A Brief History of Blacks in America
A Brief History of African Americans in America
By Robert James, Ph.D.
In 1619, the first Africans were sold at Jamestown, Virginia by a Dutch trader. Although these first Africans were treated as indentured servants and not slaves, their introduction marked the beginning of the central American sin: slavery. To this day, the conflict over race remains the greatest problem facing Americans.
Over the course of the 1600s, slavery was gradually introduced into the South. Laws began changing the status of Africans in the 1660s, gradually making the color of their skin the marker of not just servitude, but lifelong slavery. With the collapse of the tobacco market in the 1660s, the decline of the white indentured servant supply, and the class warfare of Bacon's Rebellion in 1676, rich white planters completely shifted over to slave labor, increasing the supply of slaves throughout the late 1600s and 1700s. Poor whites were drawn into allegiance with rich white planters through electoral patronage and racial divisions.
In the 1700s, slavery grew in importance. In South Carolina, the introduction of a rice economy by French West Indies refugees led to the most brutal form of slavery, necessitating a constant flow of new slaves. In the Chesapeake area, slavery was less brutal, allowing slaves to have children and increase their numbers, creating an African-American culture for the first time. Slaves clung to their families, despite the lack of legal marriages and the possible breakup due to selling slaves. Few, if any, resisted violently (the Stono Rebellion in South Carolina in 1739 ended in the death of the rebels; the riots in New York City in 1741 ended in twenty black executions); while a few ran away, far more common was passive resistance: working slowly or carelessly, stealing, or “accidentally” destroying their masters’ property. During the Great Awakening of the 1740s, Baptists welcomed slaves into their revival meetings; slaves welcomed the Baptist message that all men and women were equal in God's eyes. Despite white planters’ efforts to break up these conversions, slaves increasingly joined the Baptist and Methodist churches, eventually creating their own congregations led by their own ministers. Even today, ministers remain the most common leaders of African-American communities.
During the Revolutionary War, the ideal of “all men are created equal” spurred severe ethical questioning, especially in the North. While Quakers had long been involved in resisting slavery, and Benjamin Franklin even founded the first abolitionist society on the eve of the Revolution, the North’s true test came during the war as they wrote their new state constitutions. Massachusetts led the way, banning slavery in their constitution (although it took a court ruling to enforce this interpretation for Mum Bett, who would eventually have a great-great-grandson by the name of W.E.B. Dubois…). By the end of the war, the North had largely banned slavery. By 1800, the North and South would be split by their stance on slavery. But even in the South, many masters were embarrassed by slavery. Jefferson himself had tried to include an anti-slavery clause into the Declaration of Independence; after the war, he successfully banned slavery from the new territories of the Old Northwest through the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. After the war, many offered manumission to any slave who fought in the War; many slave owners even offered the belief that slavery would eventually wither away and die.
Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton gin marked the end of any such pipedreams. By making cotton profitable, the cotton gin sparked a revival of slavery, and its resultant spread into the Old Southwest (what became the Deep South) led to the South gathering a vast amount of wealth into slavery and land. In time, the older states (Virginia, Maryland, worn-out eastern South Carolina and Georgia) tended to be the slave breeder states, breaking up families to sell them down the river, to the Deep South. In 1820, the north and south nearly came to blows over the spread of slavery to Missouri; only Henry Clay's brilliant Missouri Compromise averted civil war for another generation. By making Maine and Missouri enter at the same time, 1 slave/1free, and by drawing the Missouri Compromise line to the West, Clay satisfied both North and South.
In 1817, the American Colonization Society was founded in an attempt to remove the free black population of the North. A racist society, they were nonetheless successful in sending back thousands of free blacks to found Liberia in Africa (Monrovia was named after their group’s president, James Monroe). Colonization would remain the favorite solution for what to do with the slaves for much of the nineteenth century (Lincoln himself thought this was the best choice until a group of free blacks let him know how much they hated the idea).
