[Congressional Record Volume 165, Number 146 (Thursday, September 12, 2019)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1143-E1147]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




    400TH ANNIVERSARY OF FIRST ENSLAVED AFRICANS BROUGHT TO AMERICA

                                 ______
                                 

                               speech of

                            HON. BARBARA LEE

                             of california

                    in the house of representatives

                       Monday, September 9, 2019

  Ms. LEE of California. Madam Speaker, I include in the Record the 
following article from ``The 1619 Project'' published in The New York 
Times Magazine.

           [From The New York Times Magazine, Aug. 14, 2019]

                            The 1619 Project

                        (By Nikole Hanna-Jones)

       My dad always flew an American flag in our front yard. The 
     blue paint on our two-story house was perennially chipping; 
     the fence, or the rail by the stairs, or the front door, 
     existed in a perpetual state of disrepair, but that flag 
     always flew pristine. Our corner lot, which had been redlined 
     by the federal government, was along the river that divided 
     the black side from the white side of our Iowa town. At the 
     edge of our lawn, high on an aluminum pole, soared the flag, 
     which my dad would replace as soon as it showed the slightest 
     tatter.
       My dad was born into a family of sharecroppers on a white 
     plantation in Greenwood, Miss., where black people bent over 
     cotton from can't-see-in-the-morning to can't-see-at-night, 
     just as their enslaved ancestors had done not long before. 
     The Mississippi of my dad's youth was an apartheid state that 
     subjugated its near-majority black population through 
     breathtaking acts of violence. White residents in Mississippi 
     lynched more black people than those in any other state in 
     the country, and the white people in my dad's home county 
     lynched more black residents than those in any other county 
     in Mississippi, often for such ``crimes'' as entering a room 
     occupied by white women, bumping into a white girl or trying 
     to start a sharecroppers union. My dad's mother, like all the 
     black people in Greenwood, could not vote, use the public 
     library or find work other than toiling in the cotton fields 
     or toiling in white people's houses. So in the 1940s, she 
     packed up her few belongings and her three small children and 
     joined the flood of black Southerners fleeing North. She got 
     off the Illinois Central Railroad in Waterloo, Iowa, only to 
     have her hopes of the mythical Promised Land shattered when 
     she learned that Jim Crow did not end at the Mason-Dixon 
     line.
       Grandmama, as we called her, found a house in a segregated 
     black neighborhood on the city's east side and then found the 
     work that was considered black women's work no matter where 
     black women lived--cleaning white people's houses. Dad, too, 
     struggled to find promise in this land. In 1962, at age 17, 
     he signed up for the Army. Like many young men, he joined in 
     hopes of escaping poverty. But he went into the military for 
     another reason as well, a reason common to black men: Dad 
     hoped that if he served his country, his country might 
     finally treat him as an American.
       The 1619 Project is a major initiative from The New York 
     Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of 
     American slavery. It aims to reframe the country's history, 
     understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the 
     consequences of slavery and the contributions of black 
     Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves 
     about who we are. Read all the stories.
       The Army did not end up being his way out. He was passed 
     over for opportunities, his ambition stunted. He would be 
     discharged under murky circumstances and then labor in a 
     series of service jobs for the rest of his life. Like all the 
     black men and women in my family, he believed in hard work, 
     but like all the black men and women in my family, no matter 
     how hard he worked, he never got ahead.
       So when I was young, that flag outside our home never made 
     sense to me. How could this black man, having seen firsthand 
     the way his country abused black Americans, how it refused to 
     treat us as full citizens, proudly fly its banner? I didn't 
     understand his patriotism. It deeply embarrassed me.
       I had been taught, in school, through cultural osmosis, 
     that the flag wasn't really ours, that our history as a 
     people began with enslavement and that we had contributed 
     little to this great nation. It seemed that the closest thing 
     black Americans could have to cultural pride was to be found 
     in our vague connection to Africa, a place we had never been. 
     That my dad felt so much honor in being an American felt like 
     a marker of his degradation, his acceptance of our 
     subordination.
       Like most young people, I thought I understood so much, 
     when in fact I understood so little. My father knew exactly 
     what he was doing when he raised that flag. He knew that our 
     people's contributions to building the richest and most 
     powerful nation in the world were indelible, that the United 
     States simply would not exist without us.
       In August 1619, just 12 years after the English settled 
     Jamestown, Va., one year before the Puritans landed at 
     Plymouth Rock and some 157 years before the English colonists 
     even decided they wanted to form their own country, the 
     Jamestown colonists bought 20 to 30 enslaved Africans from 
     English pirates. The pirates had stolen them from a 
     Portuguese slave ship that had forcibly taken them from what 
     is now the country of Angola. Those men and women who came 
     ashore on that August day were the beginning of American 
     slavery. They were among the 12.5 million Africans who would 
     be kidnapped from their homes and brought in chains across 
     the Atlantic Ocean in the largest forced migration in human 
     history until the Second World War. Almost two million did 
     not survive the grueling journey, known as the Middle 
     Passage.

