Present from the Very Beginning

In August 1619, just twelve years after the founding of the Jamestown colony in Virginia, an English pirate ship, the White Lion, showed up at Point Comfort near present day Hampton, Virginia and traded about twenty to thirty enslaved Africans for food and supplies.^[1] Two days later, another pirate ship, the Treasurer, arrived and traded two to three more. The Africans had been kidnapped by Portuguese slave traders from what today is the country of Angola and were en route across the Atlantic on a Portuguese slave ship, the San Juan Bautista. Somewhere along the way, the White Lion and the Treasurer had attacked the San Juan Bautista, stolen about 60 African people, and sailed for Virginia (Austin 2019).

The Africans that arrived in Virginia in 1619 were not the first Africans in the New World, and their enslavement was not the beginning of Black slavery in the New World. Historically speaking, a Spanish system of slavery had existed well before the English began colonizing North America, including in territories such as Florida when it still belonged to Spain (Austin 2019; Cancio-Donlebún Ballvé 2021). However, the event we have been considering is the first documented case of Africans landing in an English colony on the mainland and can be seen as a foreshadowing of things to come in the English colonies that would eventually become the United States.

To the argument advanced by historians who claimed that slavery did not exist as a legal institution until 1661, when Virginia passed the first law making race-based slavery legal, historian Beth Austin replies that “[a]s with most aspects of English law, the absence of written codes does not indicate the absence of a practical or legal reality.” Slavery was legal, both in custom and in fact, long before Virginia’s Slave Codes were formalized (2019: 20).

Meanwhile, as slavery took one form in Virginia, the English colonizers of Barbados in the West Indies were building an even more oppressive system of slavery that legally defined enslaved Africans as not merely involuntary laborers but as chattel property without any legal rights. When slave holders from Barbados arrived near present-day Charleston, South Carolina, in 1670, they set to work replicating a slave society modeled on the one they had left behind in Barbados. The particularly dehumanizing form of slavery imported from Barbados eventually spread across the entire Deep South, and elements of it even permeated the more moderate regions of Virginia and Maryland. By the time of the American Revolution, permanent slavery had become the norm everywhere south of Pennsylvania (Woodard 2011: 82–90).

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In the preceding paragraphs, we have put forward a basic premise under a subtitle that we can now see has a double meaning. What—we may ask—was present from the very beginning? The answer is twofold. Africans who would soon be joined by other Africans—and whose descendants would one day be citizens—were present from the very beginning, living more intimately with whites than was generally the case for Indigenous peoples. And Black enslavement was present from the very beginning of this country.

The American Founding and its Contradictions

The story of the transformation of the thirteen British colonies on the Atlantic coast of the present-day United States (before it was the United States) into one independent nation is well known to most Americans. For readers who may not be very familiar with the story, let’s start with some very basic background before getting to the main points of this section.

By 1776, the original two English colonies of Virginia and Massachusetts that had been established over a century and a half earlier had grown, and the number of colonies had multiplied; there were thirteen colonies at the time of the American Revolution, and while many colonists still saw themselves as English, a distinctive “American” identity had also emerged. Before the 1760s, the colonies had also enjoyed considerable autonomy over their own internal affairs, with each of the colonies governed locally by its own legislature. However, during the 1760s, Britain sought to bring the colonies under more direct control. The British Parliament levied taxes and passed a series of intrusive laws. These actions by the British alienated many Americans, who objected to being subject to taxes and laws over which they had no influence because the colonies had no direct representation in the British Parliament.

After a decade and a half of conflict, which sometimes boiled over into open rebellion, a group of colonial dissidents, commonly referred to today as “the founding fathers,” eventually became disenchanted enough to begin advocating for separation from Britain. When war broke out in 1775, the Americans convened a Continental Congress consisting of delegates from all of the colonies. Their purpose was to manage the war and deliberate over strategies for dealing with Britain.

After more than a year of work and much debate, the advocates of independence persuaded the Congress to approve the issuance of a document—a Declaration of Independence—which formally announced, not just to Britain but to all of Europe, American intentions to separate from Britain. The declaration was written principally by Thomas Jefferson and signed by all of the delegates on July 4, 1776.

After declaring independence, Congress then got to work in 1777 attempting to establish the basis for a working government; however, this first framework—the Articles of Confederation,^[2] lasted for only ten years. Its failure led to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 which produced the Constitution that has remained the framework for the U.S. government ever since its ratification in 1789.

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Americans generally take pride in these two founding documents: the Declaration of Independence for its soaring rhetoric and lofty ideals, and the United States Constitution for its revolutionary vision of a government based on a separation of powers and the protection of individual rights.

For example, the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence is well known to most Americans and is often held up as emblematic of American ideals:

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.       — Thomas Jefferson

The plain words of the text seem clear enough. We need not explore every nuance of the passage’s language to appreciate the central claim that “all men are created [i.e., born] equal”—which is not to say “born alike with identical potentials.” The equality spoken of here is a political equality, an equality of rights which a government must not violate. Jefferson suggests that there are numerous such rights, but he names the most important ones as “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” The idea is that no one should be deprived of these broad rights—nor presumably of any other rights upon which the three big ones might rest.