By the 1820s and 1830s, the abolitionist movement began to gather strength in the North, rooting itself in the religious revivals of the Second Great Awakening, with its democratic message that all men and women were equal in the eyes of God. The most famous abolitionist, William Lloyd Garrison, began publishing The Liberator in 1831, calling for immediate, uncompensated abolition of slavery; eventually, he would even burn the Constitution as a “covenant with death” and an “agreement with hell” due to its compromises over slavery (the Constitution had two main compromises: the slave trade could not be interfered with until 1808, when Congress banned it; more cruelly, it counted a slave as 3/5 of a person for the purposes of representation, giving the South an edge in the House of Representatives even as it denied blacks the right to vote.) The South, believing Garrison and his allies to be representative of Northern feeling (they weren’t, as the many northern anti-abolitionist mobs and riots would prove), turned to Congress and the Federal government to stop the abolitionists: in Congress, they imposed the Gag Rule, forbidding even the discussion of any anti-slavery laws; Andrew Jackson approved censorship of the mails to prevent the distribution of abolitionist literature. The South, after all, blamed abolitionists for the 1831 Nat Turner rebellion, which they brutally crushed; after 1831, the South imposed even stricter controls on the slaves, creating night riders, curfews, and severe restrictions on travel. The South had reason to believe that abolitionists had caused the rebellion; in 1827, a free black named David Walker had written an Appeal...to the Colored Citizens calling for the violent overthrow of the South, if they would not free the slaves; Walker’s Appeal was very popular reading among free blacks, especially in the South. So the South, in addition to its new controls, began an active defense of slavery, rather than its former embarrassed apologetics. Slavery was no longer a “necessary evil”; now it was promoted as a “positive good.” They argued slavery protected blacks from the evils of industrialism; slaves were “happier” and better cared for than northern workers. They argued slavery was the best way for whites and blacks to get along in harmony. They also argued slavery was protected and promoted by the Bible: St. Paul had told servants to “obey your masters.” In the Old Testament, Noah’s youngest son had curly hair and his children were condemned to be “hewers of wood and bearers of water”; to Southerners, this was a clear description of African slaves. Slavery, to their way of seeing the world, permitted and promoted freedom -- for the white planter, who could then have the leisure to practice the highest qualities of civilization. John C. Calhoun even went so far as to encourage northern business leaders to act more like Southern planters. History also showed that the greatest democracies and republics – Rome and Greece – had owned slaves. As ridiculous as some of these arguments seem now, in the 1830s and 1840s they found many in agreement, in both North and South.
By the 1840s, the US was seized by a desire to spread across the continent; “Manifest Destiny” was only the latest name for the expansionist fever that marked US history from time to time. Ironically, the great victory over Mexico in 1848, with its resulting land grab, only served to break the US apart. A Northern congressman proposed the Wilmot Proviso, banning slavery from all territory seized in the war. Defeated as a proposition, it nonetheless scared the South into suspecting the North was out to overturn their way of life. Arguments arose over what would be done with the new territory. John C. Calhoun proposed a “common property” doctrine, insisting that slavery be allowed everywhere; most moderates supported a simple extension of the Missouri Compromise line to the ocean; Lewis Cass created the idea of “popular sovereignty,” in which each territory would decide for itself. In 1850, when California requested entry as a free state, the South was furious, since California was clearly, at least in part, below the Missouri Compromise line. Henry Clay again engineered an arrangement to hold off civil war in the Compromise of 1850. Put through Congress by Stephen Douglas as individual acts, the Compromise of 1850 had incentives to both north and south: California was admitted as a free state; New Mexico and Utah were organized as territories without reference to slavery (but with implied popular sovereignty); the slave trade was abolished in Washington, D.C.; and, most importantly for the South, a new stricter Fugitive Slave Law was added, to be enforced by the federal government.