[[Page E1144]]

       Before the abolishment of the international slave trade, 
     400,000 enslaved Africans would be sold into America. Those 
     individuals and their descendants transformed the lands to 
     which they'd been brought into some of the most successful 
     colonies in the British Empire. Through backbreaking labor, 
     they cleared the land across the Southeast. They taught the 
     colonists to grow rice. They grew and picked the cotton that 
     at the height of slavery was the nation's most valuable 
     commodity, accounting for half of all American exports and 66 
     percent of the world's supply. They built the plantations of 
     George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, 
     sprawling properties that today attract thousands of visitors 
     from across the globe captivated by the history of the 
     world's greatest democracy. They laid the foundations of the 
     White House and the Capitol, even placing with their unfree 
     hands the Statue of Freedom atop the Capitol dome. They 
     lugged the heavy wooden tracks of the railroads that 
     crisscrossed the South and that helped take the cotton they 
     picked to the Northern textile mills, fueling the Industrial 
     Revolution. They built vast fortunes for white people North 
     and South--at one time, the second-richest man in the nation 
     was a Rhode Island ``slave trader.'' Profits from black 
     people's stolen labor helped the young nation pay off its war 
     debts and financed some of our most prestigious universities. 
     It was the relentless buying, selling, insuring and financing 
     of their bodies and the products of their labor that 
     made Wall Street a thriving banking, insurance and trading 
     sector and New York City the financial capital of the 
     world.
       But it would be historically inaccurate to reduce the 
     contributions of black people to the vast material wealth 
     created by our bondage. Black Americans have also been, and 
     continue to be, foundational to the idea of American freedom. 
     More than any other group in this country's history, we have 
     served, generation after generation, in an overlooked but 
     vital role: It is we who have been the perfecters of this 
     democracy.
       The United States is a nation founded on both an ideal and 
     a lie. Our Declaration of Independence, approved on July 4, 
     1776, proclaims that ``all men are created equal'' and 
     ``endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.'' 
     But the white men who drafted those words did not believe 
     them to be true for the hundreds of thousands of black people 
     in their midst. ``Life, Liberty and the pursuit of 
     Happiness'' did not apply to fully one-fifth of the country. 
     Yet despite being violently denied the freedom and justice 
     promised to all, black Americans believed fervently in the 
     American creed. Through centuries of black resistance and 
     protest, we have helped the country live up to its founding 
     ideals. And not only for ourselves--black rights struggles 
     paved the way for eve1y other rights struggle, including 
     women's and gay rights, immigrant and disability rights.
       Without the idealistic, strenuous and patriotic efforts of 
     black Americans, our democracy today would most likely look 
     very different--it might not be a democracy at all.
       The very first person to die for this country in the 
     American Revolution was a black man who himself was not free. 
     Crispus Attucks was a fugitive from slavery, yet he gave his 
     life for a new nation in which his own people would not enjoy 
     the liberties laid out in the Declaration for another 
     century. In every war this nation has waged since that first 
     one, black Americans have fought--today we are the most 
     likely of all racial groups to serve in the United States 
     military.
       My father, one of those many black Americans who answered 
     the call, knew what it would take me years to understand: 
     that the year 1619 is as important to the American story as 
     1776. That black Americans, as much as those men cast in 
     alabaster in the nation's capital, are this nation's true 
     ``founding fathers.'' And that no people has a greater claim 
     to that flag than us.
       In June 1776, Thomas Jefferson sat at his portable writing 
     desk in a rented room in Philadelphia and penned these words: 
     ``We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are 
     created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with 
     certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, 
     Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.'' For the last 243 
     years, this fierce assertion of the fundamental and natural 
     rights of humankind to freedom and self-governance has 
     defined our global reputation as a land of liberty. As 
     Jefferson composed his inspiring words, however, a teenage 
     boy who would enjoy none of those rights and liberties waited 
     nearby to serve at his master's beck and call. His name was 
     Robert Hemings, and he was the half brother of Jefferson's 
     wife, born to Martha Jefferson's father and a woman he owned. 
     It was common for white enslavers to keep their half-black 
     children in slavery. Jefferson had chosen Hemings, from among 
     about 130 enslaved people that worked on the forced-labor 
     camp he called Monticello, to accompany him to Philadelphia 
     and ensure his every comfort as he drafted the text making 
     the case for a new democratic republic based on the 
     individual rights of men.
       At the time, one-fifth of the population within the 13 
     colonies struggled under a brutal system of slavery unlike 
     anything that had existed in the world before. Chattel 
     slavery was not conditional but racial. It was heritable and 
     permanent, not temporary, meaning generations of black people 
     were born into it and passed their enslaved status onto their 
