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. 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 slaves, and sailed for Virginia.^[1]

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.^[2] 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.

A popular myth rehearsed by earlier generations of historians was that the first Africans in Virginia were not regarded as slaves in the way that term would later come to be understood, that is, as “persons reduced to property and required to work without wages for life,” but instead, may have been regarded as similar in status to many of the first English colonists who arrived as indentured servants, “bound by contract to serve a master for four to seven years in order to pay the expense of their passage.”^[3] Ronald Takaki, for example, drawing on outdated interpretations, repeated this mistake in his excellent and widely acclaimed history of multicultural America, A Different Mirror, first published in 1993.

However, more recently, Beth Austin, registrar and historian at the Hampton History Museum, has re-examined this signature event in the history of slavery in the United States. (See Footnote 1.) Seeking “to make the best and most current scholarly research on Virginia’s First Africans available to the general public,” Austin has published a compelling corrective to the older myth. In a fascinating thrity-four-page manuscript, Austin tells the story, starting with the Portuguese invasion of Ndongo in West Central Africa, where Virginia’s first Africans were kidnapped, and ending with a consideration of the eventual status of the captive Africans after they arrived in the colony of Virginia in 1619. Although little is yet known about the individual Africans who arrived in 1619, nor about the handful of others who arrived in the several years after that, Austin shows that their personal stories, while still sketchy at best, have nevertheless begun to emerge in recent years thanks to the tireless digging of documentary historians.

Most important for our purposes, though, is Austin’s argument that there is no evidence to support the myth that Africans were originally regarded or treated as indentured servants.^[4] There is a documented case of one free Black sailor, a man named John Phillip, who testified in a Virginia court in 1624.^[5] But other than John Phillip, Austin finds no evidence that any Africans arrived in Virginia before 1625 as free people, although “at least three early Africans in Virginia became free after a long period of enslavement.” Nevertheless, Austin concludes that “the experiences of these freed Africans were exceptional, not typical of the vast majority of Africans brought to early Virginia.”

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, 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.^[6]

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.^[7]

*   *   *

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 either Indigenous or Hispanic peoples. And Black enslavement was present from the very beginning.

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,^[8] 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; it is the world’s oldest constitution.

*   *   *

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.” 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.^[9] The Fourth of July being virtually synonymous with the Declaration of Independence, Douglass’ 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.^[10] — Frederick Douglass

*   *   *

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.

 

*   *   *

More recently, investigative journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones was less charitable in characterizing 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.^[11] … Jefferson and the other founders were keenly aware of this hypocrisy…^[12] — Nikole Hannah-Jones

 

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.^[13] — Nikole Hannah-Jones

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. Thomas Jefferson himself was deeply conflicted about it, and yet he could not find his way to emancipating his own slaves. 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, yet those who make such compromises do so hoping to come back and win the fight on another day.

Of course, 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. And the work is still not finished.

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, Hispanics, and Asians have all been inspired by the example of the Black freedom fight.

From Transatlantic Nightmare to Plantation Slavery

Many Africans arrived in the Americas as a consequence of the transatlantic slave trade, which began in the 15th century and was perpetuated by European powers such as Portugal, Spain, Britain, and Holland. From 1525 to 1866, approximately 12.5 million Africans fell victim to the transatlantic slave trade. Only about 10.7 million Africans survived the transatlantic crossing, and most of them landed in South America and the Caribbean. A relatively small number, about 388,000, were transported to the United States. They arrived in chains, having survived the unspeakable horrors of the so-called Middle Passage, the second leg of the journey that entailed the actual crossing of the Atlantic Ocean and lasted anywhere from six weeks to several months. The conditions on the slave ships were horrendous, as slaves were chained together, confined for the most part in their own excrement, and beaten for insubordination or as retaliation for attempted rebellions that were not uncommon among the desperate prisoners. Many people died during the journey.^[14]

Upon arrival, the captives were offered for sale at slave auctions, where they were inspected for their physical condition and demeanor and then sold to the highest bidder as “property.” The vast majority of the new arrivals were transported to plantations in the American South, where they would spend the rest of their lives working under harsh and inhumane conditions. Slave trading remained legal in the United States until it was outlawed in 1808 under a provision of the U.S. Constitution that had set a limit on the ability of Congress to regulate the slave trade. Despite the relatively smaller number of slaves transported across the Atlantic to the United States compared to the rest of the Americas, the enslaved Black population in the U.S. grew substantially by natural increase, in part because of the relatively balanced ratio of male to female slaves, and in part because enslaved women sometimes bore children fathered by slave masters.^[15]

Plantation life for most slaves in the American South was characterized by long hours of hard labor, poor living conditions, and limited personal freedom. Slaves worked from sunrise to sunset, often performing backbreaking labor such as picking cotton or tobacco, tending to livestock, or working in the fields. They were subject to physical punishment if they did not meet their daily quotas or if they were caught trying to escape. Slaves also faced inadequate food and housing, with many living in small, poorly-constructed cabins lacking basic amenities. In addition, they were denied education and other opportunities for personal growth, and their families and communities were often broken apart by sales or forced labor transfers. Overall, plantation life for most slaves was a brutal and dehumanizing experience marked by exploitation and oppression.^[16]

By 1860, the enslaved Black population of the United States was nearly four million. Only when the American Civil War broke out in 1861 did the dream of freedom become a real possibility for most enslaved people. On the eve of the Civil War, many Southern slaves fled the plantations, and by about 1863, as many as 200,00 had joined the Union army with the understanding that they would be fighting to secure their freedom.^[17]

Free Black Communities

While the majority of Blacks in colonial and pre–Civil War America were enslaved from the start, this was not universally the case. From the very beginning, some Blacks did manage to gain their freedom. Sometimes enslaved people bought their freedom; sometimes they ran away to freedom. One of the more remarkable stories to come out of the 1619 landing of the first Africans in Virginia, as told in the opening paragraph of this chapter, is that of Anthony Johnson. History has it that Johnson managed to somehow gain his freedom, that he and his wife Mary were able to establish themselves in Virginia’s Northampton County in the 1640s, holding 250 acres of land in the colonial settlement where they grew corn and tobacco, and that Johnson himself even owned a slave. Unfortunately, Johnson’s family lost the land after Johnson died, whereupon the courts seized his property, claiming he had not left a will and that besides, as a “Negro,” he was not eligible to own land.^[18]

Although Johnson’s case was not typical, it serves to call attention to the fact that while out of the ordinary, a free Black community began to take shape in the English colonies of North America right alongside the more prevalent system of slavery. Even more surprising perhaps is that this was just as true in the South as it was in the North. Indeed, there were more free Blacks in the South than in the North, a fact that runs against our usual understanding of the dynamics of race and slavery in America.^[19]

On the other hand, the South was a complicated place, so the situation was quite different in the states of the Upper South (Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, and later Kentucky, Missouri, Tennessee and Washington, DC) compared to those of the Lower South (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas). The population of free Blacks was greater in the Upper South than in the Lower South. After the American Revolution in 1776, slaves in the Upper South were more likely to gain their freedom either by being set free by their masters through the process of manumission or by freeing themselves. Blacks usually freed themselves in one of two ways: they either bought their freedom or they ran away. Even so, until the Civil War, 89% of the nation’s total Black population remained enslaved; free Blacks made up barely 10% of the population.^[20] But the existence of this free Black population would play an important role in the anti-slavery movement that developed to counter the fundamental injustice of slavery.