By the 1850s, the South was deeply committed not only to maintaining slavery, but to expanding slavery. The pro-slavery arguments of the 1820s and 1830s were bolstered by a belief that slavery was responsible for civilization itself; without slavery, who would do the dirty work that formed the basis for any society? Slavery guaranteed that there would be freedom for whites from this kind of labor, allowing democracy and freedom itself to exist. The lack of Southern cities, southern education, and southern magazines helped prevent the spread of ideas that might change the South as the North had been changed over the previous forty years. Slaves survived by clinging to their families and their religion, as well as by forming the Underground Railroad to help the thousands of runaways reach the free North. Some free blacks, most famously Frederick Douglass, reached the north and became prosperous; Douglass was the foremost black leader of the nineteenth century, pushing for abolition and, during the Civil War, black military action. Free blacks both North and South faced severe racism; rarely were they more than second-class citizens. For slaves, sabotage and passive resistance, however, continued to be the more common forms of resistance until the Civil War.
The Fugitive Slave Law would prove to be the most explosive part of the Compromise of 1850, serving to further polarize the North and South. Northerners found that their personal liberty laws, passed to protect runaway slaves, were voided; even more importantly, their states were now required to aid in the return of runaway slaves. Runaway slaves were denied the right to trials or to testify in their own defense; a higher bounty was paid to commissioners if a guilty verdict was found. Frederick Douglass abandoned pacifism. Northern abolitionists began actively breaking the law to help runaway slaves. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1851-52 to personalize slavery for hundreds of thousands of readers; Abraham Lincoln once greeted her as the woman who started the Civil War. The Free-Soil movement, begun in the 1840s to prevent the spread of slavery and preserve the west for whites, expanded and became the new Republican Party. The South proved furious in what they saw as a betrayal of “Southern Rights,” and began organizing behind secessionist movements; they held back, so long as the North did not threaten to abolish slavery in Congress. Pro-slavery books were written in response to Stowe; in 1857, a Virginia planter published Cannibals All, or, Slaves without Masters (the title says it all, as it argued that freeing the slaves would mean that they would eat white people).
Tensions were made far worse with the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. Stephen Douglass wanted to be president, and needed Southern support, so he decided to cut up Kansas and Nebraska into two territories, and support the passage of popular sovereignty, believing along with the South that at least one of the territories would be slave. This Act overturned the Missouri Compromise, and infuriated the North. Douglas’ action led directly to “Bleeding Kansas,” as both southerners and northerners poured into Kansas to influence the vote for or against slavery. Pro-slavers massacred free-soilers at Lawrence, Kansas; in retaliation, John Brown led the Pottawotamie massacre, cutting down five pro-slavers with swords. Presidents Pierce and (later) Buchanan were in favor of slavery, and tried to recognize the pro-slave constitution written by the falsely elected pro-slave legislature at Lecompton. By the 1856 election, the Republicans had gained enough support to replace the Whigs as the main second party, opposed by the Democrats.
James Buchanan won, but he increased the tensions even further by encouraging the Supreme Court to pass the Dred Scott decision. Dred Scott was ruled, along with all blacks, to not be citizens of the United States; in each and every state, slaves were property. The Missouri Compromise was now ruled to have always been unconstitutional; Congress was ordered to keep its hands off slavery in the territories (essentially, this is John C. Calhoun’s common property doctrine made law). The North began to believe in a vast slave conspiracy: first, the Kansas-Nebraska Act had overturned the Missouri Compromise, then the Dred Scott decision, then the presidential support of the fraudulent pro-slavery Kansas Lecompton constitution. All of these pointed at a southern takeover of the government. At Freeport, Illinois, Stephen Douglas himself added fuel to the Southern belief in a conspiracy against them in the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Pinned to the wall by Lincoln’s question about how he could support both Dred Scott and popular sovereignty, Douglas replied that any state could prevent slavery by simply not passing the laws necessary to protect its existence. The Freeport Doctrine now meant that the South could be denied any benefit from the Dred Scott decision.
