulted in the police failing to adequately investigate these deaths. Darren Seals, a leader in the Ferguson protests was found shot and killed inside a burning car, similarly to DeAndre Joshua. Edward Crawford also died in 2017 after, according to police, committing suicide. In Ohio, Columbus police have a “significant disparity of use of force against minority residents,” according to a consultant’s recommendations on improving the division. Matrix Consulting Group found numerous racial divides within the Police Division. Though white residents make up almost 61% of the city’s population, they account for 26% of the Police Division’s 438 incidents involving use of force in 2017, the study found. Blacks account for about half of the use-of-force incidents, between 49% and 53% since 2013. Black residents make up only 28% of the city’s population.
Black mothers in the U.S. die at 3 to 4 times the rate of white mothers, one of the widest of all racial disparities in women's health. A black woman is 22% more likely to die from heart disease than a white woman, 71% more likely from cervical cancer, but 243% more likely to die from pregnancy or childbirth-related causes. Black women are 2 to 3 times more likely to die than white women who had the same condition. Black college-educated mothers who gave birth in local hospitals were more likely to suffer severe complications of pregnancy or childbirth than white women who never graduated from high school. The fact that someone with social and economic advantages is at higher risk highlights how profound the inequities really are. There's something inherently wrong with the system that's not valuing the lives of black women equally to white women. Pain is often under treated in black patients for conditions from appendicitis to cancer. The stress of being a black woman in America can take a physical toll during pregnancy and childbirth. Chronic stress "puts the body into overdrive." A professor at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, coined the term "weathering" for stress-induced wear and tear on the body. Weathering "causes a lot of different health vulnerabilities and increases susceptibility to infection, but also early onset of chronic diseases, in particular, hypertension and diabetes," conditions that disproportionately affect blacks at much younger ages than whites. Research suggests it accelerates aging at the molecular level; the chromosomal markers of aging of black women in their 40s and 50s appeared 7 1/2 years older on average than those of whites. In 2021 Ohio ranks 47 on health value out of 50 states and D.C. Racism and other forms of discrimination drive troubling differences in outcomes across Ohio. This includes racist and discriminatory beliefs and interactions among Ohioans and structural racism and discrimination embedded within systems and across sectors, rooted in ageism, ableism, xenophobia, homophobia and more. Ohioans experiencing the worst health outcomes are also more likely to be exposed to trauma and adversity, toxic stress, violence, stigma, and inequitable access to resources. 1 in 10 Black children in Ohio is treated unfairly due to their race, 17 times higher than the rate for white children. Inequitable distribution of infrastructure, power, resources and dollars result in obstacles to accessing education, food, transportation, housing, health care and other resources for Ohio’s most at-risk groups. Black Ohioans experience much worse outcomes than white Ohioans across measures of health, healthcare and the social, economic and physical environment. Racism is a primary driver of the poor outcomes facing Black Ohioans.
End Rant.