     children. Enslaved people were not recognized as human beings 
     but as property that could be mortgaged, traded, bought, 
     sold, used as collateral, given as a gift and disposed of 
     violently. Jefferson's fellow white colonists knew that black 
     people were human beings, but they created a network of laws 
     and customs, astounding for both their precision and cruelty, 
     that ensured that enslaved people would never be treated as 
     such. As the abolitionist William Goodell wrote in 1853, ``If 
     any thing founded on falsehood might be called a science, we 
     might add the system of American slavery to the list of the 
     strict sciences.''
       [Listen to a new podcast with Nikole Hannah-Jones that 
     tells the story of slavery and its legacy like you've never 
     heard it before.]
       Enslaved people could not legally marry. They were barred 
     from learning to read and restricted from meeting privately 
     in groups. They had no claim to their own children, who could 
     be bought, sold and traded away from them on auction blocks 
     alongside furniture and cattle or behind storefronts that 
     advertised ``Negroes for Sale.'' Enslavers and the courts did 
     not honor kinship ties to mothers, siblings, cousins. In most 
     courts, they had no legal standing. Enslavers could rape or 
     murder their property without legal consequence. Enslaved 
     people could own nothing, will nothing and inherit nothing. 
     They were legally tortured, including by those working for 
     Jefferson himself. They could be worked to death, and often 
     were, in order to produce the highest profits for the white 
     people who owned them.
       Yet in making the argument against Britain's tyranny, one 
     of the colonists' favorite rhetorical devices was to claim 
     that they were the slaves--to Britain. For this duplicity, 
     they faced burning criticism both at home and abroad. As 
     Samuel Johnson, an English writer and Tory opposed to 
     American independence, quipped, ``How is it that we hear the 
     loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?''
       Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact 
     that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to 
     declare their independence from Britain was because they 
     wanted to protect the institution of slavery. By 1776, 
     Britain had grown deeply conflicted over its role in the 
     barbaric institution that had reshaped the Western 
     Hemisphere. In London, there were growing calls to abolish 
     the slave trade. This would have upended the economy of the 
     colonies, in both the North and the South. The wealth and 
     prominence that allowed Jefferson, at just 33, and the other 
     founding fathers to believe they could successfully break off 
     from one of the mightiest empires in the world came from the 
     dizzying profits generated by chattel slavery. In other 
     words, we may never have revolted against Britain if the 
     founders had not understood that slavery empowered them to do 
     so; nor if they had not believed that independence was 
     required in order to ensure that slavery would continue. It 
     is not incidental that 10 of this nation's first 12 
     presidents were enslavers, and some might argue that this 
     nation was founded not as a democracy but as a slavocracy.
       Jefferson and the other founders were keenly aware of this 
     hypocrisy. And so in Jefferson's original draft of the 
     Declaration of Independence, he tried to argue that it wasn't 
     the colonists' fault. Instead, he blamed the king of England 
     for forcing the institution of slavery on the unwilling 
     colonists and called the trafficking in human beings a crime. 
     Yet neither Jefferson nor most of the founders intended to 
     abolish slavery, and in the end, they struck the passage.
       There is no mention of slavery in the final Declaration of 
     Independence. Similarly, 11 years later, when it came time to 
     draft the Constitution, the framers carefully constructed a 
     document that preserved and protected slavery without ever 
     using the word. In the texts in which they were making the 
     case for freedom to the world, they did not want to 
     explicitly enshrine their hypocrisy, so they sought to hide 
     it. The Constitution contains 84 clauses. Six deal directly 
     with the enslaved and their enslavement, as the historian 
     David Waldstreicher has written, and five more hold 
     implications for slavery. The Constitution protected the 
     ``property'' of those who enslaved black people, prohibited 
     the federal government from intervening to end the 
     importation of enslaved Africans for a term of 20 years, 
     allowed Congress to mobilize the militia to put down 
     insurrections by the enslaved and forced states that had 
     outlawed slavery to turn over enslaved people who had run 
     away seeking refuge. Like many others, the writer and 
     abolitionist Samuel Bryan called out the deceit, saying of 
     the Constitution, ``The words are dark and ambiguous; such as 
     no plain man of common sense would have used, [and] are 
     evidently chosen to conceal from Europe, that in this 
     enlightened country, the practice of slavery has its 
     advocates among men in the highest stations.''
       With independence, the founding fathers could no longer 
     blame slavery on Britain. The sin became this nation's own, 
     and so, too, the need to cleanse it. The shameful paradox of 
     continuing chattel slavery in a nation founded on individual 
     freedom, scholars today assert, led to a hardening of the 
     racial caste system. This ideology, reinforced not just by 
     laws but by racist science and literature, maintained that 
     black people were subhuman, a belief that allowed white 
     Americans to live with their betrayal. By the early 1800s, 
     according to the legal historians Leland B. Ware, Robert J. 
     Cottrol and Raymond T. Diamond, white Americans, whether

