We Are Not Yet Equal: Understanding Our Racial Divide

To those who aspired and paid the price

—C. A.

For lovers of history, seekers of truth

—T. B.

CONTENTS

Foreword by Nic Stone

Prologue

1 Original Sin

2 But for Your Race

3 Forty Acres and a Mule

4 Black Codes

5 We Showed Our Hand Too Soon

6 Johnson Is with Us!

7 Courting Justice

8 Derailing the Great Migration

9 The Sweet Ordeal

10 Building toward Brown

11 Beating Down Brown

12 The NAACP and Sputnik

13 Rolling Back Civil Rights

14 Like Your Whole World Depended on It

15 In the Crosshairs: The VRA

16 Beating Down Brown ( Again! )

17 The Reagan Revolution

18 Crack

19 Streets Cleared of Garbage

20 Obama

21 Shelby County v. Holder : Gutting the VRA

22 Why Would They Try to Make People Hate Us?

Epilogue

Discussion Guide

For Further Reading

Notes

Photograph Credits

Index

FOREWORD

My high school US History teacher, Mr. Tripathi, was Indian American. In fact, if I remember correctly, he and I were the only two people in the classroom—out of twenty-five or so—with brown skin.

But that’s not something we ever talked about. In fact, it took until now, fifteen years later, for me to recognize how remarkable it was that he was the teacher. That fifty years after the first African Americans stepped into a previously segregated school in the South, an Indian immigrant was teaching US History in one of the most racially and socioeconomically diverse high schools in the state of Georgia. Clearly change was possible.

In 1960, one of those first students, six-year-old Ruby Bridges, was escorted into the William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans by her mother and four federal US Marshals; she spent her entire first day in the principal’s office. Like Ruby, I was the only black kid in that US History class. Honestly, I was the only black kid in most of my high school classes. Despite Norcross High’s diversity, courses were stratified into three levels: college prep, honors, and gifted-honors/AP/IB. The higher up the class-level pyramid you climbed, the whiter—and richer—the classrooms became. I was the token at that gifted honors level.

But back then, it would’ve been in poor taste to point it out.

Which is why I think Mr. Tripathi never acknowledged his ethnicity, despite the fact that it could’ve been used as an example of just how far we’d come as a nation. Back then, colorblindness was the name of the game. Acknowledging that the only other spot of brown in the US History classroom was the teacher—and how problematic that was—would’ve been considered divisive. It’d been a long time since Dr. King and his contemporaries did away with Jim Crow during the Civil Rights Movement, and progress meant we were all the same. Racism was no longer a thing.

Except now we know that’s not—and has never been—true. Now, statistics show undeniable discrepancies in arrest and incarceration rates along racial lines. Now, unarmed black men and women are gunned down in the streets for nothing more than looking suspicious. Now, people openly gather in the name of white nationalism and raise the Nazi salute as they rally around discriminatory and xenophobic ideas.

Now it can’t be denied that racism in America is still very much a thing.

But why? Why are we still here? What paradigms perpetuate racism in our society? What seemingly innocent—if not patriotic—ideas are actually racist in origin?

And what do we do about it? What do we say? Racism is a topic so fraught, so taboo these days, the very mention of it causes instant discomfort for most people. How do we discuss both the origins of American racism and its manifestations—past and present—in a way that leads to mutual understanding and a desire for change? Is that even possible?

I think it is.

And I think this book, this journey from the end of American chattel slavery through the twentieth century and into the present day—exposing the roots of American racism, as well as the branches, boughs, and still-sprouting leaves—is an excellent place to start.

—Nic Stone

PROLOGUE

KINDLING

The seed for this book began to germinate many years ago, in the aftermath of a black man’s death at the hands of the police: that of Amadou Diallo, a twenty-two-year-old West African immigrant. Diallo was mowed down in a hail of New York Police Department (NYPD) bullets on February 4, 1999, as he stood in the vestibule of his apartment building in the Soundview section of the Bronx, New York.

Though the killing was horrific enough—the police fired forty-one bullets, nineteen of which hit their target—what was truly stunning was the policy rationale espoused by New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani. On the news show Nightline, the mayor, virtually ignoring Diallo’s death, glibly spouted one statistic after the next to demonstrate how the NYPD was the most restrained and best behaved police department you could imagine.

Mayor Giuliani touted policies that had reduced crime in New York City, and dismissed black peoples’ concerns about racial profiling, stop and frisk, and police brutality. If those poorer neighborhoods that happened to be primarily black did not have this increased police activity, he asserted, the police would be accused of caring only about the affluent. Giuliani then countered that the real issue was the community’s racism against the police and unwillingness to take responsibility for the issues plaguing their neighborhoods.

But restrained and behaved police don’t fire forty-one bullets at an unarmed man. Moreover, New York’s aggressive law enforcement policy appeared to expend most of its energy on the groups bringing the smallest yield of criminal activity. In 1999, blacks and Latinos, who made up 50 percent of New York City’s population, accounted for 84 percent of those stopped and frisked by the NYPD, while the majority of illegal drugs and weapons were found on the relatively small number of whites detained by police.

