1619 Project

What started out as an article in the NY Times and is now an eye-opening book, the 1619 Project shares examples of how post Civil War experiences for Black Americans were perhaps not quite what we were lead to believe.  Is it an attempt to rewrite history?  Or perhaps it is sharing an alternate perspective and interpretation of the events previously shared as FACT in our history books.

In our April meeting we selected a few of the chapters and discussed the following topics in greater detail:  Healthcare, Inheritance, Punishment and Democracy.  A few thoughts are shared below

HEALTHCARE:

“Congress had established the (Freedmen’s) Bureau in 1865 as a federal entity meant to oversee the transition from slavery to freedom…opponents of the bureau, including President Andrew Johnson and most Democratic members of Congress, argued that such assistance would only breed dependence, which would keep freed people from returning to the plantations, where their labor was still needed…The bureau director put in charge of the program aimed to provide just enough care to just enough freed people to maintain the plantation labor force”

“No charitable black scheme can wash out the color of the Negro, change his inferior nature or save him from his inevitable fate,” Ohio Democratic congressman Samuel Cox said in 1865 on the floor of the House of Representatives.

These, and many, many more examples illustrate that although the enslaved  people were officially “free” the system had other plans and even the well-meaning plans were often executed by individuals and groups that disagreed and were given the discretion to implement as they saw fit.  Which very often meant the Black Americans were continued to be treated as “less than”.

In more recent years, the AMA barred Black doctors from becoming members and would send certain patients to one hospital while sending others to a lesser quality facility.

Black and Latino Americans still have the highest uninsured rates in the country and still shoulder a disproportionate share of the nation’s poor health outcomes. But they are not alone. After all the debates and elections and bills and lawsuits, millions of Americans— of every race, ethnicity, and political persuasion— still don’t have health insurance of any kind, and millions more are still forced to ration crucial medications, or to forgo critical procedures

INHERITANCE:

This chapter chronicles the life (and death) of Elmore Bolling, who managed to create a number of successful business and amass savings that would be equivalent to approximately $500K, in todays world. He was killed because white people didn’t like that he was successful.  Just like Wilmington, Tulsa and countless other examples of how white Southerners killed, ruined and stole when Blacks made anything of themselves.  The whites saw it as a threat to their opportunities to prosper.

“Bolling came from a long line of Black entrepreneurs that stretched back to the early post-slavery days. From them, he learned how to be successful in the Jim Crow South. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, his father and grandfather had managed to acquire a large plot of land, on which they ran cattle. But just as they were getting ahead, a white man who’d been renting a parcel of land from them claimed that the land was his. Black people had no legal standing when it came to business matters with white folks, so he was able to simply take it from the Bollings. After that, the Bolling men vowed never to buy property again. Instead, they would lease it…Bolling sent his two oldest sons to live with their aunt in Montgomery during the week so they could attend school in the city instead of going to the local high school, where the focus was on working the land rather than book learning. “Our father decided that those schools offered a better education,” McCall says of her dad, who never learned to read or write…McCall says the shooters didn’t bother to cover their faces; they didn’t need to. Everyone would know who had killed Elmore and why. “Enraged whites, jealous over the business success of a Negro, are believed to be the lynchers of Elmore Bolling,” reported The Chicago Defender on December 20, 1947; the story noted that “Bolling has long been a marked man.” One local who knew Elmore put it succinctly: he was “too successful to be a Negro.”…The trauma reverberated over the years after her father’s lynching, and in addition to the emotional pain, there was the ongoing financial toll. “There was no inheritance,” says McCall, “nothing for my father to pass down, because it was all taken away.””

There are also other ways to think about inheritance.

PUNISHMENT:

The chapter does a decent job mapping the growth of the incarceration state in the US; the inequalities in outcomes in the CJ system; the historical roots of disproportionate or dishonest enforcement; and ties the current state to those historical factors and also societal factors driving that incarceration.

In the early 1970s, the USA had fewer than 350,000 people in prisons across the country. Then Richard Nixon’s war on drugs was declared. Many here know that decades after the fact, Nixon’s top aide John Ehrlichman admitted at the beginning of a speech that it was created as a political tool to destabilize the black rights movement by targeting blacks and hippies.

So what was the result? That 350,000 people is now 2.3 million people. The United States has an incarceration rate of 629 per 100,000. For comparison, France has 119. Italy has 91. Canada has 94.

And it only got worse as the federal government got into the game, with disproportionate sentences and, eventually, in 1994 the “Three Strikes and You Are Out” law that I would hope Bill Clinton wishes he could take back.