Abolitionist Movement

During the late 18th and early 19th century, a robust abolitionist or anti-slavery movement took root in the northern states. One reason abolition emerged in the northern states was that these states were economically less dependent on slave labor than southern states were. Slaves in the North typically labored as domestic servants or as farm hands on small subsistence enterprises, but they were not producers of cash crops like cotton or tobacco, which was typical of plantation production in the South, where slavery was a widespread and indispensable component of the economy, particularly in states like South Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana.

The commitment to abolitionism in the North was also a natural outgrowth of an evangelical religious revival, the so-called Second Great Awakening that swept the country during the late 1700s and early 1800s. White Evangelicals had come to believe that slavery was a sinful practice fundamentally at odds with the core teachings of Christianity, which held that all human beings were created equal in the eyes of God. They also saw it as a form of oppression and injustice that went against the values of love, compassion, and mercy that were central to their faith.

The evangelical movement also inspired Black people, providing them with a spiritual discourse that affirmed the righteousness of their struggles for freedom and gave them courage. Certain Biblical stories in particular spoke to the collective experience of Black people in America. The Exodus story, for instance, resonated powerfully with Black folks, who could readily identify with the plight of the Israelite people and their flight from bondage in Egypt. Like the Israelites, many Black people put their faith in God and looked forward to the day when He would send a Moses to lead them to freedom in the promised land.

In the early 1780s, a young slave named Richard Allen, inspired by White evangelical preachers, introduced his own master to the evangelical message, and in 1783, the master allowed Allen to buy his freedom. Richard Allen would go on to found the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church of Philadelphia in 1794, the first independent Black church in the United States. Then in 1816, he organized the first General Conference of the AME Church, which officially separated the African Methodist Episcopal Church from the parent Methodist Episcopal Church. Here he used his position as a minister to advocate for the abolition of slavery.

The AME Church became a hub for the Underground Railroad as well as a safe haven for fugitive slaves and a meeting place for abolitionists. It also provided a platform for prominent Black abolitionists, such as Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Tubman, to speak out against slavery and to promote the cause of freedom for all people. Indeed, ever since its founding, the AME Church has provided a sense of community for generations of Black Americans. With over 7,000 congregations worldwide and over 2.5 million members, the AME church remains a source of political and social activism today, advocating for civil rights, voting rights, and other issues affecting the Black community.

Resistance to slavery and agitation for freedom on the part of slaves had intensified in the years leading up to the American Revolution, as Black people were aware of and exploited the promises of liberty and equality enshrined in the revolutionary rhetoric of the times. Black people even fought in the American Revolution, although some fought on the British side, hoping to secure their freedom in exchange for military service.

But after the Revolution, many African Americans sought to use the ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence as the basis of legal claims against enslavement. One famous example was Mum Bett, who would later take the name Elizabeth Freeman. In 1781, inspired by talk in Massachusetts of a newly adopted state Constitution declaring that all human beings were created equal, Mum Bett, a slave, ran away. In Stockbridge, Massachusetts, she secured a lawyer and sued her master in court, arguing that the existence of slavery violated the most basic principle of the American Revolution, which had espoused the equality of all human beings. Mum Bett won her case and her freedom, and within two decades, every state in the North was on the road to abolition.^[21]

In the early 1800s, enslaved Blacks living in states bordering the North ran away with increasing frequency, but slaves sometimes escaped from states as far south as Georgia. Running away was a dangerous proposition, as runaways who were caught before they could reach a safe harbor were often severely punished. Nevertheless, the thirst for freedom was so strong that many African Americans were willing to take the risk.

Escaped slaves sometimes became active in the abolitionist movement, working closely with the new anti-slavery societies in New England and New York, including the American Anti-Slavery Society, formed in Philadelphia in late 1833. Anti-slavery societies provided a public platform for many fugitive slaves who performed the indispensable task of translating the White abolitionists’ abstract anti-slavery messages into concrete human terms. The lectures and printed narratives of former slaves, such as Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, Ellen and William Craft, Henry Bibb, Harriet A. Jacobs, Sojourner Truth, and Solomon Northup, dramatized the inhumanity of slavery and helped undermine the widespread belief in the North that most slaves were kindly treated and were contented with their lot.^[22]

*   *   *

Undoubtedly the most famous and most eloquent orator of the 19th century was Frederick Douglass. Born as Frederick Bailey to an enslaved Black mother in either 1817 or 1818, Douglas was never certain who his father was, but he believed it to have been his former master, Thomas Auld. When young Frederick was sent to live with Thomas Auld’s brother Hugh Auld in Baltimore, he learned the rudiments of reading from Hugh’s wife, Sophia, until Hugh forbade the literacy lessons. After that, Douglass devoted himself to self-instruction whenever he could.

When Douglass was fifteen or sixteen, Thomas Auld, seeking to punish Douglass for his insolence, hired him out to a man named Edward Covey who had a reputation as a ruthless “slave-breaker.” The rebellious Douglass, endured regular whippings from Covey until one day Douglass fought back and won a physical confrontation with Covey, which put an end to the beatings. Douglass wrote about the fight with Covey in his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, depicting it as life transforming. Douglass became determined to escape the bondage of slavery, and twice he tried to run away before he finally succeeded on his third attempt in 1838 at the age of 20.

The following year, Douglass was ordained as a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, which helped him cultivate his skills as a public speaker, and from roughly 1840 until his death in 1895, over a career spanning at least 45 years, Douglass tirelessly plied the lecture circuit, prosecuting the case against slavery. Douglass’s biographer David Blight has noted that throughout his life, Frederick Douglass gave a critique of the United States that is as powerful as any we’ve ever had regarding the meaning of the United States and the betrayal of its promise because of the long shadow of slavery.^[23]

*   *   *

Another remarkable Black abolitionist was Araminta Ross, better known as Harriet Tubman. In her lifetime, Tubman would become known as the “Moses of Her People” for her extraordinary leadership in the struggle for freedom and equality.