Taken at face value, the ideals expressed in paragraph two of the Declaration are compelling. They present us with a vision of the nation, and therefore of ourselves, that is noble, a vision that we want to believe in. It is easy for white Americans to get carried away in patriotic pride when contemplating the words of the Declaration.

But throughout American history, Black Americans have never ceased to remind us of the contradictions and hypocrisies enshrined in both of these documents. For instance, on July 5, 1852, the great Frederick Douglass gave a fiery speech entitled “The Meaning of the Fourth of July for the Negro.”^[3] Douglass had been born into slavery in 1818 but escaped at the age of twenty, educated himself, and dedicated his life to the abolition of slavery (Stevens 1999). The Fourth of July being virtually synonymous with the Declaration of Independence, Douglass’s remarks are a tacit critique of the Declaration. Here is just a brief excerpt from his renowned speech:

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour —Frederick Douglass 1852

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A little more than one hundred years later, on August 28, 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave a famous speech in Washington, D. C. known as the “I Have a Dream” speech. Although King’s speech gives Jefferson and the nation’s founders the benefit of the doubt regarding the intent of their words, he held white America accountable for the promises that King claimed it had inherited from the founders who had failed to honor them. Here is what King had to say about the founding documents, and in particular the Declaration of Independence:

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.” — Martin Luther King Jr. 1963

 

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More recently, investigative journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones more plainly characterizes the intentions of Jefferson and the founding fathers. In her lead essay for the 1619 Project, published August 18, 2019, the 400th anniversary of the arrival of enslaved Africans in the colony of Virginia, Hannah-Jones is blunt in her criticism:

The United States is a nation founded on both an ideal and a lie. Our Declaration of Independence, signed 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 (Hannah-Jones 2019: 16).

The Constitution, too, in spite of the erudition of its framers, and for all of its originality, contains embarrassments that further highlight the “lie,” as Hannah-Jones has called it, at the heart of the nation’s founding. Here is Hannah-Jones on the Constitution:

… 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 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 (Hannah-Jones 2019: 18–19).

These are harsh judgments, and they are hard to refute. It is true that many of the nation’s founders were slaveholders who had an economic interest in preserving slavery. At the same time, some of these same founders recognized that enslaving Africans was an extreme form of tyranny and a moral abomination. And of course, almost everybody, pro- and anti-slavery, recognized the importance of not making explicit references to slavery in the Constitution; it would have damaged their cause internationally by acknowledging their hypocrisy.

On the other hand, we should not overlook the fact that some of the founders were most assuredly opposed to slavery and would have preferred to abolish it had they found it possible. But they were also politicians who knew that they had to compromise with slaveholders if they had any hope of achieving their principal goal of nurturing a revolution and founding a new nation. Some compromises are not just terrible but unjust as well.

In any case, observations about the realities of politics were no comfort to enslaved Blacks, and politics cannot truly excuse the sins of the founding fathers—so say many Americans today, whatever their race or ethnicity might be. And African Americans have historically been among the severest critics of the sinister irony of Jefferson’s words. The problem with the compromises that the opponents of slavery made at the nation’s founding was that these compromises gave the pro-slavery faction so much leverage that overcoming slavery sometime in the future would become a monumental undertaking. In fact, nothing short of a civil war and a series of amendments to the Constitution would be able to dislodge slavery and guarantee Black people equality under law. And even then, it would take another century of struggle before most Black Americans would begin to enjoy anything that looked even remotely like equality.

The Rise of Jim Crow

Southern states began passing laws and imposing social codes that denied Blacks the newly gained freedoms and opportunities they had begun to enjoy after Reconstruction, a post–Civil War project aimed at putting the nation back together and addressing the destruction in the South, began. The systemic white suppression of Black life was so severe that this period between the 1880s and the 1930s became known as “the second slavery” (Hannah-Jones 2019: 21).  Many Blacks that had acquired land after the Civil War had their land taken from them. If they had started businesses, they lost them. Many found themselves picking cotton or otherwise tending the same fields where they had worked as enslaved people, but now they worked under an arrangement called sharecropping; their old masters lent them the fields in exchange for a share of the crop. But a Black sharecropper also incurred debts from local merchants for necessities bought on credit. Sharecroppers then had to use their own share of the crop they had grown to pay back their debts to the merchants. If there was product left, they could sell it for cash, but often there was little to nothing left, or they found themselves even deeper in debt, excluding them almost entirely from mainstream American life. These laws and codes eventually became known as “Jim Crow,” named after a white minstrel show performer who colored his face black and portrayed a stereotyped Black character who appeared foolish and illiterate. So-called Jim Crow laws mandated racial segregation and barred Black people from all sorts of public venues otherwise open to whites, including libraries, schools, restaurants, theaters, hotels, bathrooms, and drinking fountains. When these places were open to Blacks, it was on a segregated basis. For example, Blacks had to use separate theater entrances, separate drinking fountains, and attend separate schools, all of which were of lower quality. Blacks were expected to step off of the sidewalk to let a white person pass, to sit in the back of the bus, and to give up their seats on the bus if a white person demanded it. Saying or doing anything that a white person might decide he or she didn’t like could result in the Black person’s arrest, imprisonment, police beating, burning down of their house, or lynching.