For the South, the clincher in the Northern conspiracy was John Brown’s 1859 raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers' Ferry. Brown wanted to spark off a slave rebellion throughout the South; his failure to do so did not keep the South from thinking that the North backed Brown. Brown became a martyr for the abolitionist movement; Henry David Thoreau said Brown was an “angel of light”; Emerson said his death would “make the gallows as glorious as the cross.”
The election of 1860 became a referendum not just on slavery, but on the existence of the Union itself. The Democrats split into northern (Stephen Douglas) and southern branches (John Breckenridge); the border states supported a union ticket (Bell). When Lincoln won the election without a majority in the popular vote (not even 50%) solely on northern voters in the Electoral College, the South exploded into secession, despite Lincoln's promises that he would not interfere in slavery where it already existed. Lincoln’s free-soil position was assumed by the South to be a lie covering abolitionist plans. The Civil War had begun. Lincoln himself did not see the war as being over slavery, but rather over the preservation of the Union. The South saw it as necessary to protect their way of life; blacks both North and South saw it as the prelude to their freedom.
But by 1863, Lincoln recognized that the war had to be about something greater. In a move both cynical and ideal, Lincoln passed the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing all slaves currently held in enemy territory. Not a single slave was actually freed by this act, since Lincoln needed to keep the border states loyal. But the moral tone of the war changed, and the war became a fight to free the slaves. the Emancipation Proclamation helped end any chance that Britain or France would come to the aid of the South as well.
As states were liberated from the South, former slaves joined the ranks of free blacks. Many chose to enlist in the Union Army, serving in segregated units. But by 1865, it was clear that all blacks would be set free. In 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment banned all slavery. The Freedmen’s Bureau was created to help former slaves keep fed and clothed, and resettle on land formerly owned by planters. The hated gang system of labor was successfully ended. Radical Republicans wanted to give each former slave 40 acres and a mule, but that would prove to be a pipedream. With Lincoln’s assassination, and Johnson’s friendliness towards the South, the former Confederate masters soon regained the upper hand, passing new “black codes” to restrict and restrain former slaves’ actions and economic opportunities and restore the slave-master relationship. Radical Republicans in Congress soon realized they had to take action, and in 1867 they launched Reconstruction. First, the Reconstruction Act of 1867 placed all southern states under military governorships; the Fourteenth Amendment, proposed in 1866, made all blacks citizens, fully entitled to the rights of all citizens. In 1869, Congress passed the Fifteenth Amendment, asserting the right of all black males to vote. Until a state accepted the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, they would not be readmitted to the Union. By 1871, all southern states met these stipulations. But the military remained, enforcing black suffrage and enabling blacks to control many Southern state legislatures due to their majorities. In 1870, the first black Senator, Hiram Revels, took Jefferson Davis’ former seat.
But the South struck back. In 1865, the Ku Klux Klan was born; by 1870, it operated throughout the South. Terrorism began to reassert Democratic control of several Southern states. Despite the Force Acts of 1870 and 1871, designed to deal with the Klan, the South slowly returned to white dominance. Black leaders were beaten and assassinated; Republican meetings were broken up; voters were threatened. By 1877, only three Republican governments remained; these were surrendered in the fraudulent 1876 election, wherein Republican Rutherford B. Hayes stole the presidency in exchange for ending Reconstruction.
For southern blacks, the overwhelming majority of whom remained in the South, this was a disaster largely equivalent to a return to slavery. Fear, terrorism, lynching, and the closure of educational, political, and economic opportunities created an environment of dead ends. The sharecropping system tied black farmers into a cycle of debt and poverty they rarely recovered from; any black man or woman who dared challenge the system often found brutality their only reward. By the 1890s Democrats had pulled all whites into a racially divided alliance against blacks as the “white man’s party,” appealing to poor whites’ racism and ending any hope of a class-based resistance in the Populist movement. “Grandfather clauses” and literacy tests effectively shut down black voting throughout the South; “Jim Crow” laws established a color line of segregation in almost all public facilities and transportation. In 1896, the Supreme Court nailed the door shut by approving of segregation in the infamous Plessy v Ferguson ruling.