“Minty,” as she was known in her youth, was born into slavery in perhaps 1822 in Dorchester County, Maryland. As a young girl, she suffered a traumatic blow to the head that left her with a permanent disability that caused recurring headaches, dizziness, and seizures. She also sometimes experienced vivid dreams and strange visions, which she interpreted as messages from God. Like many enslaved people, Minty’s early life was filled with hardship, and she endured much abuse and harsh treatment from a cruel mistress. She recounted being whipped and carried the scars to prove it, but like Douglass, she found ways to resist, including running away and staying away for days at a time, wearing layers of clothing as protection against beatings, and fighting back.

As she got older, Minty became ever more resourceful. Seeing an opportunity to gain some degree of control over her own work, Minty proposed to pay her master, Edward Brodess, a yearly fee for the privilege of hiring herself out to various masters of her own choosing. When Minty went to work for merchants and shipbuilders, her world opened up. She was sometimes sent to the docks, where she loaded and unloaded ships, and more importantly where she came in contact with the water men and benefited from their knowledge of the wider world. She moved around a lot and became very knowledgeable about the lay of the land. Preferring to work outdoors in the open air of field and forest—driving oxen, plowing, cutting wood, and hauling logs, Minty sometimes worked alongside her father, who was an expert lumberjack, timber foreman, and ship carpenter. Although she was small in stature, Minty became quite strong as a result of the vigorous outdoor labor that she undertook. Around 1844, Minty met a free Black man named John Tubman, and when they married, Araminta Ross became Harriet Tubman.

In 1849, Edward Brodess died, leaving the family in the hands of his widow, Eliza Brodess. Fearing that Eliza would sell off her family to settle debts, Tubman ran away, accompanied by her two brothers. But her first attempt to run away failed because her brothers lost their nerve and dragged her back. However, she soon set off again, this time alone, and she never looked back. From then on, Tubman took on the dangerous task of leading other enslaved people to freedom through the Underground Railroad, a network of secret routes and safe houses. Tubman led dozens of missions over the years and is credited with rescuing over seventy enslaved individuals, including her own family. Her years of preparation had turned her into a skilled navigator with a deep knowledge of the land, which enabled her to avoid detection by slave catchers and their dogs. Moreover, she had a keen sense of strategy and leadership that allowed her to safely guide her charges while avoiding confrontation with authorities. As a leader, she was ruthless, carrying a pistol and sometimes threatening to shoot any members of her party that might jeopardize the mission by wavering in their commitment.

Tubman’s achievements went well beyond her work with the Underground Railroad. During the Civil War, she worked as a nurse, cook, and spy for the Union Army. In 1863, she led a raid on plantations along the Combahee River, liberating over 700 enslaved people. After the war, she continued to work as an activist for the rights of African Americans and women. Near the end of her career, she became an influential speaker, traveling throughout the United States to speak about her experiences and advocate for civil rights.^[24]

Civil War and Emancipation Proclamation

The growing abolitionist movement worried Southern leaders and exacerbated the political tensions between the North and South. Many Southern leaders saw the anti-slavery movement as a direct threat to their economic and political power. Moreover, the South was genuinely alarmed when Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860. Southerners feared Lincoln’s election meant the federal government would soon take affirmative steps to end slavery in the United States once and for all.

Although such fears were no doubt exaggerated at the time, many Southern states, including South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, began agitating for secession from the United States. Then, even before Lincoln could be sworn into office in March 1861, Southern states began to secede from the Union one by one, starting with South Carolina in December of 1860. By February 1861, South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas joined together to form a Confederacy, followed later in the spring by Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee. When Confederate forces fired on the federal garrison at Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to put down the rebellion, and the American Civil War began.

Although prominent—and often southern-born-historians—once sought to trivialize the role that slavery played in the American Civil War, the broad consensus among 21st-century-historians is that the commitment of the Southern states to the preservation of slavery truly was the overriding consideration that prompted Southern succession, without which there would have been no Civil War. For his part, President Lincoln had initially declared that his sole objective was the preservation of the Union with no thought of interfering with the institution of slavery.

But whatever White Northerners or Southerners thought the Civil War was about, African Americans made it unambiguously clear that for them it was about freedom and emancipation. When the war began, a half a million slaves made a run for it. As time went by, more and more Black refugees showed up behind Union lines.

While Lincoln grappled with the problem of how the Union could prevail in its cause, African Americans advanced the argument that Lincoln needed the help of African Americans and that the easiest way for the Union to win the war would be to emancipate the slaves. On January 1, 1863, Lincoln did just that, issuing an executive order, known today as the Emancipation Proclamation, which read in part:

… All persons held as slaves within any State … in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authority … will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons, and will do no act or acts to repress such persons … in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom.

The Emancipation Proclamation did not set all slaves free; it only freed those slaves living in the states that had left the Union. Nor did it legally abolish slavery; that would require an amendment of the U.S. Constitution. But Lincoln’s proclamation would end up being a first step along the way to total abolition. And for African Americans, enslaved or free, the Emancipation Proclamation was their Declaration of Independence.^[25] The proclamation also had one other immediate effect: it granted Black men the right to fight for the Union. As a result, nearly 200,000 African Americans enlisted in the military and fought in the Civil War on the side of the Union.

These developments left Lincoln with a legal and moral dilemma. With the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln had proclaimed a certain subset of enslaved people to be “thenceforward, and forever free.” But by 1865, with the war nearing its end and the South on the verge of surrender, Lincoln recognized that if the war were to end with the institution of slavery still constitutionally intact, nothing could stop the former Confederate states, upon re-entering the Union, to order all slaves back into slavery, and this was now unthinkable to him. Lincoln’s bold plan was to abolish slavery by pushing through a constitutional amendment, the 13th Amendment, before the end of the war.

Getting the 13th Amendment through Congress, in particular through the House of Representatives, seemed at the time like a nearly impossible legislative feat, and it almost failed. But in the end, Lincoln and Congress succeeded; the 13th Amendment was passed and signed into law, slavery was legally abolished, and the southern states re-entered a very different Union—one in which slavery was a thing of the past.

Reconstruction

When the Civil War ended in 1865, Congress had already passed the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery once and for all. African Americans rejoiced that “their long night of captivity” was over, and they set to work building lives as a free people. Reconstruction, a post–Civil War project aimed at putting the nation back together and addressing the destruction in the South, began. During this time, formerly enslaved people started to participate in the political process, aided by the presence of federal troops that kept the vengeance of Southern Whites in check. Black people organized, voted, and even elected Black representatives to federal and state legislatures.

The U.S. Congress also fought back against Southern attempts to subvert the new freedoms of Blacks by passing the 14th and 15th Amendments. Despite Southern White opposition and sometimes violence, including actions by the Ku Klux Klan—a white-supremacist organization founded by former Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest to terrorize Southern Blacks—Blacks were pressing forward to claim their full rights of citizenship. It seemed that the nation was finally beginning to live up to its founding ideals of equality, justice, “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

Then the wheels of progress ground to a halt and began to move backwards. The Republican candidate for President in 1876, Rutherford B. Hayes, facing a close and contested election, made a compromise with Southern Democrats that would be disastrous for the Black cause. In exchange for Southern support, Hayes agreed to remove federal troops from the South. “With the troops gone, white Southerners quickly went about eradicating the gains of Reconstruction.

