Reckoning with Race

America's Failure

Gene Dattel

• Publisher: Encounter Books
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781594039102
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Reckoning with Race confronts America's most intractable problem—race. The book outlines in a provocative, novel manner American racial issues from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the present. It explodes myths about the South as America's exclusive racial scapegoat. The book moves to the Great Migration north and the urban ghettos which still plague America.Importantly, the evergreen topics of identity, assimilation, and separation come to the fore in a balanced, uncompromising, and unflinching narrative. People, cities, and regions are profiled. Despite civil rights legislation, the racial divide between the races remains a chasm. A plethora of reports, commissions, conferences, and other highly visible gestures, purporting to do something have generated publicity, but little else. There remain no adequate structures—family, community or church—to provide leadership. Destructive cultural traits cannot be explained solely by poverty.The book asks and answers many questions. After emancipation, how were blacks historically segregated from the rest of American society? Why is self-segregation still a feature of black society? Why do large numbers of blacks resist assimilation and the acceptance of middle class norms of behavior? Why has there been so little black penetration in the private sector? Why did the removal of overt legal segregation and civil rights legislation in the 1960s not settle the racial conundrum? What are the differences and similarities between the leaders of the civil rights movement in the 1960s and today? Why do we still have the problems enumerated in the Kerner Commission report (1968) after trillions of dollars have been spent promote black progress? What, if anything, should be done, to eliminate the racial divide?

Chapter One

Racial Attitudes in the North, 1800–1865

White abolitionists “best love the colored man at a distance.”

—SAMUEL R. WARD, BLACK ABOLITIONIST, 1840S

The great fact is now fully realized that the African race here is a foreign and feeble element . . . incapable of assimilation . . . a pitiful exotic unnecessarily transplanted into our fields, and which it is unprofitable to cultivate at the cost of the desolation of the native vineyard.

—WILLIAM H. SEWARD, ANTI-SLAVERY ADVOCATE, NEW YORK GOVERNOR AND SENATOR, SECRETARY OF STATE, LINCOLN’S “RIGHT HAND,” 1860

[Free blacks] have no economy; and waste, of course, much of what they earn. They have little knowledge either of morals or religion. They are left, therefore, as miserable victims to sloth, prodigality, poverty, ignorance, and vice.

—TIMOTHY DWIGHT, PRESIDENT OF YALE UNIVERSITY, 1810

African Colonization is predicated on the principle that there is an utter aversion in the public mind, to an amalgamation and equalization of the two races; and that any attempt to press equalization is not only fruitless but injurious.

—WILBUR FISK, PRESIDENT OF WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY, 1835

[Blacks must] learn trades or starve . . . and learn not only to black boot but to make them as well.

—FREDERICK DOUGLASS, 1853

White foreigners who are, or may hereafter become residents of [Oregon] . . . shall enjoy the same rights in respect to the possession, enjoyment, and descent of property as native-born citizens.

No Negro, Chinaman, or Mulatto shall have the right of suffrage.

No free Negro, or Mulatto, not residing in this state at the time of the adoption of this constitution, shall come, reside, or be within this state, or hold any real estate, or make any contracts, or maintain any suit therein; an [sic] the Legislative Assembly shall provide by penal laws, for the removal, by public officers, of all such Negroes, and Mulattoes, and for their effectual exclusion from the state, and for the punishment of persons who shall bring them into the state, or employ, or harbor them.

—OREGON STATE CONSTITUTION, 1857 (THE BLACK EXCLUSION LAW WAS REPEALED IN 1926.)

The Antebellum Free States

The end of slavery in the United States did not change white attitudes toward blacks. From the early nineteenth century, when gradual emancipation began in earnest, the presence of free blacks had presented a problem for the antebellum North. From New England to California and Oregon, whites asked themselves, what shall we do with them? The overwhelming response was that blacks belonged nowhere but in the South.

Race-based slavery was a moral and economic anachronism. For the South, where slavery was implanted in large-scale staple agriculture, morality was an issue, but the advent of the tornado that was cotton gave slavery a vital economic role. In one decade, the 1830s, the South completely revised its rationalization of slavery to account for its economic benefits.

With the growth of slavery due solely to the expansion of profitable cotton agriculture came a gradual shift in the rhetoric of slavery. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the cotton and land boom of the pivotal 1830s. Nat Turner’s slave rebellion in 1831 and the growing anti-slavery movement in the North exacerbated Southern racial fears. In 1831 the Mississippi lawyer and politician Seargent S. Prentiss expressed a commonly held belief: “That slavery is a great evil, there can be no doubt—and it is an unfortunate circumstance that it was ever introduced into this or any other country. At present, however, it is a necessary evil, and I do not think admits of a remedy.” Just five years later the quotable Prentiss offered a diametrically opposed view in his recommendation to the Mississippi state legislature:

Resolved, that the people of the state of Mississippi look upon the institution of domestic slavery . . . not as a curse, but as a blessing, as the legitimate condition of the African race, as authorized both by the laws of God and the dictates of reason and humanity. . . . We will allow no present change, or hope of future alteration in this manner.

From a “great” and “necessary” evil to a “blessing” in five years to justify an economic force.