Blacks attempted to resist as best they could, but aside from the occasional boycott and courageous instances of resistance (like Ida B. Wells’ reporting on lynching), blacks were largely stuck. Booker T. Washington emerged as the dominant leader of black America in the 1890s when his speech in Atlanta essentially accepted this second-class status of segregation. Washington insisted rather that blacks should focus on economic advances, receiving skills training at Tuskegee Institute and other such places, and rejecting civil liberties until such time as economic advances would naturally accrue social benefits. While he did work behind the scenes against lynching and Jim Crow laws, his Atlanta Compromise became the central leadership position for a large percentage of black Americans for the next twenty years. It pleased white America so much he became the first black man invited to the White House; even so, Teddy Roosevelt paid so high a price in southern support for this that it would be over half a century before the next black man stayed as a visitor (Sammy Davis, Jr. with Richard Nixon).
Directly opposing Washington would be the intellectual W.E.B. DuBois. The first black man to receive a doctorate from Harvard, DuBois instead believed in the “talented tenth,” the black intellectuals and artists who were the natural leaders; he insisted that civil rights and integration into mainstream American culture were absolutely essential to black Americans. He founded the Niagara movement, which eventually spawned the NAACP with its white leadership. DuBois was a major spur towards the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, but even in the 1890s black poets like Paul Laurence Dunbar and musicians like ragtime creator Scott Joplin were prominent.
World War I would prove to be the great break with the past for many blacks. Northern factories (like those owned by Henry Ford, who paid blacks the same wages as whites) actively recruited in the South, launching the Great Migration that would last until after World War II and produce the large urban black populations of many northern cities, especially New York’s Harlem and Chicago’s South Side. The lure of high-paying jobs and the specter of the past drove blacks north; the return of the Ku Klux Klan, driven by the highly popular racist film Birth of a Nation only hurried many North to escape southern oppression. Unfortunately, by the 1920s, the KKK was far more prominent in the North and Midwest. Lynchings reached an appallingly high number; the 1919 murder of black swimmer Eugene Williams in Chicago led to the bloodiest race riot of the decade. Many blacks turned to the first major separatist movement in black history, Marcus Garvey’s UNIA, which established the Black Star Line to ship blacks back to Africa; Garvey was ultimately convicted of mail fraud and deported by the federal government. The NAACP and the explosion of black talent in the Harlem Renaissance helped dull the pain of such oppression, as did the new music of the twenties, jazz. Created by black musicians in New Orleans initially, the music spread up the Mississippi River after the closing of Storyville, the red-light district of New Orleans. Trumpeter Louis Armstrong followed the lead of his mentor King Oliver, quickly surpassing him and creating the dominant music of the twentieth century; Duke Ellington became famous for his broadcasts from the Cotton Club, but his big band swing would soon become the music of mainstream America, and his compositions the most celebrated by any American composer.
The Great Depression marked a severe downturn for black America. Blacks were often the first fired, and rarely rehired. The Harlem Renaissance came to a screeching halt. Race riots and lynchings rose again as white frustrations played out on a bleeding black canvas. The most infamous case of all concerned black hobos falsely accused by two white women of raping them; without a shred of evidence, the Scottsboro boys were convicted (later pardoned and/or overturned on technical grounds). In March 1935, Harlem saw the worse race riot of the decade as rumors of police murder of a young black boy led to days of rioting. At Booker T. Washington’s own Tuskegee Institute, doctors found infected blacks with syphilis to observe the course of the disease, without informing the subjects about their condition; long after a cure was found, these men suffered from this brutal, callous display of “science” in the hands of a government program: the antibiotics were withheld from them to continue the study. The Depression held some rays of light, as FDR and, more convincingly, his wife Eleanor championed blacks. Mary McLeod Bethune headed the “black cabinet,” a group of black leaders who advised the President and worked for fairer treatment of blacks in the New Deal. When the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to allow the black opera singer Marian Anderson to sing in one of their halls, Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from that group and arranged for a far greater concert in front of the Lincoln Memorial. As a sign of this support, blacks shifted in overwhelming numbers from their traditional loyalties to become one of the Democratic Party’s firmest supporters, as New Deal programs reached their communities.