In 1980, at the beginning of the Reagan 80s, there were 40,000 people in prison for drug offenses. That number is now at 450,000.

Most in this chat are likely to know that for some period the punishment for offenses related to crack cocaine were harsher than the punishment for powered cocaine. Crack is essentially powdered cocaine cooked with baking soda to become something that can be smoked. Crack was associated with Harlem and ghettos, powdered cocaine associated with Studio 54.

A study from the 1980s found that in Georgia, black defendants accused of killing a white person were twenty-two times as likely to be sentenced to capital punishment as those who killed black victims. To be blunt, because at that time Black Lives did not Matter in those courts the same way that white lives did.

The historical roots come down to control and exploitation of black bodies. We have all heard the term lynching, but most of us don’t know that it is derived from either of two Virginia judges during revolutionary times that ordered extrajudicial punishment in order to suppress citizens and keep his chosen societal order in place.  According to the Tuskegee institute, there were 3,442 lynchings of black people between 1882 and 1968. That comes down to 40 a year. Three a month.

The continued exploitation comes from a clause in the 13th amendment, which ended slavery except “AS PUNISHMENT FOR CRIME WHEREOF THE PARTY SHALL HAVE BEEN DULY CONVICTED.”

This is where “Convict Leasing” arose in the heart of the old south, where plantation owners who no longer had slaves to work the fields could pay local governments for slaves convicted of such dubious things as loitering or vagrancy, based only on the testimony of the white deputy delivered to the white judge before the all-white jury.  Historian Douglas Blackmon won the Pulitzer Prize for his book “Slavery by another name.”

So what does that have to do with today? I work in the court system in Massachusetts. We have a prison population of about 130 per 100,000. In Louisiana, that population is more than 5 times higher per capita. The laws and systems put in place in states like Louisiana, Missouri and other states to feed the lucrative need for slave labor were not repealed when convict leasing ended.

In the Massachusetts Court system, we see time and again the factors that push some populations into incarceration. The book talks about the jump in drug incarceration starting in 1980. By no co-incidence, 1980 is about the start of the movement to defund education and hollow out public schools. Declaring ketchup a vegetable in school lunches is a good punchline for the Reagan 80s, but it is also indicative of what was happening. And which school systems are most dependent on federal funding? Urban and poor rural. Guess where the majority of today’s prisoners are from?

Like in many places, Massachusetts school funding is at the local level, meaning the rich towns fund their schools as much as they want. The black vs white drop-out rates in public schools here is informative. It is almost twice as high for black students as white. The system is built to reward those who are already well rewarded.

Even if a black student in a Boston school does everything right and graduates valedictorian, the Boston Globe did a study a few years ago on where those valedictorians were all those years later. The answer included homeless, jobless, on the other side of jail time, dropped out of the school they matriculated into.

Because the schools EVEN IN YANKEE MASSACHUSETTS are systemically failing kids concentrated into urban districts.

DEMOCRACY

This chapter begins with a story about Nikole Hannah-Jones father who flew an American flag outside her house in a small town in Iowa. Here father may have ignored the wear and tear on some parts of her house, but he made sure the flag was in pristine condition. Hannah-Jones struggled to understand how a black man, whose home was redlined, could be so dedicated to the American flag. The chapter ends with Hannah-Jones stating, “We were once told, 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.”  The chapter focuses on the complex, duplicity of living in America as descendants of formerly enslaved people. Throughout the chapter she sights examples of conflicting messages and actions by America that is seldom discussed in schools. For example:

– George Washington described how the British attempts to control the colonist was a form of slavery. He stated, “those from whom we have a right to seek protection are endeavouring  be every piece of Art and despotism to fix the Shackles of Slavery upon us.” At the same time Washington, “derived his wealth from the forced slave labor of more than 120 human beings…”

– Frederick Douglas saw Abraham Lincoln as an evolving man. Douglas states, “He was preeminently the white man’s president, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men. He was ready and willing at any time during the first yeas of his administration to deny, postpone and sacrifice the humanity in color people to promote the welfare of the white people in this country.” However Douglas also stated, “under his wise and beneficent rule we saw ourselves gradually lifted from the depths of slavery to the heights of liberty and manhood.”

– When the Civil War ended there was progress in terms of political representation: “Some sixteen Black men served in Congress – including Hiram Revels of Mississippi, who became the first Black man elected to the US Senate in 1870.” However, there was not another Black senator until 1967 as many white Americans violently suppressed the progress that was made at the beginning of Reconstruction. “The systematic white suppression of Black life proved was so severe that this period between 1880s and the early twentieth century became known as the second slavery…”