[[Page E1145]]

     they engaged in slavery or not, ``had a considerable 
     psychological as well as economic investment in the doctrine 
     of black inferiority.'' While liberty was the inalienable 
     right of the people who would be considered white, 
     enslavement and subjugation became the natural station of 
     people who had any discernible drop of ``black'' blood.
       The Supreme Court enshrined this thinking in the law in its 
     1857 Dred Scott decision, ruling that black people, whether 
     enslaved or free, came from a ``slave'' race. This made them 
     inferior to white people and, therefore, incompatible with 
     American democracy. Democracy was for citizens, and the 
     ``Negro race,'' the court ruled, was ``a separate class of 
     persons,'' which the founders had ``not regarded as a 
     portion of the people or citizens of the Government'' and 
     had ``no rights which a white man was bound to respect.'' 
     This belief, that black people were not merely enslaved 
     but were a slave race, became the root of the endemic 
     racism that we still cannot purge from this nation to this 
     day. If black people could not ever be citizens, if they 
     were a caste apart from all other humans, then they did 
     not require the rights bestowed by the Constitution, and 
     the ``we'' in the ``We the People'' was not a lie.
       On Aug. 14, 1862, a mere five years after the nation's 
     highest courts declared that no black person could be an 
     American citizen, President Abraham Lincoln called a group of 
     five esteemed free black men to the White House for a 
     meeting. It was one of the few times that black people had 
     ever been invited to the White House as guests. The Civil War 
     had been raging for more than a year, and black 
     abolitionists, who had been increasingly pressuring Lincoln 
     to end slavery, must have felt a sense of great anticipation 
     and pride.
       The war was not going well for Lincoln. Britain was 
     contemplating whether to intervene on the Confederacy's 
     behalf, and Lincoln, unable to draw enough new white 
     volunteers for the war, was forced to reconsider his 
     opposition to allowing black Americans to fight for their own 
     liberation. The president was weighing a proclamation that 
     threatened to emancipate all enslaved people in the states 
     that had seceded from the Union if the states did not end the 
     rebellion. The proclamation would also allow the formerly 
     enslaved to join the Union army and fight against their 
     former ``masters.'' But Lincoln worried about what the 
     consequences of this radical step would be. Like many white 
     Americans, he opposed slavery as a cruel system at odds with 
     American ideals, but he also opposed black equality. He 
     believed that free black people were a ``troublesome 
     presence'' incompatible with a democracy intended only for 
     white people. ``Free them, and make them politically and 
     socially our equals?'' he had said four years earlier. ``My 
     own feelings will not admit of this; and if mine would, we 
     well know that those of the great mass of white people will 
     not.''
       That August day, as the men arrived at the White House, 
     they were greeted by the towering Lincoln and a man named 
     James Mitchell, who eight days before had been given the 
     title of a newly created position called the commissioner of 
     emigration. This was to be his first assignment. After 
     exchanging a few niceties, Lincoln got right to it. He 
     informed his guests that he had gotten Congress to 
     appropriate funds to ship black people, once freed, to 
     another country.
       ``Why should they leave this country? This is, perhaps, the 
     first question for proper consideration,'' Lincoln told them. 
     ``You and we are different races. . . . Your race suffer very 
     greatly, many of them, by living among us, while ours suffer 
     from your presence. In a word, we suffer on each side.''
       You can imagine the heavy silence in that room, as the 
     weight of what the president said momentarily stole the 
     breath of these five black men. It was 243 years to the month 
     since the first of their ancestors had arrived on these 
     shores, before Lincoln's family, long before most of the 
     white people insisting that this was not their country. The 
     Union had not entered the war to end slavery but to keep the 
     South from splitting off, yet black men had signed up to 
     fight. Enslaved people were fleeing their forced-labor camps, 
     which we like to call plantations, trying to join the effort, 
     serving as spies, sabotaging confederates, taking up arms for 
     his cause as well as their own. And now Lincoln was blaming 
     them for the war. ``Although many men engaged on either side 
     do not care for you one way or the other . . . without the 
     institution of slavery and the colored race as a basis, the 
     war could not have an existence,'' the president told them. 
     ``It is better for us both, therefore, to be separated.''
       As Lincoln closed the remarks, Edward Thomas, the 
     delegation's chairman, informed the president, perhaps 
     curtly, that they would consult on his proposition. ``Take 
     your full time,'' Lincoln said. ``No hurry at all.''
       Nearly three years after that White House meeting, Gen. 
     Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox. By summer, the Civil 
     War was over, and four million black Americans were suddenly 
     free. Contrary to Lincoln's view, most were not inclined to 
     leave, agreeing with the sentiment of a resolution against 
     black colonization put forward at a convention of black 
     leaders in New York some decades before: ``This is our home, 
     and this our country. Beneath its sod lie the bones of our 
     fathers . . . . Here we were born, and here we will die.''
       That the formerly enslaved did not take up Lincoln's offer 
     to abandon these lands is an astounding testament to their 