World War II proved to be an even greater break with the past than World War I. Factories continued to draw blacks from the South, especially after A. Philip Randolph’s threatened march on Washington forced FDR to order that jobs in the defense factories were to be handed out without discrimination (Executive Order 8802); the Fair Employment Practices Committee was established to enforce this ruling. Blacks began promoting the Double V Campaign: victory over the fascists in Europe and Japan, and victory over racism here. Black newspapers spread the idea that serving in the military would show good citizenship and patriotism, while also demanding equality. The NAACP grew nine-fold; a new organization, CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) led sit-ins in Washington restaurants, successfully desegregating them. Perhaps most importantly of all, blacks served in the military as they had in WWI. This time, however, larger numbers served in combat units, albeit under white officers for the most part. The first black officers received their commissions. The most successful fighter squadron in the war was the all black Tuskegee Squadron. When black soldiers returned home after the war, they did so with the knowledge that racism and segregation was not the way of the world, and could be fought.
Postwar America became the proving ground for the fight against segregation. One of the greatest blows came when President Truman desegregated the military (Truman also called for other civil rights legislation, including an end to the poll tax; the Southern Democrats under Strom Thurmond campaigned against him as the Dixiecrats in 1948). Truman saw a fight for equality as a necessity in the Cold War; the Soviets often pointed at American racism to convince Third World countries who were choosing sides. The Fifties saw McCarthyism used against the NAACP; the FBI had Martin Luther King trailed and bugged for years in the conviction he was a communist spy.
One of the greatest symbolic actions came when Branch Rickey chose to break major league baseball’s color barrier and sign Jackie Robinson, whose grace under pressure proved black athletes could play pro ball (in the 1930s and 1940s, heavyweight boxer Joe Louis had been the main hero for many blacks, since nobody could beat him). Black music continued to inspire America, as rhythm and blues music became transformed into rock’n’roll (once again, as with jazz and swing, white musicians stole entire musical forms from blacks and profited highly, while the originals often toiled on in obscurity). But the greatest break of all came when Chief Justice Earl Warren led the Supreme Court to unanimously overturn segregation in all American schools with Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas in 1954. While it took another decade to actually complete desegregation, the beginning was struck boldly. NAACP Lawyer Thurgood Marshall led the fight to end segregation; in the Sixties, LBJ would appoint Marshall as the very first black Supreme Court justice (in an earlier 1944 case, Smith v. Allwright, Marshall had convinced the Supreme Court to ban all white primaries).
The next year, Rosa Parks’ refusal to move to the back of the bus sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and the rise of Martin Luther King, Jr. to national prominence. In 1957, television began its crucial role in showing the country outside the South the brutality of segregation, when it broadcast the crisis in Little Rock. Gov. Faubus ordered out the National Guard to prevent nine black students from attending the all-white Central High School. Public outrage drove Eisenhower to finally take action, and he ordered in the Army to protect the black students.
The sixties proved to be the height of the civil rights movement, as well as the seeds of its decline. In 1960, four black students in Greensboro, North Carolina staged a sit-in at an all-white lunch counter to protest its whites-only policy. It worked, and soon the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced “snick”) was created, organizing other sit-ins and demonstrations throughout the South. CORE organized the “freedom rides” wherein buses drove down whites and blacks from the North to protest segregation; the KKK often attacked these young people violently. The Kennedy administration threatened to use federal forces to force compliance with the new civil rights rulings, and most of the South quietly went along. But many did not, and murder, bombings, and bloodshed followed. The most infamous of these violent confrontations came in 1963 in Birmingham, Alabama, where the Southern authorities ordered the use of dogs, electric cattle prods, and fire hoses to break up the march, organized by Dr. King. Television cameras filmed and broadcast the whole travesty, outraging the nation far more than any other reported act. JFK stepped forward at last and promised major civil rights legislation.