The white North, without the ability to cultivate cotton, had no such economic imperative for slavery, but it nonetheless had to grapple with the existence of a small free-black population in its midst. While Americans have often conflated anti-slavery attitudes with pro-black sentiments, in fact, white Northerners were anti-slavery and also predominantly anti-black. In every Northern state the pattern of responses to free blacks was similar. There was no thought of creating a biracial society based on freedom and equality. White Northerners wanted blacks shipped overseas to Africa, the Caribbean, or Central America via colonization societies or sent to segregated regions within America or placed in designated all-black states or forced into physically separate communities, the forerunners of the modern urban racial ghettos. Above all, after emancipation they wanted blacks contained in the South.

White America’s hypocrisy and its true racial attitudes were fully on display in the North. There, racial animosity was rife, and an all-consuming fear of black migration was well entrenched. Northern bigotry played a vital role in curtailing the physical and economic mobility of blacks. Trapped in the South, they were needed as cotton-field laborers, first as slaves, then as free blacks, for with emancipation the economic imperatives of cotton did not go away. The consequence was a separate community of free blacks, first induced by white Northerners, then adopted by the white South after Emancipation, then reinforced by blacks during the long period of compulsory exclusion. Historians generally ignore the North’s racial containment policy designed to keep blacks in the South. The policy worked, for on the eve of World War I 90 percent of all blacks in America lived in the South. Only another economic force—a labor shortage in the North—toppled the containment policy.

Black American identity was put to the test early in the North, where slavery was being eliminated by gradual emancipation. The living and social conditions of the small number of free blacks in the antebellum North is well worth reviewing, beginning in the New England and Middle Atlantic states.

Separatism asserted itself early on. As a twenty-six-year-old, Richard Allen, a former slave turned gifted Methodist orator, preached to a small number of blacks in 1786 at St. George’s Church in Philadelphia. The young leader was allowed to perform his service at 5 a.m., before the white service. At a later date, either 1787 or 1792, Allen and his fellow black worshipers were told to vacate the white section of St. George’s Church. Allen’s black colleague, the Reverend Absalom Jones, in a prayer position on his knees, was pulled up by a white trustee. “You must get up; you must not kneel here,” the trustee said. The black congregants had been assigned instead to a newly built, racially segregated balcony. Thus provoked, blacks left the church, never to return. “An increase in the black communicants,” as W. E. B. Du Bois later wrote, had alarmed the white church and prompted racial segregation. Allen and others would found a racially separate religious entity, the African American Church (Bethel), and a mutual aid society, the Free African Society of Philadelphia. The white North would not be a promised land for free blacks.

In a pattern that would be repeated throughout American history, an increase, or anticipated increase, in the number of blacks in a particular community invariably provoked a policy of forced separation. Historians rationalize the establishment of separate black institutions by Allen and others as evidence of black resilience and ingenuity, but in doing so they ignore the devastating long-term consequences of racial segregation.

Philadelphia, like other Northern cities before the Civil War, offers a glimpse of the “squalid” conditions of most free blacks in the North. In 1862 the English visitor Edward Dicey provided this account of the city:

Everywhere and at all seasons the colored people form a separate community. . . . As a rule, the blacks you meet in the Free States are shabbily, if not squalidly, dressed; and as far as I could learn, the instances of black men having made money by trade in the North are few in number. . . . In every Northern city, the poorest, the most thriftless, and perhaps the most troublesome part of the population are free negroes.

“There is . . . [no] city,” wrote Frederick Douglass, the black abolitionist and orator, “in which prejudice against color is more rampant than in Philadelphia.” Such was the reality in the “City of Brotherly Love.”

By the time Philadelphia’s most famous citizen, Benjamin Franklin, was a delegate to the Constitutional Convention in 1787, he had become an abolitionist. Earlier he had owned slaves for thirty years; in 1770 he had lobbied the English government for approval of the state of Georgia’s slave codes; in 1779 he had contacted the French police to help recapture Abbe, a female slave owned by John Jay, another of his compatriots living in France. (Jay was a founding member of New York’s abolition society when he still owned slaves.) The French police found Abbe and imprisoned her until she “repented her ingratitude.” Franklin had also asked the French government to allow his relative, John Williams Jr., to keep a slave in France after the French had abolished slavery.

More important for our purposes, Franklin’s ideas for the “improvement” of free blacks were harsh. In the fall of 1789 he issued a formal plan for a committee of Abolition Society members to oversee emancipated blacks. Because he feared a mass of free slaves unleashed on American society, he also recommended that a branch of our “national police . . . supervise emancipated slaves.” A “committee of inspection” would “superintend the morals, general conduct, and ordinary situation of Free Negroes.” A “committee of education” was formed to “superintend the children of Free Blacks,” who would be taught “moral and religious principles.” A “committee of employ” would find “constant employment for those Free Negroes who are able to work, as the want of this would occasion poverty, idleness, and many vicious habits.” The jobs contemplated would “require little skill.” Apprehensive white abolitionists like Franklin wanted comprehensive white regulation of the lives of blacks after emancipation.

