A Brief History of the Subordination of African Americans in the U.S.

Of Handcuffs and Bootstraps

Alexander Polikoff, Elizabeth Lassar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000035001
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This "brief history" presents the essential story of the subordination of African Americans in the U.S., captured in a 1968 cartoon by Pulitzer-prize-winning cartoonist John Fischetti. The drawing is of a black man handcuffed to a wall with cuffs labeled "White Racism." The caption reads, "Why don't they lift themselves up by their own bootstraps like we did?" Bootstraps shows just how little lift-up there has been, and how the handcuffs of white racism have been and continue to be the cause.

Unique in its combination of comprehensiveness and brevity, Bootstraps is written in language for the general reader; yet its extensive endnotes will make it useful to both scholars and students. Its succinct overview of the subordination history includes an in-depth treatment of residential segregation – a legacy of slavery and a central problem of our time – and a response to the view that today's racial inequality is due largely to African Americans' own moral and cultural failures. By addressing a serious omission in the way we have educated our children, the book's narration of our white racism history may make a contribution to a much-needed confrontation with our racist past.

1 The Lack of Lift-Up

It is indisputable that lift-up—meaning by that shorthand phrase rough economic and social parity of African Americans with other, especially white, Americans—remains a distant goal. For decades, black unemployment has been roughly double white unemployment, and that’s true regardless of education level.¹ Black wealth—a key measure of the ability to build a good future for children—is less than 2.5% of white wealth.² The income of black households is about 60% that of white households.³

The litany goes on. Black children are eight times more likely than white children to live in high-poverty neighborhoods.⁴ Black students are more than twice as likely as white students to attend high-poverty classrooms⁵ and far less likely to earn a college or graduate degree.⁶ Blacks are more than five times as likely as whites to be incarcerated.⁷ Young black adults are nearly twice as likely as young white adults to die from heart disease, stroke, and diabetes,⁸ and black teens are eight times more likely than white teens to be killed by guns.⁹ Most sobering of all, these and other disparities are passed on from one generation to the next; almost half of all black families in the last two generations, compared with only 7% of white families, have lived in the poorest of the country’s neighborhoods.¹⁰

We’ll stop there with the examples because too many numbers make eyes glaze over. But numbers do tell a story. Some African Americans have “made it.” Entertainers. Super athletes. Accomplished entrepreneurs and professionals. A black middle class is no longer negligibly small (although, lacking wealth, it is vulnerable to losing ground and likely to live in disadvantaged neighborhoods).¹¹ But for too many black Americans the picture is one that includes poor health, low income, little wealth, inferior schools, difficulty finding work, high risk of incarceration, and confinement to disadvantaged, racially segregated neighborhoods, conditions that are passed on, through the generations, to children and grandchildren.

Why is this so? Why, more than a century and a half after the end of slavery, has there been so little progress in closing the gap between African Americans and whites? The answer requires looking at some history, the nearly 250 years of slavery and—especially—the 155 post-slavery years. The purpose is two-fold: first, to understand specifically what the “white racism” handcuffs have consisted of, and what they continue today to consist of; and, second, to show how the cuffs have caused the bleak lift-up statistics. Our discussion is organized into five sections of unequal length entitled Slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, The Great Migration, and Aftermath.¹²

Notes

1National Urban League, “Executive Summary and Key Findings,” in 2016 State of Black America (New York: National Urban League, 2016), 14–15; Kim Parker, Juliana Horowitz, and Brian Mahl, On Views of Race and Inequality, Blacks and Whites Are Worlds Apart (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, June 27, 2016), 26. See discussions of back unemployment in Chapter 2 at notes 320–23, and job discrimination in Chapter 2 notes 251, 350–53.

2The 2016 figures are $140,000 for the median white household, $3,400 for the median black household. Edward N. Wolff, Household Wealth Trends in the United States, 1962 to 2016: Has Middle Class Wealth Recovered? Working Paper 24085 (Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2017), Table 13, 56.

3Wolff, Table 13, 56. In 2016, median white household income was $60,000; for blacks it was $35,000.

4Joe Cortright and Dillon Mahmoudi, “Lost in Place: Why the Persistence and Spread of Concentrated Poverty—Not Gentrification—Is Our Biggest Urban Challenge,” City Report, December 2014, 8, http://cityobservatory.org/lost-in-place/. See discussions of black poverty and ghetto conditions in Chapter 2 at notes 204–15, 300, and 309–29, and the particular harm to children in Chapter 2 at notes 216–28, 301–8, 334.