The systemic white suppression of black life was so severe that this period between the 1880s and the 1920s and ’30s became known as … the second slavery.”^[26]  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 slaves, 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.

The Rise of Jim Crow

Also disheartening to African Americans was the fact that Southern states began passing laws and imposing social codes that denied Blacks the newly gained freedoms and opportunities they had begun to enjoy, 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. 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.

Black Musicians Re-Create American Music

The Birth of the Blues

Emancipated Blacks and their heirs responded to the unkept promises of Reconstruction and the institutionalization of Jim Crow by, among other things, forging a new musical vernacular that became known as the blues. An often-repeated idea in popular accounts of the origin of the blues is that it had its roots in negro spirituals and in the work songs, field hollers, shouts, and chants of slaves as they worked the southern plantations in the years before the Civil War. However, according to folklorist Lamont Pearley, Sr., the blues was not “slave music.”

The earliest blues may have borrowed some musical elements from the pre-Civil War past, but it no longer reflected the lives of enslaved people. While the old negro spirituals had expressed the longing of the enslaved for freedom from bondage, the blues more often evoked the everyday contradictions of a people whom the Civil War had made free but who were still constrained by the realities of life in a white-supremacist society.

[The blues] spoke of cotton bales/gins, boll weevil, juke houses, and sharecropping. Farming and sharecropping were the starting places for most of the legendary blues musicians celebrated today, including Charlie Patton, Rubin Lacey, Son House, Howling Wolf, Muddy Waters and the most famous in recent generations, B.B. King.^[27]

It is difficult to overemphasize the cultural significance of the blues and of the roles that African Americans played in its genesis and dispersal.

As the blues migrated out of rural Mississippi to cosmopolitan cities like New Orleans, Saint Louis, and Chicago, it became an altogether new genre, which would eventually shape the entire landscape of American popular music, serving as the foundation of multiple 20th-century innovations, including jazz, gospel, R&B, soul, funk, and rock and roll.

The Emergence of Jazz

The genre that has come to be known as jazz emerged around the turn of the 20th century in New Orleans. Like the city itself, jazz was a blend of African, Latin, and European forms and styles. Pioneering musicians like Buddy Bolden, a cornet player known for his improvisational skills and powerful sound, laid the groundwork, introducing a new rhythmic style that came to be known as swing.

The new sound quickly spread throughout New Orleans, primarily among Black musicians although it was soon picked up by White musicians as well. A distinctive New Orleans style emerged characterized by bands playing swinging, collective, polyphonic, ensemble, music in which every instrument played virtually continuously.

At first, jazz bands relied heavily on this collective ensemble style, but as the genre evolved, a gradual shift occurred, marked by the emergence of the solo in which one performer would break out in a burst of individual creativity and improvisational flair while other members of the band would drop out and take turns at soloing.

The earliest pioneers of New Orleans jazz included musicians like Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, and Jelly Roll Morton among others. But jazz did not remain confined to New Orleans. By the second decade of the 20th century, thriving jazz scenes were springing up in many big cities across the country, notably in places like Chicago and New York. Chicago venues like the Dreamland Cafe hosted performances by the likes of Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, and Jelly Roll Morton, and rising stars like Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, and Count Basie performed regularly in iconic venues like the Cotton Club and the Savoy Ballroom in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood. Of course, the popularity of all these musicians was such that they also toured extensively, bringing their unique styles of jazz to audiences across the United States. The growing accessibility of radio broadcasts and the advent of recording technology also played a significant role in bringing jazz to a wider audience, further contributing to its popularity and growing cultural significance.

During the middle decades of the 20th century, jazz musicians like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane would continue to break new ground, continually infusing jazz with a sense of innovation and experimentation.^[28]

The Great Migration

By the first decades of the 20th century, many Southern Blacks had rejected life under Jim Crow, expressing their determination to be free by leaving the South in search of better lives. 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.”  The Great Migration “remade the nation in ways that are still being felt.”^[29] 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 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 forebears of most African-Americans born in the North and West.^[30]

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”—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 be projected well into the future.^[31]

The Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance, or the New Negro Movement as it was known at the time, was an intellectual, social, and artistic movement centered in the borough of Harlem in New York City during the first several decades of the 20th century. When Harlem began to be developed in the late 1800s, it had originally attracted prosperous Whites looking to get away from the hustle and bustle of Manhattan. But by the 1890s, real estate speculators had overbuilt in Harlem. Then a stock market crash and an economic recession led to the collapse of the housing market. Desperate Harlem landlords began renting to Blacks despite the opposition of White residents, and as greater numbers of African Americans moved to Harlem, Whites moved out. By 1914, Harlem had become a predominantly Black neighborhood. In the years after 1914, Harlem became a magnet as well for southern Blacks joining the Great Migration. Many Blacks from the Caribbean were also drawn to New York, making it the city with the most diverse Black population in the entire country.^[32]

During the 1920s and ’30s, Harlem had an exciting and vibrant entertainment scene featuring the hottest Black musicians and entertainers in the country, including people like Duke Ellington, Adelaide Hall, Cab Holloway, and Louis Armstrong to name just a few. Iconic venues like the Cotton Club and the Savoy Ballroom drew large crowds eager to experience the electrifying sounds of jazz, blues, and swing music. Although both venues played significant roles in shaping the cultural landscape of Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance, they differed in the degree to which they tolerated racial mixing. The Cotton Club enforced strict segregation, featuring Black performers but catering primarily to a wealthy White audience. In contrast, the Savoy Ballroom was a more open venue, frequented by Black and White patrons alike, who were free to share the same dance floor.

While the vibrant nightlife of Harlem during the 1920s and ’30s showcased the cultural achievements of Black musicians and entertainers, a Black intellectual movement also thrived, with prominent figures like Marcus Garvey, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Alain Locke shaping the discourse on racial identity and empowerment. All three men were advocates of Black self-determination and emphasized racial pride and Black unity although each differed in his vision of what this might mean in practical terms.

Jamaican-born immigrant Marcus Garvey promoted a separatist vision for Blacks, even advocating a back-to-Africa movement as the best means of escaping racial oppression and reclaiming an African cultural heritage. Unfortunately, Garvey faced significant opposition from the U.S. government, which sought to silence him through legal persecution and surveillance, viewing his ideas as a threat to the status quo, which of course, it was. In 1923, he was convicted of mail fraud for activities related to his Black Star Line shipping company, a venture aimed at promoting Black economic independence. It is an open question whether Garvey’s indictment and conviction were nothing more than a politically motivated attempt to undermine his leadership in the Black nationalist movement. At any rate, after serving time in federal prison, Garvey was deported to Jamaica in 1927. Nevertheless, his ideas would live on to inspire later activists, such as Malcolm X.