There obviously was so much more going on here with Amadou Diallo’s death than what was actually being discussed by the media, more than Giuliani was letting on, and more than even the most outraged discussions in the beauty shops and barbershops and churches and classrooms managed to pinpoint. Only I didn’t know what to call it, what to name the unsettling and disturbing performance by Giuliani that I had just witnessed.

Fifteen years later, I experienced that same feeling, although the circumstances this time were somewhat different.

In August 2014, following the police shooting of eighteen-year-old Michael Brown, Ferguson, Missouri, went up in flames. Commentators throughout the print and digital media served up variations of the same story: black people, angered by the police killing of an unarmed black teen, were taking out their frustration in unproductive and predictable ways—rampaging, burning, and looting.

Framing the discussion—dominating it, in fact—was an overwhelming focus on black rage. Op-eds and news commentators debated whether Michael Brown was surrendering to or assaulting a police officer when six bullets took him down. They wrangled over whether Brown was really an innocent or a thug who had just committed a strong-arm robbery.

The question seemed to be whether black people were justified in their rage, even if that rage manifested itself in the most destructive, nonsensical ways. Again and again, across America’s ideological spectrum, the issue was framed in terms of black rage, which, it seemed to me, entirely missed the point.

Epiphany.

What was really at work here was white rage. With so much attention focused on the flames, everyone had ignored the logs, the kindling. In some ways, it is easy to see why. White rage is not only about visible violence, but rather it works its way through the courts, the legislatures, and a range of government bureaucracies. It wreaks havoc subtly, almost imperceptibly. Too imperceptibly, certainly, for a nation consistently drawn to the spectacular—to what it can see. It’s not just the Klan. White rage doesn’t have to wear sheets, burn crosses, or take to the streets. Working the halls of power, it can achieve its ends far more effectively, far more destructively.

The trigger for white rage, inevitably, is black advancement. It is not the mere presence of black people that is the problem; rather, it is blackness with ambition, with drive, with purpose, with aspirations, and with demands for full and equal citizenship. It is blackness that refuses to accept subjugation, to give up. A formidable array of policy assaults and legal contortions has consistently punished black resilience, black resolve.

And all the while, white rage manages to maintain not only the upper hand but also, apparently, the moral high ground. It’s Giuliani chastising black people to fix the problems in their own neighborhoods instead of always scapegoating the police. It’s the endless narratives about a culture of black poverty that devalues education, hard work, family, and ambition. It’s a mantra told so often that some black people themselves have come to believe it. Few even think anymore to question the stories, the studies of black fathers abandoning their children, of rampant drug use in black neighborhoods, of black children hating education because doing well in school is acting white—all of which have been disproved.

In the wake of Ferguson I wrote an op-ed that ran in the Washington Post. In it, I set out to make white rage visible, to blow graphite onto that hidden fingerprint and trace its historic movements over the past 150 years, from the end of the Civil War and Reconstruction on down through the presidency of Barack Obama.

This book is an outgrowth of that op-ed. As I journey through Reconstruction, the Great Migration, Brown v. Board of Education and the rest of the Civil Rights Movement, and onward into the twenty-first century, it is my hope that you will see how white rage has undermined democracy; warped the Constitution; weakened the nation’s ability to compete economically; squandered billions of dollars on baseless incarceration; rendered an entire region sick, poor, and woefully undereducated; and left cities nothing less than decimated. All this havoc has been wreaked simply because black people wanted to work, get an education, live in decent communities, raise their families, and vote. Because they were unwilling to take no for an answer.

It is only by recognizing the roots of this rage that we can build a future without it.

Crowds gather for Lincoln’s second inauguration, in March 1865, shortly before the end of the Civil War.

1

ORIGINAL SIN

Fourth US President and Founder James Madison called America’s engagement in the African slave trade the nation’s original sin.

The horrors of chattel slavery would bring down a wrath of biblical proportions, prophesied another founder, Thomas Jefferson, principal author of the Declaration of Independence. Like Madison, this third US president was a slaveholder.

Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever, wrote Jefferson in the 1780s.

The day of reckoning came roughly eighty years later.

We now call it the Civil War.

This war erupted in mid-April 1861, when Confederate forces fired on the Union-held Fort Sumter in South Carolina’s Charleston Harbor. Months earlier, in December 1860, South Carolina had seceded from the Union, then urged other slaveholding states to unite with it in creating a Confederate States of America (CSA). Eventually ten states did: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, Mississippi, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. (The slave states of Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri remained in the Union as did a slew of counties in western Virginia, the origins of the state of West Virginia in June 1863.)

The Confederacy’s determination to establish their independent slave republic, as historian James M. McPherson put it, led to four years of war, more than 1.5 million casualties, including perhaps as many as seven hundred and fifty thousand military deaths, along with an estimated fifty thousand civilian fatalities.

Added to this enormous loss of life, at war’s end there were more than one million disabled ex-soldiers adrift. Countless widows sought help from a rickety veterans’ pension system.

The mangled sinews of commerce in so much of the Southland only added to the despair.

Railroad tracks torn apart.

Fields fallow, hardened, and barren.

Bridges that once defied the physics of uncrossable rivers destroyed.