     belief in this nation's founding ideals. As W.E.B. Du Bois 
     wrote, ``Few men ever worshiped Freedom with half such 
     unquestioning faith as did the American Negro for two 
     centuries.'' Black Americans had long called for universal 
     equality and believed, as the abolitionist Martin Delany 
     said, ``that God has made of one blood all the nations that 
     dwell on the face of the earth.'' Liberated by war, then, 
     they did not seek vengeance on their oppressors as Lincoln 
     and so many other white Americans feared. They did the 
     opposite. During this nation's brief period of 
     Reconstruction, from 1865 to 1877, formerly enslaved people 
     zealously engaged with the democratic process. With federal 
     troops tempering widespread white violence, black Southerners 
     sta1ted branches of the Equal Rights League--one of the 
     nation's first human rights organizations--to fight 
     discrimination and organize voters; they headed in droves to 
     the polls, where they placed other formerly enslaved people 
     into seats that their enslavers had once held. The South, for 
     the first time in the history of this country, began to 
     resemble a democracy, with black Americans elected to local, 
     state and federal offices. Some 16 black men served in 
     Congress--including Hiram Revels of Mississippi, who became 
     the first black man elected to the Senate. (Demonstrating 
     just how brief this period would be, Revels, along with 
     Blanche Bruce, would go from being the first black man 
     elected to the last for nearly a hundred years, until Edward 
     Brooke of Massachusetts took office in 1967.) More than 600 
     black men served in Southern state legislatures and hundreds 
     more in local positions.
       These black officials joined with white Republicans, some 
     of whom came down from the North, to write the most 
     egalitarian state constitutions the South had ever seen. They 
     helped pass more equitable tax legislation and laws that 
     prohibited discrimination in public transportation, 
     accommodation and housing. Perhaps their biggest achievement 
     was the establishment of that most democratic of American 
     institutions: the public school. Public education effectively 
     did not exist in the South before Reconstruction. The white 
     elite sent their children to private schools, while poor 
     white children went without an education. But newly freed 
     black people, who had been prohibited from learning to read 
     and write during slavery, were desperate for an education. So 
     black legislators successfully pushed for a universal, state-
     funded system of schools--not just for their own children but 
     for white children, too. Black legislators also helped pass 
     the first compulsory education laws in the region. Southern 
     children, black and white, were now required to attend 
     schools like their Northern counterparts. Just five years 
     into Reconstruction, every Southern state had enshrined the 
     right to a public education for all children into its 
     constitution. In some states, like Louisiana and South 
     Carolina, small numbers of black and white children, briefly, 
     attended schools together.
       Led by black activists and a Republican Party pushed left 
     by the blatant recalcitrance of white Southerners, the years 
     directly after slavery saw the greatest expansion of human 
     and civil rights this nation would ever see. In 1865, 
     Congress passed the 13th Amendment, making the United States 
     one of the last nations in the Americas to outlaw slavery. 
     The following year, black Americans, exerting their new 
     political power, pushed white legislators to pass the Civil 
     Rights Act, the nation's first such law and one of the most 
     expansive pieces of civil rights legislation Congress has 
     ever passed. It codified black American citizenship for the 
     first time, prohibited housing discrimination and gave all 
     Americans the right to buy and inherit property, make and 
     enforce contracts and seek redress from courts. In 1868, 
     Congress ratified the 14th Amendment, ensuring citizenship to 
     any person born in the United States. Today, thanks to this 
     amendment, every child born here to a European, Asian, 
     African, Latin American or Middle Eastern immigrant gains 
     automatic citizenship. The 14th Amendment also, for the first 
     time, constitutionally guaranteed equal protection under the 
     law. Ever since, nearly all other marginalized groups have 
     used the 14th Amendment in their fights for equality 
     (including the recent successful arguments before the Supreme 
     Court on behalf of same-sex marriage). Finally, in 1870, 
     Congress passed the 15th Amendment, guaranteeing the most 
     critical aspect of democracy and citizenship--the right to 
     vote--to all men regardless of ``race, color, or previous 
     condition of servitude.''
       For this fleeting moment known as Reconstruction, the 
     majority in Congress seemed to embrace the idea that out of 
     the ashes of the Civil War, we could create the multiracial 
     democracy that black Americans envisioned even if our 
     founding fathers did not.
       But it would not last.
       Anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country, as 
     does the belief, so well articulated by Lincoln, that black 
     people are the obstacle to national unity. The many gains of 
     Reconstruction were met with fierce white resistance 
     throughout the South, including unthinkable violence against 
     the formerly enslaved, wide-scale voter suppression, 
     electoral fraud and even, in some extreme cases, the 
     overthrow of democratically elected biracial governments. 
     Faced with this unrest, the federal government decided that 
     black people were the cause of the problem and that for 
     unity's sake, it would leave the white South to its own 
     devices. In