Another highly influential Black intellectual was W. E. B. Du Bois, who authored The Souls of Black Folk, a sociological examination of the Black experience in America. Du Bois was also a founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), an organization dedicated to the fight for civil rights. In contrast to Garvey, Du Bois articulated a more integrationist philosophy, believing that social and political equality for African Americans should be pursued within the existing framework of American society.

Meanwhile, philosopher Alain Locke focused his attention on elevating the status of African American art and literature, editing and publishing The New Negro, an important anthology of essays, poetry, fiction, and visual art that showcased the artistic and intellectual achievements of African Americans.^[33]

A New Day in Literature

Although the Harlem Renaissance touched every facet of Black experience, it is often associated primarily with the emergence of a robust new literary tradition. This was not, however, a movement unified in its artistic aims and methods. Its poets, for instance, embraced a variety of different assumptions concerning what it meant to be poet. While Countee Cullen rejected the idea that his racial background should have anything to do with his approach to poetry, Langston Hughes thought Black poets should create a distinctive Negro voice. Jean Toomer was inspired by Southern folk song and jazz, while Jamaican-born Claude McKay first wrote primarily in Jamaican dialect and later, after immigrating to the U.S., switched to standard English and used traditional forms such as the sonnet. Black women poets such as Alice Dunbar Nelson, Gwendolyn Bennett, and Anne Spencer resisted poetry that remained constrained by traditional notions of race and gender.^[34]

Meanwhile, the novelists and short story writers explored “the diversity of Black experience across boundaries of class, colour, and gender.” Jessie Redmon Faucet’s characters in novels like There is Confusion (1924) deal with “the transformation of mainstream culture effected by the new Black middle class and by the Black creative arts.” Jean (Nathan) Toomer, who was bi-racial and probably often passed as White, explored the ambiguities of living between racial identities. His unconventionally structured novel Cane (1923), blended “modernist literary techniques with African American style and subject matter that alternated between the rural South and the urban North.” And Nella Larsen, another bi-racial writer, gained recognition for her two novels, Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929), which explore “issues of racial psychology, class, and sexuality in the modern city.”^[35]

Another prominent literary figure of the era was Zora Neale Hurston, best known today for her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) which inspired many later Black women writers, including Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Maya Angelou. Born in 1891 in Notasulga, Alabama, Hurston grew up in Eatonville, Florida, which deeply influenced her perspective on African American life and culture. After attending Howard University, Hurston moved to New York and became immersed in the vibrant cultural scene of the Harlem Renaissance. She pursued graduate studies in anthropology under Franz Boas, and her travels throughout the American South and the Caribbean provided rich material for her anthropological studies and literary endeavors. With the waning of the Harlem Renaissance, Hurston’s work fell into obscurity for a time before being revived in the late 20th century,^[36] thanks largely to Alice Walker.^[37]

Post-Rennaissance Literary Revolt

The generation of Black writers who made their mark after the waning of the Harlem Renaissance, which is to say from the 1940s through the 1960s, tended to be critical of their precursors for their alleged elitism and detachment from the broader struggles of African Americans, as well as an emphasis on pleasing White audiences and conforming to mainstream cultural standards. This development corresponded to the second wave of the Great Migration which saw five-and-a half million Blacks move from the rural South to the urban North to establish a new urban life rife with “labor conflicts, class antagonisms, and housing discrimination.” Along with this came a unique Black urban street culture, which “introduced a distinctly urban idiom into the American language.” The result was a new Black urban aesthetic produced a more hard-edged literature, one which tackled racial discrimination more aggressively than had the literature of the Harlem Renaissance.^[38]

Richard Wright is widely regarded as christening the decade with his publication of Native Son (1940), a best seller that garnered Wright critical acclaim as well as commercial success. Other Black writers soon followed in Wright’s wake. Margaret Walker’s For My People (1942) won Yale Younger Poets Award. Gwendoline Brooks received the Pulitzer Prize for Annie Allen (1950). Ralph Ellison’s  Invisible Man (1952) won the National Book Award. And Lorraine Hansbury received the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for A Raisin in the Sun (1959).^[39]

One of the boldest and most influential writers of the era was James Baldwin. His semi-autobiographical novel Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), dealing with themes of identity and religious hypocrisy, was rated by Modern Library as among the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. Giovanni’s Room (1956) was one of the first novels to openly address homosexuality and bisexuality.^[40] Moreover, Baldwin’s essay collections, such as Notes of a Native Son (1955) and The Fire Next Time (1963) offered incisive critiques of racial injustice and eloquently conveyed the ambiguities of Black experience in America.^[41]

Dismantling Jim Crow

Desegregating the Military

The second sustained period of active struggle on the part of Black people to make freedom and equality a reality for all Americans began in the years during and after World War II. When the United States entered the war, hundreds of thousands of Black Americans joined the military to fight fascism abroad. Taking advantage of the historical moment, the Black press mounted the “Double-V” campaign—advocating for victory on two fronts, against Hitler in Europe and against racism at home. When White troops tried to impose Jim Crow policies on Black soldiers overseas, Black soldiers rejected it forcefully.

Black servicemen returned home after the war with a new sense of self-worth. They had become accustomed to standing up against discrimination while serving abroad, and many continued to demand respect back home. But the country had not changed. Even a U.S. army uniform was not enough to garner respect, as the tragic story of Sergeant Isaac Woodard would dramatize. Woodard, a decorated World War II veteran, was returning home by bus when he was attacked and savagely beaten by a police officer in South Carolina after demanding respect from a bus driver that had cursed at him. The beating left Woodard permanently blinded.

The incident sparked a national outrage and prompted President Harry Truman to establish a Presidential Civil Rights Commission to examine the condition of civil rights in the U.S. and submit recommendations for their improvement. Truman later responded to the commission’s findings by ordering the desegregation of the federal work force and the desegregation of the armed services. The issue of civil rights would now be increasingly on the national agenda, and African Americans would be at the forefront of an aggressive campaign to dismantle Jim Crow.^[42]

Desegregating Schools

The civil rights movement of the 1950s and ‘60s advanced the cause of racial equality in ways not seen since the Civil War and Reconstruction. But it wasn’t only an African American movement. The modern civil rights movement was a multifaceted mass movement in which Black, Latino, Indigenous, and Asian Americans as well as women,and gay Americans all organized and mounted campaigns to secure “liberty and justice for all.” Still, the most visible aspect of the movement and the most iconic images of the era emerged out of the organized campaigns led by Black Americans.