Examples of white Northern racial animosity abound, often with a modern resonance. In the 1790s, residents of New Haven, Connecticut, and Salem, Massachusetts, argued that the movement of blacks to white neighborhoods precipitated a 20 to 50 percent decline in property values. Citizens of South Boston bragged in 1847 that “not a single colored family” resided in the neighborhood. Abolitionist Boston had its segregated “Nigger Hill” when only 1.3 percent of the population was black. Groping for a positive interpretation of this situation, black historians cite examples of Boston blacks and whites living “adjacent to one another.” But, in fact, Boston greeted blacks with residential segregation; separate and inferior schools; separate churches, lecture halls, and places of entertainment; and, according to the historian James Horton, “condescension in polite circles.” Blacks “held the worst jobs at the lowest pay.” Even the Irish, according to Frederick Douglass, were able to push blacks out of their normal occupations. The two decades before the Civil War were a time of economic crisis for Boston’s blacks. As the white population doubled from 84,400 to 177,800, the black population held stagnant at 2,261 (1.3 percent).

Historians heap praise on the Massachusetts legislature for banning racial segregation in schools in 1855. The act affected all of fifty children. (When time came for real integration via busing in the 1960s, Boston’s resistance, led by Louise Day Hicks, was legendary.) In 1860 only thirty thousand black children out of an American black school population of eighty-six thousand in the free North attended any form of school. A small number attended integrated schools. In contrast, 6.3 million (two-thirds) of white children were enrolled in school.

The absolute numbers of black people residing in a Northern city or state in the antebellum years are critical to understanding racial separation and animosity. They reinforce the distinction made by the white North in opposing slavery but despising the presence of blacks. Blacks constituted a mere 2 percent of the North’s antebellum population, and 94 percent of them were not allowed to vote, even with such minuscule numbers. That proportion was preferred even in Boston, the hotbed of abolition and twentieth-century liberal politics. In 1930 the black population in the entire state of Massachusetts was 1.3 percent out of a total of four million. By contrast, as David Cohn has noted, the cotton-dominated Bolivar County, in the Mississippi Delta, alone had the same number of blacks—fifty-two thousand. A hospitable North would have drained the South’s labor force after the Civil War.

Connecticut provides a vivid portrait of Northern disdain for free blacks. Slavery was hardly an economic bonanza in Connecticut and was simply not profitable enough to expand. In 1784 the state ended race-based slavery via legislation for gradual emancipation, by which all slaves born after 1784 would be freed at age twenty-five; females were to be freed at age twenty-one. In 1775 the state had had more than 5,100 black slaves, about 3 percent of the population. In 1800, in a population of 451,520, only 8,627 (1.9 percent) were black.

Supposedly, slavery in New England was benign. Still, an article in the Connecticut Journal in 1774 exhibited widespread notions of black inferiority. The writer categorized “the Negroes of Africa” as animals to be ruled by white descendants of the biblical Adam.

God formed [blacks] . . . in common with horses, oxen, dogs, &c. for the white people alone to be used by them either for pleasure or to labour with other beasts in the culture of tobacco, indigo, rice, and sugar. [This was before the advent of cotton production.]

Connecticut has left an extraordinary record of white attitudes toward free blacks in the antebellum North. In 1800 the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences conducted a survey of more than one hundred Connecticut towns. The major sponsors were Timothy Dwight, the president of Yale College, and Noah Webster. The survey consisted of thirty-two “articles,” of which Number 26 dealt with race. Specifically, it wanted to know if a black person born enslaved was different than one born free:

Free blacks; their number, vices and modes of life, their industry and success in acquiring property; whether those born free are more ingenious and virtuous, than those who were emancipated after arriving to adult years.

The inquiry embodied the optimistic viewpoint that blacks had been degraded by slavery and, once freed, would undergo a transition to “proper” morality and productive citizenship. In Connecticut a brief period between gradual emancipation and the first decades of the nineteenth century evidenced white idealism and a hope that the effects of slavery could be whitewashed from black character. A thorough apprenticeship, similar to Benjamin Franklin’s proposal for “improvement,” with white tutelage and charity, was envisioned. The goal was the acceptance of white Christian norms. If this transition could not work in Connecticut, what would be the fate of blacks in the rest of America?

The Connecticut town responses were devastating, with a damaging assessment of blacks as lazy and immoral. No distinction was drawn between the character of emancipated blacks and that of freeborn blacks. In all, blacks were recognized in early-nineteenth-century Connecticut as an intractable problem.

Timothy Dwight, the well-educated Congregationalist minister, wrote the report from New Haven in 1811. In one of his own sermons in 1810, Dwight was highly critical of New Haven blacks:

[T]hese people . . . are, generally, neither able, nor inclined to make their freedom a blessing unto themselves. When they first became free, they are t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter One: Racial Attitudes in the North, 1800–1865
• Chapter Two: The Containment of Blacks in the South
• Chapter Three: The Great Migration: The Reception of Blacks in Northern Cities
• Chapter Four: The 1960s: Civil Rights and Civil War
• Chapter Five: The Enduring American Dilemma
• Chapter Six: From Dream to Reality
• Notes on Sources
• Index