So many Southern cities had been reduced to smoldering rubble.

On March 4, 1865, in his second inaugural address, President Abraham Lincoln agonized that the war’s carnage was God’s punishment for all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil.

How would the nation atone?

That was the burning question for black people and progressive white people when the Confederacy began its surrender on April 9, 1865.

America was now at the crossroads between its slaveholding past and the possibility of a truly inclusive, vibrant democracy.

Would—could—the majority of white people come to see black people as equals?

In the process of rebuilding, of reconstructing the nation, would—could—political leaders have the clarity, humanity, and resolve to move the United States away from the racialized policies that had brought it to the edge of apocalypse?

Assigned to defend Washington, DC, twenty-seven soldiers of the 4th United States Colored Infantry pose in their Union uniforms. Nearly two hundred thousand black men and boys joined the Union army and navy, many with the hope that the end of the Civil War would bring black people full citizenship rights.

2

BUT FOR YOUR RACE

Long before cannon boom and rifle shot ceased, President Abraham Lincoln made it clear that he would go easy on the rebels. This news was delivered in his Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction, issued on December 8, 1863.

With some exceptions, including top Confederate leaders, if rebels swore allegiance to the Constitution and, essentially, accepted the emancipation of black people in rebel territory they would be pardoned. Lincoln’s plan for rebuilding required only that a rebel state accept acts of Congress and presidential proclamations regarding slavery. Once 10 percent of its people eligible to vote in 1860 (white propertied males) said yes to these terms, a state could get on with reconstituting its government.

Lincoln had neither the clarity, the humanity, nor the resolve necessary to fix what was so fundamentally broken. Before the war he had opposed the expansion of slavery into the western territories, but he was never an abolitionist, never called for an immediate end to the abomination that was slavery.

Yes, in January 1863 Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring free black people who were held in rebel territory. But that was a military measure designed to increase the chaos in the Confederacy as more and more blacks made a mad dash to Union lines. The Emancipation Proclamation also allowed black men to serve in the Union’s armed forces. Why? Because the Union was in desperate need of more soldiers.

Before Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, he had plotted to rid the nation of as many of the nearly half million free black people as possible. In this Lincoln was heavily influenced by two of his intellectual heroes.

One was Thomas Jefferson, who had advocated the expulsion of blacks from the United States in order to save the nation.

The other was Kentucky slaveholder and statesman Henry Clay. In 1816 Clay cofounded the American Colonization Society to encourage free blacks to leave the nation. Clay’s society oversaw the resettlement of thousands in what is now Liberia, West Africa.

In Lincoln’s resettlement plans he initially selected Chiriquí, a resource-poor area in what is today Panama.

Now if only the president could persuade black people to leave.

In August 1862, Lincoln summoned five of DC’s black leaders to the White House. He told them it was their duty to accept immigration to South America given what their people had done to the United States. But for your race among us there could not be war, said the president.

As to just how and why your race came to be among us, Lincoln conveniently ignored that. His framing of the issue absolved slaveholders and their political allies of responsibility for catapulting the nation into a civil war. It also signaled the power of racism over patriotism.

Lincoln’s anger in 1862 was directed at blacks who, by and large, fully supported the Union and did not want to leave the United States of America. Many would exclaim that, despite slavery and enforced poverty, We will work, pray, live, and, if need be, die for the Union. Nevertheless, Lincoln cast black people as the enemy for wickedly dividing us.

From this perspective flowed Lincoln’s lack of clarity about the purpose and cause of the war. The president insisted that it was only about preserving the Union. Not about slavery!

Not about slavery?

The Confederacy operated under no such illusions. Its Senate president, R. M. T. Hunter, remarked, What did we go to war for, but to protect our property?

Not about slavery?

Mississippi’s Articles of Secession stated unequivocally, Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery. . . . ​ Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth.

Not about slavery?

Eighty-one percent of South Carolina’s wealth was directly tied to owning human beings. Given Lincoln’s opposition to the spread of slavery in the western territories, slaveholders had no reason to believe that he would stop there and wouldn’t push to end slavery in the states, regardless of his statements to the contrary. No wonder South Carolina was willing to do whatever it took to be free from the federal government.

To cast the war as about something other than slavery, as Lincoln did—when in 1860 two-thirds of the wealthiest Americans lived in the slave states—to shroud that hard, cold reality under the cloak of preserving the Union, would not and could not address the root causes of the war and the toll that centuries of slavery had wrought. And that failure of clarity led to a failure of humanity.

Millions upon millions of enslaved people had built the enormous wealth of the United States. During those nearly 250 years of unpaid toil, they had endured rape, whippings, murder, the dismemberment of families, and forced subjugation, illiteracy, and abject poverty. The quest to break the chains was clear at the start of the war when thousands of enslaved people escaped to Union forts and camps.

The drive for liberty led nearly two hundred thousand black men and boys—freeborn and once enslaved, the majority of them Southerners—to serve in the Union’s armed forces. At war’s end, humanity cried out to honor their sacrifice and heroism in service of the nation. Black people and their white allies believed that this military service had to carry with it citizenship rights and the dignity that comes from no black person