In the 1950s, the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) was the legal arm of the movement. Founded in 1909, the NAACP had challenged legalized segregation in the courts for decades. In 1954, the NAACP’s tireless efforts to fight segregation resulted in the landmark Supreme Court decision known as Brown v. Board of Education. The case involved the family of Linda Brown, a third grader who was compelled to travel to an all-Black school that was further from her home than a nearby all-White school. At issue was the segregation policy of the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. The policy relied on the principle that the provision of “separate but equal” facilities for Blacks and Whites did not violate the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, a position previously affirmed by the Supreme Court in Plessey v. Ferguson in 1896. The lawyers for Brown argued that in the case of education, separate facilities were inherently unequal because of the detrimental psychological impact. The Supreme Court agreed and ruled 9–0 in favor of Brown.^[43]

The Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling required American public schools to integrate, and some previously segregated schools complied. But several states defied the Supreme Court ruling. The NAACP fought back by strategically selecting Black students to enroll in all-White public schools in cities throughout the South.

*   *  *

In 1957, the NAACP registered nine Black students, who would become known as the Little Rock Nine, to attend the previously all-White Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas. As the school year got under way, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus sought to prevent the Black students from attending. When angry Whites became threatening and violent, the governor sought to use the Arkansas National Guard to prevent integration rather than to protect the Black students. However, President Eisenhower federalized the National Guard and sent 1,000 U.S. Army troops to keep the peace. The National Guard, under the president’s authority, subsequently accompanied the Black students throughout the school year.

 

On November 14, 1960, six-year-old Ruby Bridges became the first Black child to integrate an all-White elementary school, William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans. She was accompanied by four federal marshals. On January 6, 1961, Hamilton Holmes and Charlayne Hunter won a case in U.S. District Court that cleared the way for them to attend the University of Georgia, thereby ending 160 years of segregation at the school.^[44]

 

On October 1, 1962, James Meredith became the first African American student to enroll at the University of Mississippi. Meredith’s fight for admission was a particularly dramatic one. Although a district court had ruled that Meredith must be admitted to the university, the state of Mississippi appealed the verdict first to the U.S. Court of Appeals, and then to the U.S. Supreme Court. Meredith won at every level, but Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett refused to comply with the courts. Like President Eisenhower before him, President Kennedy eventually had to order federal troops to Mississippi to contain the violence that erupted because of the fierce segregationist opposition to Meredith’s admission.^[45]

Desegregating Public Transportation and Lunch Counters

The Montgomery Bus Boycott is often mentioned as the foundational event of the modern civil rights movement. In truth, the movement was already underway when the bus boycott began on December 5, 1955, four days after Rosa Parks got arrested for violating a local Jim Crow ordinance by refusing to give up her seat on a city bus to a White man. Although Black activists were already at work challenging Jim Crow in the South, the bus boycott was an event that called attention to the desegregation fight in a particularly dramatic and publicly visible way. Rosa Parks’s failure to give up her seat on December 1, 1955, is often portrayed as the spontaneous act of a humble seamstress who was just too tired and too fed up to comply with a bus driver’s unreasonable demand on that particular day. But in fact, Rosa Parks’s action was a carefully planned gesture of non-violent civil disobedience. Parks had been a long-time member of the Montgomery chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and at the time of her arrest, she was secretary of the local chapter. She had been a civil rights activist already for many years, and the previous summer she had attended a workshop for social and economic justice at Tennessee’s Highlander Folk School. The NAACP had specifically selected Parks for the assignment because of her dignified and composed demeanor, and Parks herself had carefully prepared for the confrontation.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott is notable too as the beginning of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.’s rise to fame. King was a young minister who had, only a short time before, become pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. However, while King provided the upfront leadership and Rosa Parks lit the fuse, the boycott relied on a lot of behind-the-scenes coordination. For example, Jo Ann Robinson, an Alabama State College professor and member of the Women’s Political Council (WPC) of Montgomery, understanding the importance of advertising the boycott, stayed up all night reproducing over 35,000 handbills announcing the bus boycott.^[46] On Sunday, December 4, 1955, plans for the Montgomery bus boycott were announced at Black churches in the area, and a front-page article in the Montgomery Advertiser, a daily newspaper, helped spread the word.^[47]

The Montgomery Bus Boycott was a masterpiece of organizing, as the whole Black community got behind it and maintained their resolve for an entire year, walking and organizing car pools to cope with the inconveniences of forgoing use of the transit system. Eventually, the financial costs of the boycott caused the Montgomery transit system to capitulate to the demands of Black citizens. Meanwhile, an anti-segregation lawsuit made its way through the courts, and in 1956, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling that declared Alabama’s racial segregation laws for buses to be unconstitutional.

One of the principal organizations to emerge in the aftermath of the Montgomery Bus Boycott was the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The SCLC came together in 1957 in Atlanta, Georgia, when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph Abernathy, Fred Shuttlesworth, Joseph Lowery, and others, recognized the need for a more organized and coordinated effort to advance civil rights and achieve racial equality in the South. The SCLC adopted a philosophy of nonviolent resistance and advocated tactics such as sit-ins, protests, and voter registration drives to challenge segregation and discrimination.^[48]

*   *   *

As the 1960s got underway, the challenges to racial segregation grew more direct, and the number of organizations dedicated to the cause proliferated. In February 1960, for example, four Black students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College staged a sit-in at the F. W. Woolworth’s five-and-dime store in Greensboro, North Carolina. Black patrons at Woolworth’s had been able to buy merchandise and eat at a stand-up snack bar, but were not permitted service at the sit-down lunch counter. The Greensboro four, as they became known, took seats at the lunch counter, ordered coffee and donuts, and refused to leave when they were denied service. They stayed put until the store closed, then returned the next day with more students from local colleges.^[49] As had been the case with the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the lunch counter sit-ins were not merely spontaneous acts of rebellion but instead carefully planned campaigns.

By February 5, some 300 students had joined the protest at Woolworth’s, paralyzing the lunch counter and other local businesses. By the end of March 1960, the movement had spread to fifty-five cities in thirteen states. National media coverage of the sit-ins brought increasing attention to the civil rights movement. Sit-ins began to spread to college towns throughout the South and into the North, as young Black and white people joined in various forms of peaceful protest against segregation in libraries, beaches, hotels, and other establishments. Protesters were sometimes arrested for trespassing, disorderly conduct, or disturbing the peace, but national media coverage of the sit-ins brought increasing attention to the civil rights movement. In response to the disruptions of the sit-in movement, dining facilities across the South were being integrated by the summer of 1960.^[50]

In the wake of the lunch counter sit-ins, veteran civil rights organizer Ella Baker, who had been the first executive director of the SCLC, founded a new organization, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee—SNCC (pronounced as “snick”). Baker had come to believe that “the strength of an organization grew from the bottom up, not the top down,” and that “the bedrock of any social change organization is not its leaders’ eloquence or credentials, but the commitment and hard work of the rank and file membership and their willingness and ability to engage in discussion, debate, and decision-making.” Accordingly, she felt it was important for young people to take the lead in the fight for civil rights rather than relying on charismatic leaders like King.^[51]