[[Page E1146]]

     1877, President Rutherford B. Hayes, in order to secure a 
     compromise with Southern Democrats that would grant him 
     the presidency in a contested election, agreed to pull 
     federal troops from the South. With the troops gone, white 
     Southerners quickly went about eradicating the gains of 
     Reconstruction. The systemic white suppression of black 
     life was so severe that this period between the 1880s and 
     the 1920 and '30s became known as the Great Nadir, or the 
     second slavery. Democracy would not return to the South 
     for nearly a century.
       White Southerners of all economic classes, on the other 
     hand, thanks in significant part to the progressive policies 
     and laws black people had championed, experienced substantial 
     improvement in their lives even as they forced black people 
     back into a quasi slavery. As Waters McIntosh, who had been 
     enslaved in South Carolina, lamented, ``It was the poor white 
     man who was freed by the war, not the Negroes.''
       Georgia pines flew past the windows of the Greyhound bus 
     carrying Isaac Woodard home to Winnsboro, S.C. After serving 
     four years in the Army in World War II, where Woodard had 
     earned a battle star, he was given an honorable discharge 
     earlier that day at Camp Gordon and was headed home to meet 
     his wife. When the bus stopped at a small drugstore an hour 
     outside Atlanta, Woodard got into a brief argument with the 
     white driver after asking if he could use the restroom. About 
     half an hour later, the driver stopped again and told Woodard 
     to get off the bus. Crisp in his uniform, Woodard stepped 
     from the stairs and saw the police waiting for him. Before he 
     could speak, one of the officers struck him in his head with 
     a billy club, beating him so badly that he fell unconscious. 
     The blows to Woodard's head were so severe that when he woke 
     in a jail cell the next day, he could not see. The beating 
     occurred just 4\1/2\ hours after his military discharge. At 
     26, Woodard would never see again.
       There was nothing unusual about Woodard's horrific maiming. 
     It was part of a wave of systemic violence deployed against 
     black Americans after Reconstruction, in both the North and 
     the South. As the egalitarian spirit of post-Civil War 
     America evaporated under the desire for national 
     reunification, black Americans, simply by existing, served as 
     a problematic reminder of this nation's failings. White 
     America dealt with this inconvenience by constructing a 
     savagely enforced system of racial apartheid that excluded 
     black people almost entirely from mainstream American life--a 
     system so grotesque that Nazi Germany would later take 
     inspiration from it for its own racist policies.
       Despite the guarantees of equality in the 14th Amendment, 
     the Supreme Court's landmark Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 
     1896 declared that the racial segregation of black Americans 
     was constitutional. With the blessing of the nation's highest 
     court and no federal will to vindicate black rights, starting 
     in the late 1800s, Southern states passed a series of laws 
     and codes meant to make slavery's racial caste system 
     permanent by denying black people political power, social 
     equality and basic dignity. They passed literacy tests to 
     keep black people from voting and created all-white primaries 
     for elections. Black people were prohibited from serving on 
     juries or testifying in court against a white person. South 
     Carolina prohibited white and black textile workers from 
     using the same doors. Oklahoma forced phone companies to 
     segregate phone booths.
       Memphis had separate parking spaces for black and white 
     drivers. Baltimore passed an ordinance outlawing black people 
     from moving onto a block more than half white and white 
     people from moving onto a block more than half black. Georgia 
     made it illegal for black and white people to be buried next 
     to one another in the same cemetery. Alabama barred black 
     people from using public libraries that their own tax dollars 
     were paying for. Black people were expected to jump off the 
     sidewalk to let white people pass and call all white people 
     by an honorific, though they received none no matter how old 
     they were. In the North, white politicians implemented 
     policies that segregated black people into slum neighborhoods 
     and into inferior all-black schools, operated whites-only 
     public pools and held white and ``colored'' days at the 
     country fair, and white businesses regularly denied black 
     people service, placing ``Whites Only'' signs in their 
     windows. States like California joined Southern states in 
     barring black people from marrying white people, while local 
     school boards in Illinois and New Jersey mandated segregated 
     schools for black and white children.
       This caste system was maintained through wanton racial 
     terrorism. And black veterans like Woodard, especially those 
     with the audacity to wear their uniform, had since the Civil 
     War been the target of a particular violence. This 
     intensified during the two world wars because white people 
     understood that once black men had gone abroad and 
     experienced life outside the suffocating racial oppression of 
     America, they were unlikely to quietly return to their 
     subjugation at home. As Senator James K. Vardaman of 
     Mississippi said on the Senate floor during World War I, 
     black servicemen returning to the South would ``inevitably 
     lead to disaster.'' Giving a black man ``military airs'' and 
     sending him to defend the flag would bring him ``to the 
     conclusion that his political rights must be respected.''
       Many white Americans saw black men in the uniforms of 