5The numbers (2013) are 71.5% of black students and 30.7% of white students. Martin Carnoy and Emma Garcia, Five Key Trends in U.S. Student Performance (Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute, January 12, 2017), 16, 21.

6Thirty-nine percent of whites versus 23% of blacks. Lisa J. Dettling, Joanne W. Hsu, Lindsay Jacobs, Kevin B. Moore, and Jeffrey P. Thompson, “Recent Trends in Wealth-Holding by Race and Ethnicity: Evidence from the Survey of Consumer Finances,” FEDS Notes, September 27, 2017, Table 2, on website of Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/recent-trends-in-wealth-holding-by-race-and-ethnicity-evidence-from-the-survey-of-consumer-finances-20170927.htm. Also whites are more than twice as likely to attend a top tier college. Jonathan Rothwell, “Black Students at Top Colleges: Exceptions, Not the Rule,” Social Mobility Memos, February 3, 2015, on website of Brookings, www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2015/02/03/black-students-at-top-colleges-exceptions-not-the-rule/.

7National Urban League, “2016 Black-White Equality Index,” in 2016 State of Black America, 17. See discussion of incarceration in Chapter 2 at notes 261, 265, 324–27.

8Timothy J. Cunningham, Janet B. Croft, Yong Liu, Hua Lu, Paul Eke, and Wayne Giles, “Vital Signs: Racial Disparities in Age-Specific Mortality Among Blacks or African Americans—United States, 1999–2015,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 66, no. 17 (2017): 444–56.

9Children’s Defense Fund, Portrait of Inequality 2012: Black Children in America, 6, on website of Children Defense Fund, www.childrensdefense.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/portrait-of-inequality-2012.pdf.

10Patrick Sharkey, Stuck in Place: Urban Neighborhoods and the End of Progress Toward Racial Equality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 40, 44–45, 117–18.

11Patrick Sharkey, “Spatial Segmentation and the Black Middle Class,” American Journal of Sociology 119, no. 4 (2014): 903–54, 904–09; Mary Pattillo, Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril Among the Black Middle Class, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 235–36. See discussion of the black middle class in Chapter 2 at notes 266–95.

12Other groups in America—including Native Americans, Hispanics, and poor whites—also suffer from lack of lift-up. But the cause and effect in the case of African Americans—slavery and its legacies—are unique, and that is the story this book tells.

2 Cause and Effect

2.1 Slavery

Slavery in the American South included conscious-shocking features. Slave marriages were not recognized, and wives and children could be sold.¹ It was against the law to teach slaves to read or write. Without redress, they could be and were subjected to frightful barbarities. And so on.

These horrors are familiar.² Perhaps less often discussed, possibly because they are so obvious, are the economic consequences. Slaves could not accumulate wealth. Without reading and writing they could not acquire the skills for which literacy is requisite. Nor, when—rarely—individual slaves overcame these obstacles, could they pass on wealth or skill to progeny who had been dispersed or sold. For almost two and a half centuries, generation upon generation of Negroes lived within a society that treated them not as human beings but as chattel.³ (In different periods “Negro,” “colored,” “black,” and “African American” have been used to refer to black Americans. Generally, we follow the usage of the period.) The result was that when four million slaves were at last set free, they embarked upon their new lives largely without assets, without income, and without education. Nor had they business experience to help them gain the first two. A crystal ball was not required to predict that they would not have an easy time making their way—lifting themselves up—in the post-slavery world.

2.2 Reconstruction

General Robert E. Lee surrendered on April 9, 1865, effectively ending the Civil War and slavery.⁴ Five days later, on April 14, President Abraham Lincoln was shot. He died the next day, and on April 15, Vice President Andrew Johnson was sworn into office.

Johnson was an out-and-out racist. This is “a country for white men,” he was quoted as saying, “and by God, as long as I’m President, it shall be a government for white men.”⁵ Addressing Congress, Johnson said that Negroes possessed less capacity for government than any other race, and that they had shown “a constant tendency to relapse into barbarism.”⁶

The first two post-Civil War years are commonly termed “Presidential Reconstruction” because what happened during those years was largely determined by the new president and his Union Army commanders.⁷ Reviving plantation production, and thereby the Southern economy, was one of Johnson’s major goals. That required forcing Negro labor to return to the plantations, which was done when Johnson promptly set up new state governments, controlled by former Conf...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword by john a. powell
• Introduction
• 1 The Lack of Lift-Up
• 2 Cause and Effect
• Conclusion: An Instrument of Change?
• Appendix: A Chronology of Some Federal Government Actions and Inactions Regarding African Americans
• Selected Bibliography
• Index