The shining moment of the civil rights movement was the 1963 March on Washington, with Dr. King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech. 250,000 black and white listeners gathered at the Lincoln Memorial to hear his inspirational words. Shortly afterwards, a church in Birmingham was bombed, killing four young black girls. Two months after the speech, JFK was assassinated. A grieving nation forced the passage of the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act, ending all employment discrimination, backed up by the federal government. The following year saw the equally important 1965 Voting Rights Act, which ended all literacy tests and other measures the south used to deny blacks the right to vote. Following upon the heels of the savage attacks ordered on Dr. King’s march on Selma by Gov. George Wallace, known as “Bloody Sunday,” LBJ had gone on TV to campaign for this act, ending his speech by saying “We shall overcome” (the main song of the civil rights movement). The political cost for LBJ was steep: Southern whites began abandoning the Democrats in favor of the Republicans, who were willing to play the race card in 1964 with Goldwater, who opposed the Civil Rights Act on libertarian grounds, and 1968 with Nixon, who told southerners he wouldn’t enforce the new egalitarian rules (George Wallace ran on an openly segregationist ticket in 1968, splitting the Democrats in the South and letting Nixon win). By the 1980 election, the South would be tipping permanently into a Solid South for the Republicans instead of the Democrats, eroding the New Deal coalition that had made the Democrats the dominant party for nearly half a century.
However, from the mid-Sixties on, the civil rights movement began tackling far tougher issues, since the economic situation facing most blacks was a far more difficult problem. Trapped by poverty on the farm and more commonly, in the city, blacks had little hope that their situation would get any better without long, sustained action. Other leaders arose to suggest methods other than Dr. King’s non-violence. Most of these preached black separatism, in a vein not unlike Marcus Garvey in the 1920s. Believing that white racism would never end, these leaders sought not integration but separation. The Nation of Islam, led by Elijah Muhammad, sponsored the rise of Malcolm Little, known as Malcolm X when he abandoned his last name, calling it his slave name. Malcolm X spoke of using “any means necessary” to achieve black power; when he broke with Muhammad after the pilgrimage to Mecca (where he saw white people who were not racist and who shared his Islamic faith), Malcolm X was assassinated by the Black Muslims. But soon others took up Malcolm X’s call for black power; Stokely Carmichael broke away from SNCC’s non-violent principles and called for black men to take over the country. Even more violent were Huey Newton’s militant self-defense organization, the Black Panthers, who set out to defend blacks from police brutality, and whose raised fist was a symbol of black separatist resistance (in the 1968 Olympics, two black winners raised their fists rather than crossing their hearts during the national anthem infuriating white America). The Panthers and other inner-city groups began to organize the black vote, leading to the first African-American mayors of cities in the Seventies. The term Afro-American came to replace black, just as black had replaced colored and Negro in the fifties.
Every summer from 1964 to 1968, cities were wracked by urban riots in black neighborhoods burning buildings and protesting. Angry, unemployed, trapped, these young black men took out their frustrations in direct action. The 1965 Watts Riots left much of the neighborhood destroyed and thirty-four blacks dead. Watts rioters shouted “Burn, baby, burn” rather than “We shall overcome.” The 1967 riots were the worst of all, hitting nearly thirty cities and causing hundreds of deaths and millions in damages. Throughout, most of the damage was aimed at white-owned businesses and property, many of whom had denied black people jobs in their own neighborhoods. Throughout America, the inner city was becoming a wasteland, with poor schools, crime rates far higher than anywhere else, and a near total lack of opportunity for jobs or any kind of hope. Segregation persisted in housing, often reinforced by racial covenants wherein whites refused to sell to blacks. Low-income jobs and slums predominated in the inner cities throughout the Sixties and Seventies. So-called “urban renewal” often led to bulldozing down ethnic neighborhoods that were helping to maintain a sense of community. Housing projects often replaced these neighborhoods, intending to provide clean, affordable housing, but more often than not leading to increased crime, more segregation, and a concentration of poverty.