     America's armed services not as patriotic but as exhibiting a 
     dangerous pride. Hundreds of black veterans were beaten, 
     maimed, shot and lynched. We like to call those who lived 
     during World War II the Greatest Generation, but that allows 
     us to ignore the fact that many of this generation fought for 
     democracy abroad while brutally suppressing democracy for 
     millions of American citizens. During the height of racial 
     terror in this country, black Americans were not merely 
     killed but castrated, burned alive and dismembered with their 
     body parts displayed in storefronts. This violence was meant 
     to terrify and control black people, but perhaps just as 
     important, it served as a psychological balm for white 
     supremacy: You would not treat human beings this way. The 
     extremity of the violence was a symptom of the psychological 
     mechanism necessary to absolve white Americans of their 
     country's original sin. To answer the question of how they 
     could prize liberty abroad while simultaneously denying 
     liberty to an entire race back home, white Americans resorted 
     to the same racist ideology that Jefferson and the framers 
     had used at the nation's founding.
       This ideology--that black people belonged to an inferior, 
     subhuman race--did not simply disappear once slavery ended. 
     If the formerly enslaved and their descendants became 
     educated, if we thrived in the jobs white people did, if we 
     excelled in the sciences and arts, then the entire 
     justification for how this nation allowed slavery would 
     collapse. Free black people posed a danger to the country's 
     idea of itself as exceptional; we held up the mirror in which 
     the nation preferred not to peer. And so the inhumanity 
     visited on black people by every generation of white America 
     justified the inhumanity of the past.
       Just as white Americans feared, World War II ignited what 
     became black Americans' second sustained effort to make 
     democracy real. As the editorial board of the black newspaper 
     The Pittsburgh Courier wrote, ``We wage a two-pronged attack 
     against our enslavers at home and those abroad who will 
     enslave us.'' Woodard's blinding is largely seen as one of 
     the catalysts for the decades-long rebellion we have come to 
     call the civil rights movement. But it is useful to pause and 
     remember that this was the second mass movement for black 
     civil rights, the first being Reconstruction. As the 
     centennial of slavery's end neared, black people were still 
     seeking the rights they had fought for and won after the 
     Civil War: the right to be treated equally by public 
     institutions, which was guaranteed in 1866 with the Civil 
     Rights Act; the right to be treated as full citizens before 
     the law, which was guaranteed in 1868 by the 14th Amendment; 
     and the right to vote, which was guaranteed in 1870 by the 
     15th Amendment. In response to black demands for these 
     rights, white Americans strung them from trees, beat them and 
     dumped their bodies in muddy rivers, assassinated them in 
     their front yards, firebombed them on buses, mauled them with 
     dogs, peeled back their skin with fire hoses and murdered 
     their children with explosives set off inside a church.
       For the most part, black Americans fought back alone. Yet 
     we never fought only for ourselves. The bloody freedom 
     struggles of the civil rights movement laid the foundation 
     for every other modern rights struggle. This nation's white 
     founders set up a decidedly undemocratic Constitution that 
     excluded women, Native Americans and black people, and did 
     not provide the vote or equality for most Americans. But the 
     laws born out of black resistance guarantee the franchise for 
     all and ban discrimination based not just on race but on 
     gender, nationality, religion and ability. It was the civil 
     rights movement that led to the passage of the Immigration 
     and Nationality Act of 1965, which upended the racist 
     immigration quota system intended to keep this country white. 
     Because of black Americans, black and brown immigrants from 
     across the globe are able to come to the United States and 
     live in a country in which legal discrimination is no longer 
     allowed. It is a truly American irony that some Asian-
     Americans, among the groups able to immigrate to the United 
     States because of the black civil rights struggle, are now 
     suing universities to end programs designed to help the 
     descendants of the enslaved.
       No one cherishes freedom more than those who have not had 
     it. And to this day, black Americans, more than any other 
     group, embrace the democratic ideals of a common good. We are 
     the most likely to support programs like universal health 
     care and a higher minimum wage, and to oppose programs that 
     harm the most vulnerable. For instance, black Americans 
     suffer the most from violent crime, yet we are the most 
     opposed to capital punishment. Our unemployment rate is 
     nearly twice that of white Americans, yet we are still the 
     most likely of all groups to say this nation should take in 
     refugees.
       The truth is that as much democracy as this nation has 
     today, it has been borne on the backs of black resistance. 
     Our founding fathers may not have actually believed in the 
     ideals they espoused, but black people did. As one scholar, 
     Joe R. Feagin, put it, ``Enslaved African-Americans have been 
     among the foremost freedom-fighters this country has 
     produced.'' For generations, we have believed in this 
     country with a faith it did not deserve. Black people have 
     seen the worst of America, yet, somehow, we still believe 
     in its best.
       They say our people were born on the water.

