The hangover of slavery

Juan Williams writes in a recent WSJ article that Clarence Thomas has a copy of the 13^th Amendment on his office wall.  This barely passed the congress 119 to 56 or by 2 votes.   His opinions are rooted on the premise that the 14^th Amendment can’t mean different things for different people.   He cheers personal responsibility.  He argues there is no proof that integration improves education.   

The legacy of the 2^nd largest slave economy in world history continues to leave a racial and political divide.  Two and a half centuries of slavery and white fear of a black insurrection have left their mark.

Black discrimination did not go away after the Civil War and 13, 14 and 15^th Amendments.

As Martin Luther King said in 1963 :

Five score years ago a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation.  This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice.  It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of captivity.

But one hundred years later the Negro still is not free.  One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination.  One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in toe corners of American society and finds himself in exile in his own land.  So we have come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.

In a sense we’ve come to our nations Capital to cash a check.  When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. 

This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check; a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds." 
 
But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we have come to cash this check- a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice. 


To Clarence Thomas, after Selma, the country paid with passage of  the voting rights act. 


Professor David Blight points out, in his Open Yale Course, when Lincoln ran for reelection, his opponent McClellan, who opposed emancipation received 45% of the vote.  If southerners had voted, a majority of Americans would have voted against emancipation.  General Sherman never wanted to free slaves and declared they would never join his army.  Slavery had been legal in northern states up to the 1840s.

Per Blight, Reconstruction was a referendum on the war. Both sides had to inhabit the same land and participate in the same government.  The south had lost everything except its faith in white supremacy
Between 1870 and 1876 there was a southern democratic revolution. The move toward southern redemption is rooted in heir hatred of the rise of black political and economic independence.  By 1868 11 of the 21 northern states denied the rights of vote to blacks.  In 1868 the southern democrats used the KKK to revive themselves.   In 1868 Grant said he would have no policy, "against the will of the American People."  This election was the most violent racist election in American history.   The republicans were the party of the black mans right to vote.  The democrats promised to return the south to home rule.   Blair the VP candidate said,” Republicans have oppressed the South by subjecting it to the rule of a semi-barbarous race of blacks, who, are polygamist and destined to subject white women to their unbridled lust.  “Let White Men Rule America”, said a Louisville paper.  Thousands of blacks were killed in the election of 1868 in the South.  The result was that the republicans kept a veto proof congress.  Without the half million blacks who voted for Grant he would not have won the presidency.  

When the 15^th amendment passed, of the 3 versions that were debated the most conservative passed.  It did not ban literacy testing or other voting requirements, as did the other versions.   A third version gave all males over age 21 the right to vote.    The amendment that passed left the door open for the states to restrict blacks from voting.   

Just being free did not give blacks the means to advance themselves.  It was noted the emancipated slaves own nothing because nothing but freedom had been given.  They owned their body and labor.  They lacked physical and human capital.  The goal of white southerners was to sustain a landless dependent and stationary labor force that would stay put.  Constraints were that Blacks had no assets.  There was no credit.  They also faced a regime of white supremacy.   Reparations were proposed.  A bill to give 40 acres and 60 dollars to each freedman did not pass.  A bill to loan money to buy land did not happen.  Blacks ended up becoming tenant farmers, which gave them control of some land.  For most it became a dead end of debt peonage.  By 1900 85 percent of freedman did not own land.
To understand our racial legacy Blight recommends the book :The Souls of Black Folks  by DuBois  


  In order to preserve the union the freedom and rights of blacks were sacrificed both in North and South.  My memory of Jim Crow was the white only sign on a restaurant seen on a drive to Florida.   That was the South.  But the lease on my parents Levittown, NJ  house had a clause that the house could never be sold to blacks.   This became illegal in ‘65.   

  

So have things improved over the past 50 years?   Yes , but .

  Clearly, there is unfinished work.   Whether implicit or explicit racism discrimination continues in education, employment, housing, criminal justice, and other areas.   Many of these are cultural and without continued efforts to improve the culture by shaming those who blatantly discriminate they will continue.   Without decent jobs and a level of support for those at the bottom the societal breakdown will continue.

The Lockian model of Freedom, property rights, small government can not provide for the changes needed for the challenges ahead.

 The 14^th amendment has not applied to criminal justice.  eg. Ferguson.

As noted on the NAACP website:

Racial Disparities in Incarceration

·  African Americans now constitute nearly 1 million of the total 2.3 million incarcerated population

·  African Americans are incarcerated at nearly six times the rate of whites ·  Together, African American and Hispanics comprised 58% of all prisoners in 2008, even though African Americans and Hispanics make up approximately one quarter of the US population

Drug Sentencing Disparities

• About 14 million Whites and 2.6 million African Americans report using an illicit drug
• 5 times as many Whites are using drugs as African Americans, yet African Americans are sent to prison for drug offenses at 10 times the rate of Whites
• African Americans represent 12% of the total population of drug users, but 38% of those arrested for drug offenses, and 59% of those in state prison for a drug offense.
• African Americans serve virtually as much time in prison for a drug offense (58.7 months) as whites do for a violent offense (61.7 months). (Sentencing Project
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

 


 The black unemployment rate has consistently been twice as high as the white rate for 50 years