In 1968, Martin Luther King was assassinated; a short time later, so was Bobby Kennedy. In a flash, the two most powerful civil rights advocates were gone. While political change had been effected, the essential status of blacks as an underclass in America remained: urban, trapped, unemployed, and angry. Many of these young black men went to fight in Vietnam, returning, if they did at all, angry at being forced to fight a war that was not theirs in such disproportionate numbers. Muhammad Ali drew attention to this fact when he refused to go to Vietnam after he was drafted. Ultimately, he sacrificed his titles to keep his principles.
The major civil rights issue that marked the early Seventies was forced busing, as the courts began to fully enforce desegregation across the country. The South finally complied; the schools were largely desegregated (in recent years, de facto segregation has returned as busing programs ended and “white flight” increased) Whites, particularly in Boston, deeply resented having to send their kids out of their safe suburbs into all black neighborhoods; they also resented blacks being bused into their neighborhoods. The Supreme Court eventually ended busing outside of a single school district, which meant that the North never really desegregated due to living in different districts; ironically, the North ended up being more racially divided than the South.
By the mid-Seventies, and accelerating into the Eighties, high-paying jobs for unskilled workers vanished; labor unions began collapsing. Blacks in particular were hit hard. White flight accelerated the decline of cities further. The liberal response was to promote affirmative action, in which minority groups with historical discrimination were given preference for government contracts and school admissions (blacks, Latinos, and women all benefited). Programs successfully brought larger numbers of minorities closer to economic and educational equality, until white backlash led to lawsuits claiming what came to be known as “reverse discrimination.” The Supreme Court ruled in 1978 in Bakke v. University of California that quotas setting aside positions in public colleges were illegal; race could only be a factor, but not a guarantee. Affirmative action would continue to be dismantled over the next two decades by the courts.
Throughout the Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties, black culture would continue to dominate American and world culture, as it had since the days of ragtime, jazz, blues, and swing, into R&B, rock’n’roll, soul, funk, disco, and then rap and hip-hop. Break dancing was only the latest dance craze in a long line of dance crazes begun in poor black neighborhoods and appropriated by white kids.
As the culture wars of the Nineties emerged, and as America grew more diverse ethnically with new Latino and Asian immigration, multiculturalism came to dominate, and black culture brought out a new cycle of celebration of black pride. Economically, by 2000, about half of all blacks were now in the middle class, and had escaped from the inner cities into the suburbs. Crack cocaine and gang warfare had further complicated matters in the inner cities, bringing drive-by shootings and AK-47s as gangs like the Bloods and Crips fought for dominance in the drug trade from the Eighties into the Nineties. But nationally, blacks were increasingly a part of mainstream America, and nowhere was this more obvious than in 2008.
Barack Obama seemingly came out of nowhere, the son of a Kenyan immigrant studying in America, and a white mother. Obama understood the very nature of multiculturalism, and easily navigated what it meant to be a black man in 21st century America, speaking to all ethnic groups with comfort and effectiveness. When he won the presidency in 2008, blacks felt they had achieved a great victory: a black man was president. While Donald Trump winning in 2016 may be seen as a setback, Obama’s two terms show that much has been achieved – and much remains to be done. Although African-Americans have achieved positions of considerable power and prestige – including Colin Powell as the first black head of the joint Chiefs of Staff and the first black Secretary of State, and Condoleeza Rice as the first female and black Secretary of State – many continue to suffer from the effects of racism. Police brutality towards blacks remains a particular problem; the protest group Black Lives Matter made a particular effort to fight against that issue in the second decade of the 21st century. The KKK and hate groups on the right experienced a resurgence in the 2016 election, and President Trump has largely refused to denounce them. The struggle for full equality and a world without racism continues.
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