Emancipated Blacks and their descendants responded in a number of ways to the broken promises of Reconstruction and the institutionalization of Jim Crow, including the invention of the blues and jazz. It is difficult to overemphasize the cultural significance of the blues and jazz, and of the roles that African Americans played in their genesis and global dispersal, but this particular history is beyond the scope of this chapter.^[4] African Americans also responded to Jim Crow by packing their suitcases and leaving the Deep South. The Great Migration, as it has become known, started as a trickle sometime around 1916 and grew into a flood which carried six million people over a period of about six decades to the big cities of the North, the Midwest, and the Far West. Among the destinations were: Baltimore, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Toledo, Detroit, St. Louis, Chicago, and Los Angeles.

“When the migration began, 90 percent of all African-Americans were living in the South. By the time it was over, in the 1970s, 47 percent of all African-Americans were living in the North and West. A rural people had become urban, and a Southern people had spread themselves all over the nation.” (Wilkerson 2016)

The Great Migration “remade the nation in ways that are still being felt” (Wilkerson 2016). Many of the children of the Great Migration would accomplish things that would have been impossible if their families had not left the South. In the words of journalist and author Isabel Wilkerson:

“They would become Richard Wright the novelist instead of Richard Wright the sharecropper. They would become John Coltrane, jazz musician instead of tailor; Bill Russell, NBA pioneer instead of paper mill worker; Zora Neale Hurston, beloved folklorist instead of maidservant. [They] would reshape professions … from sports and music to literature and art: [They would include] Miles Davis, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, August Wilson, Jacob Lawrence, Diana Ross, Tupac Shakur, Prince, Michael Jackson, Shonda Rhimes, Venus and Serena Williams and countless others. The people who migrated would become the ancestral generation of most African-Americans born in the North and West.” (Wilkerson: 2016)

At first, life was generally better in the North and opportunities more plentiful, but even so, Black people were not entirely free of racial prejudice and discrimination. Even in Northern cities, “Whites Only” signs in store windows were not uncommon all the way into the 1950s. In addition, Black people were prevented from joining labor unions and often had to settle for only the lowest-paying and most dangerous jobs.

Moreover, African Americans were usually confined to the poorest housing in the least desirable areas of town. Even those that managed to acquire the financial means to buy a house in a nice neighborhood found themselves facing policies and customs designed to maintain racial exclusion. For instance, real estate contracts often included provisions that prohibited African Americans from buying, leasing, or living in white neighborhoods. “At the same time, redlining—the federal housing policy of refusing to approve or guarantee mortgages in areas where black people lived” (Wilkerson 2016)—prevented Black people from getting mortgages in their own neighborhoods. Such policies denied African Americans the same opportunities enjoyed by other Americans to improve their economic conditions, and this not only perpetuated existing racial inequalities in wealth but virtually guaranteed that the inequalities would continue well into the future.

Long Journey to Freedom

The story of Africans in America is the story of 500 years of struggle to throw off the chains of human bondage. It is the story of a people, some of whom arrived only after surviving the trauma of their kidnapping and the unspeakable horrors of hazardous journeys in the cargo holds of transatlantic slave ships. It is the story of forced labor under the harsh and brutal conditions of plantation capitalism. It is a story of boredom and exhaustion spent in long hours at hard labor. It is a story of beatings, torture, rape, the separation of children from their parents, of brothers and sisters from one another, and of wives from husbands. It is the story of the emotional struggles to endure the anger and despair of not being treated with the dignity befitting human beings.

And then, even after slavery was finally abolished, came the struggle to be seen as equal under the law, to be afforded the same opportunities as white citizens, whose ancestors both wittingly and unwittingly constructed the system that governs us today. The struggle to participate freely and on equal terms with whites played itself out in all aspects of the social, political, and economic life of the nation. Looking upon that past from the perspective of the 21st century, it seems nearly impossible to imagine how a people could endure so much suffering.

At the same time, the story of Black America is the story of a people who resisted enslavement and subjugation from the very beginning, never surrendering their agency even in the worst of times, who time and again managed to find “a way out of no way.” It is the story of a people continually persevering in the fight for freedom, who never stopped raising their voices as the conscience of America, never stopped reminding the nation of its ideals, and who slowly forced the United States to begin living up to its founding ideals. The strategies and the tactics of Black civil rights leaders and activists have inspired every other marginalized group in the United States. Indigenous peoples, Latin Americans, Asian Americans, women, queer and trans people, and disabled people of all colors and creeds, have all been inspired by the example of the Black freedom fight. And the work is still not finished. Indeed, an enduring, rallying cry of historical and ongoing social justice movements for Black liberation is: “Freedom is a constant struggle.”