Baker mentored young leaders by asking questions, providing guidance, and helping students think critically about what they were trying to achieve and how they could best achieve it. Her approach was empowering for students and helped them to develop a sense of agency and confidence. Among the many individuals influenced by Baker’s guidance were Marion Barry, Julian Bond, James Forman, Fannie Lou Hamer, James Lawson Jr., John Lewis, Bob Moses, and Diane Nash.^[52]

In May 1961, a year after the lunch counter sit-ins, SNCC teamed up with another activist group, the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE) led by James Farmer, to carry out a series of interstate bus trips to protest the segregation of public transportation in the South. The so-called Freedom Rides involved recruiting volunteers to travel from the North to the South on Greyhound and Trailways buses. The first Freedom Ride began on May 4, 1961, with two buses leaving Washington, DC, heading south. The Freedom Riders, consisting of both black and white activists, traveled in mixed racial groups to challenge local laws or customs that enforced segregation in seating. They also sought to challenge segregation by integrating public transportation facilities, such as bus stations, restrooms, and waiting areas. Activists sat in areas designated for whites only, which led in some cases to arrests and violence from White segregationists. Despite setbacks, the Freedom Riders persevered, with more groups of riders joining the cause over the following weeks.^[53]

The Freedom Riders drew national attention to the issue of segregation in the South and put pressure on the federal government to intervene. Ultimately, the Freedom Rides were another major turning point in the fight to dismantle Jim Crow. In November 1961, the Interstate Commerce Commission issued regulations prohibiting segregation on interstate buses and in bus terminals. The Freedom Riders also set the stage for other significant moments in the fight for racial equality, such as the March on Washington and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.^[54]

The Fight for the Right to Vote

While African Americans made progress in challenging the legality of segregation in public accommodations as well as in breaking the social norms that kept it in place, access to voting was harder to achieve, especially in the Deep South. The 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1870, clearly stated:

The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

Nevertheless, southern states such as Mississippi found devious ways to circumvent the law of the land. Poll workers, law enforcement, and terrorist organizations like the KKK all colluded to create a hostile environment around the voter registration process. Black citizens were subjected to various forms of intimidation, including threats of retaliation for attempting to even register to vote. Black people might be fired from their jobs, evicted from their homes, and even physically attacked for exercising their right to vote. Local officials often administered “literacy tests” as a qualification for voting. These were designed to be so difficult that even educated individuals would fail. Moreover, the tests were often administered in a discriminatory manner, with African Americans being given more difficult tests than white applicants.

While the fight for voting rights had been in the making throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s, it became particularly intense between 1964 and 1965. During the summer of ’64, or Freedom Summer as it had been named, the NAACP, SCLC, SNCC, and CORE all joined forces to organize aggressive voter registration campaigns throughout the South. Voter registration was a particularly dangerous undertaking, and as many as eight civil rights activists were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan that summer.

The most famous case was the killing of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—a Black, a Jewish, and a White activist—who were working with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in Mississippi in June 1964. The three men had been investigating the burning of a black church when they were arrested by local police and then handed over to the Ku Klux Klan, who killed them and buried their bodies in an earthen dam. It was later revealed that the local police had colluded with the Klan in their murder. As Bruce Dierenfield tells it,

Mississippi literally burned that summer of 1964. Thirty black homes and businesses were set ablaze, as were thirty-seven rural black churches, where civil rights meetings were held. Racists beat eighty civil rights workers, shot at thirty-five others, critically wounded four, and killed three. [And yet], the police excused the white Mississippians who perpetrated these crimes and arrested a thousand activists … [But] undaunted, northern clergy, lawyers, psychologists, physicians, nurses, and idealistic student volunteers streamed into Mississippi to join forces with southern black activists to turn the closed society inside out.^[55]

*   *   *

The protests, sit-ins, marches, and massive efforts at voter registration from the late 1950s to mid-1960s had brought national attention to the problem of white supremacy across large swaths of the country. In particular, media coverage during the ’60s of the overreactions of politicians and law enforcement to the nonviolent demands of civil rights activists helped to raise public awareness of the injustices faced by African Americans. Moreover, the collusion of the racist power structure with terrorist elements of the White citizenry, as exemplified by the Ku Klux Klan, provoked increasing outrage in the general American public. By the mid-1960s, public support for the civil rights movement was growing, both among African Americans and among sympathetic White Americans.

When Lyndon Johnson became president on November 22, 1963, after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, he had inherited, in the minds of many Black civil rights activists, a fairly timid civil rights agenda. While President Kennedy had taken some steps to advance civil rights during his presidency, many Black leaders were demanding more sweeping changes to the legal and social landscape of the United States, including an end to segregation and discrimination in all aspects of life, including education, employment, housing, and voting rights. At first, Black leaders were skeptical about Johnson’s commitment to their cause.^[56]

Although Johnson was fundamentally committed to advancing civil rights and saw it as a key part of his domestic policy agenda, he also worried that continuing civil unrest could derail his Great Society programs and threaten his bid for reelection. Nevertheless, Johnson proved to be a reliable, if ambivalent, ally. Despite his concerns, Johnson ultimately decided to push ahead with civil rights legislation^[57]

A master politician and relationship builder, Johnson developed a close relationship with civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and the two men frequently corresponded and met in person to discuss civil rights issues. Johnson also forged strong relationships with other civil rights leaders, including Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, Whitney Young of the National Urban League, the labor unionist, A. Philip Randolph, and James Farmer of CORE.^[58] While taking the counsel of these civil rights leaders seriously, Johnson simultaneously used his political expertise and negotiating skills to persuade members of Congress to support his legislation. Johnson also knew how to wield power, and he used his power as president to leverage the support of interest groups and business leaders, who could influence the votes of members of Congress.^[59]

In the end, President Johnson signed into law two landmark pieces of civil rights legislation that were as important as any that had been passed in nearly 100 years. On July 2, 1964, he signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which struck directly and explicitly at the heart of Jim Crow, prohibiting discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in employment, public accommodations, and education.^[60]

Then a little over a year later, on August 6, 1965, President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that aimed to eliminate discriminatory voting practices that had been used to prevent African Americans from exercising their right to vote. The act prohibited the use of literacy tests and other discriminatory practices and established federal oversight of voting practices in areas with a history of discrimination, thus providing a set of enforcement mechanisms that had been absent from the 15th Amendment.^[61]

Together, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 helped to create a legislative framework that transformed the civil rights landscape in the United States and paved the way for greater equality and justice for all Americans. According to Dierenfield,

Three years after the Voting Rights Act, a majority of blacks in Alabama and Mississippi could vote, [and] two million more blacks voted within ten years … Within twenty years, the number of black officials nationwide rose from 103 to more than 3,500. In 1967, Cleveland’s Carl Stokes became the first black mayor of a major American city, leading the way for black mayors in Los Angeles and such northern cities as Chicago, Detroit, New York, and Philadelphia. [Southern cities like] Atlanta, Birmingham, New Orleans, and eventually Selma voted in black mayors, too. SNCC veterans John Lewis, Marion Barry, and Charles Sherrod won elections as Atlanta’s congressman, Washington, D.C.’s mayor, and Albany’s city councilman, respectively.^[62]

The above examples illustrate the beginning of a dramatic change in the United States as Black citizens began to benefit from the radical changes in the legal landscape in so far as their civil rights were concerned. And yet, significant as these changes were, they did not bring the full and lasting racial justice and equality that the civil rights leaders of the era had envisioned.