[[Page E1147]]

       When it occurred, no one can say for certain. Perhaps it 
     was in the second week, or the third, but surely by the 
     fourth, when they had not seen their land or any land for so 
     many days that they lost count. It was after fear had turned 
     to despair, and despair to resignation, and resignation to an 
     abiding understanding. The teal eternity of the Atlantic 
     Ocean had severed them so completely from what had once been 
     their home that it was as if nothing had ever existed before, 
     as if everything and everyone they cherished had simply 
     vanished from the earth. They were no longer Mbundu or Akan 
     or Fulani. These men and women from many different nations, 
     all shackled together in the suffocating hull of the ship, 
     they were one people now.
       Just a few months earlier, they had families, and farms, 
     and lives and dreams. They were free. They had names, of 
     course, but their enslavers did not bother to record them. 
     They had been made black by those people who believed that 
     they were white, and where they were heading, black equaled 
     ``slave,'' and slavery in America required turning human 
     beings into property by stripping them of every element that 
     made them individuals. This process was called seasoning, in 
     which people stolen from western and central Africa were 
     forced, often through torture, to stop speaking their native 
     tongues and practicing their native religions.
       But as the sociologist Glenn Bracey wrote, ``Out of the 
     ashes of white denigration, we gave birth to ourselves.'' For 
     as much as white people tried to pretend, black people were 
     not chattel. And so the process of seasoning, instead of 
     erasing identity, served an opposite purpose: In the void, we 
     forged a new culture all our own.
       Today, our very manner of speaking recalls the Creole 
     languages that enslaved people innovated in order to 
     communicate both with Africans speaking various dialects and 
     the English-speaking people who enslaved them. Our style of 
     dress, the extra flair, stems back to the desires of enslaved 
     people--shorn of all individuality--to exert their own 
     identity. Enslaved people would wear their hat in a jaunty 
     manner or knot their head scarves intricately. Today's avant-
     garde nature of black hairstyles and fashion displays a 
     vibrant reflection of enslaved people's determination to feel 
     fully human through self-expression. The improvisational 
     quality of black art and music comes from a culture that 
     because of constant disruption could not cling to convention. 
     Black naming practices, so often impugned by mainstream 
     society, are themselves an act of resistance. Our last names 
     belong to the white people who once owned us. That is why the 
     insistence of many black Americans, particularly those most 
     marginalized, to give our children names that we create, that 
     are neither European nor from Africa, a place we have never 
     been, is an act of self-determination. When the world listens 
     to quintessential American music, it is our voice they hear. 
     The sorrow songs we sang in the fields to soothe our physical 
     pain and find hope in a freedom we did not expect to know 
     until we died became American gospel. Amid the devastating 
     violence and poverty of the Mississippi Delta, we birthed 
     jazz and blues. And it was in the deeply impoverished and 
     segregated neighborhoods where white Americans forced the 
     descendants of the enslaved to live that teenagers too poor 
     to buy instruments used old records to create a new music 
     known as hip-hop.
       Our speech and fashion and the drum of our music echoes 
     Africa but is not African. Out of our unique isolation, both 
     from our native cultures and from white America, we forged 
     this nation's most significant original culture. In turn, 
     ``mainstream'' society has coveted our style, our slang and 
     our song, seeking to appropriate the one truly American 
     culture as its own. As Langston Hughes wrote in 1926, 
     ``They'll see how beautiful I am/And be ashamed--/I, too, am 
     America.''
       For centuries, white Americans have been trying to solve 
     the ``Negro problem.'' They have dedicated thousands of pages 
     to this endeavor. It is common, still, to point to rates of 
     black poverty, out-of-wedlock births, crime and college 
     attendance, as if these conditions in a country built on a 
     racial caste system are not utterly predictable. But 
     crucially, you cannot view those statistics while ignoring 
     another: that black people were enslaved here longer than we 
     have been free.
       At 43, I am part ofthe first generation of black Americans 
     in the history of the United States to be born into a society 
     in which black people had full rights of citizenship. Black 
     people suffered under slavery for 250 years; we have been 
     legally ``free'' for just 50. Yet in that briefest of spans, 
     despite continuing to face rampant discrimination, and 
     despite there never having been a genuine effort to redress 
     the wrongs of slavery and the century of racial apartheid 
     that followed, black Americans have made astounding progress, 
     not only for ourselves but also for all Americans.
       What if America understood, finally, in this 400th year, 
     that we have never been the problem but the solution?
       When I was a child--I must have been in fifth or sixth 
     grade--a teacher gave our class an assignment intended to 
     celebrate the diversity of the great American melting pot. 
     She instructed each of us to write a short report on our 
     ancestral land and then draw that nation's flag. As she 
     turned to write the assignment on the board, the other black 
     girl in class locked eyes with me. Slavery had erased any 
     connection we had to an African country, and even if we tried 
     to claim the whole continent, there was no ``African'' flag. 
     It was hard enough being one of two black kids in the class, 
     and this assignment would just be another reminder of the 
     distance between the white kids and us. In the end, I walked 
     over to the globe near my teacher's desk, picked a random 
     African country and claimed it as my own.
       I wish, now, that I could go back to the younger me and 
     tell her that her people's ancestry started here, on these 
     lands, and to boldly, proudly, draw the stars and those 
     stripes of the American flag.
       We were told once, by virtue of our bondage, that we could 
     never be American. But it was by virtue of our bondage that 
     we became the most American of all.