Fighting the Legacy of Jim Crow in Sports

Prior to the 1950s, African Americans had limited opportunities to participate in integrated sports venues. However, for a brief time after the Civil War, Black athletes sometimes enjoyed inclusion in popular sports. In horse racing, for example, eleven African American jockeys rode to victory in the Kentucky Derby between 1875 and 1902. But by the turn of the 20th century horse owners began demanding White jockeys only. Similarly baseball was integrated during the last decades of the 19th century.^[63] For instance, from 1884 to 1889, Moses Fleetwood Walker played for the Toledo Blue Stockings ^[64] until the color line was also firmly drawn in professional baseball and African American ball players were excluded from Major League Baseball and confined to the segregated Negro Leagues.^[65] Baseball would remain one of the most rigidly segregated sports until Jackie Robinson famously “broke the color line” in major league baseball, joining the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947.

The recruitment of Jackie Robinson by the Dodgers was a carefully considered decision by the Dodgers’ general manager Branch Rickey. Prior to signing Robinson, Rickey had conducted a comprehensive search for just the right player, seeking not only talent but also someone with the temperament and self-control to withstand the racial hostility that that individual was bound to face. Robinson, a World War II veteran, turned out to be a promising candidate. After a secret meeting in 1945, Robinson agreed to Rickey’s terms, which included a commitment to non-retaliation against racial abuse for three years. Robinson’s addition to the Dodger lineup was a tremendous success both for the team and for Robinson personally. Not only was Robinson voted Rookie of the Year in 1947, but the Dodgers won the National League pennant for the first time since 1941. After the addition of Robinson, other talented Black players subsequently joined the Dodgers, including Roy Campanella (1948), Don Newcombe (1949), and Joe Black (1952), an the Dodgers went on to win National League pennants in 1949, 1952, 1953, 1955, and 1956. Moreover, in 1955, they won their first World Series.

*   *   *

Football followed a trajectory similar to that of baseball. While the standard narrative is that Jackie Robinson was the first Black athlete in the modern era to break the color line in a professional sport, the end of racial segregation in team sports actually began a year earlier (1946) in the National Football League. But before getting to that, we need to go back to the 1920s. As with baseball, football was not entirely segregated in its earliest years. The National Football League, founded in 1920, initially had a handful of Black players.^[66] The first two African Americans to play in the newly formed league were Frederick “Fritz” Pollard and Bobby Marshall. Pollard even became head coach of a team in 1921.^[67] However, African American players were subsequently excluded from the NFL from 1933 to 1946 when NFL team owners covertly adopted a policy of never hiring a Black player, a policy that NFL owners have long denied.^[68] At any rate, by 1945, public pressure and media scrutiny were pushing the NFL towards a reckoning with its segregated past. The first move towards reintegration finally came when the Los Angeles Rams signed Kenny Washington on March 21, 1946 and Woody Strode a month-and a-half later. The Cleveland Browns subsequently signed Marion Motley and Bill Willis. The entrance of four Black players into the NFL was a breakthrough; however, it did not come without episodes of bigotry and harassment.

However, while the Los Angeles Ram and the Cleveland Browns may have integrated in 1946, not every team followed their lead. The Washington Redskins, for example, was the last NFL team to integrate, doing so only in 1962 under pressure from the John F. Kennedy presidential administration.

*   *   *

Basketball was the third major professional team sport to integrate. Prior to the 1950s, basketball, like football and baseball, was segregated along racial lines. However, although not as well known as the Negro Leagues in baseball, basketball had a counterpart known as “The Black Fives,” which had existed since 1904, providing a reservoir of athletic talent. But after professional football and baseball organizations recruited their first Black players, the National Basketball Association (NBA) soon followed suit, and the Black Fives organization disbanded, and in 1950, three Black basketball players became the first to be drafted into the  NBA—Chuck Cooper joined the Boston Celtics, Nat “Sweetwater” Clifton joined the New York Knicks, and Earl Lloyd joined the Washington Capitols. Hank DeZonie (1950) and Don Barksdale (1951) soon became the fourth and fifth Black players to sign NBA contracts.^[69]

The addition of Bill Russell to the league in 1956 was the beginning of one of the most exciting periods in basketball history. In 1957, the Celtics won their first NBA championship. And although, they lost the NBA title to the St. Louis Hawks in 1958, they went on to win eight consecutive NBA championships from 1959 to 1966, a feat that has never been equaled. What’s more, the addition between 1957 and 1963 of four more African American players—Sam Jones (1957), K. C. Jones, (1958), Tom Sanders (1960), and Willie Naulls (1963)—resulted in the Celtics sometimes fielding five Black players in their starting lineup. Russell would become the first Black NBA coach, when he accepted a contract as the Celtic’s player-coach, serving in that role from 1966 until his retirement in 1969.^[70]

The story of the building of a multi-racial Boston Celtics is merely one example of the erasing of the color line in the NBA.  As of the 2021, nearly 73.2% of all NBA players were Black.^[71]

 

*   *   *

In professional boxing, African American boxer Jack Johnson defied Jim Crow to achieve notoriety during the first decades of the 20th century, becoming the first Black boxer to win a world heavyweight championship.^[72] Johnson won the title in 1908 and held it until 1915. However, White people rioted in numerous cities across the country in 1910 after Johnson soundly defeated former heavyweight champion James J. Jeffries, a White boxer, who had come out of retirement as the “Great White Hope” to challenge Johnson.^[73] The White resentment engendered by Johnson’s success wound up undermining the careers of other African American boxers such as Harry Wills, who was a rising star with an impressive record and undeniable talent. The perceived humiliation of Jeffries put pressure on promoters to avoid arranging championship fights for Black fighters like Wills. Instead, Wills found himself confined to the segregated world of “colored boxing.”^[74]

African American boxers were only widely accepted again after the ascent of Joe Louis, who became the world heavyweight champion in 1937 and held the title until 1949. Unlike the flamboyant Jack Johnson, who flaunted conventional racial boundaries by marrying a White woman, Louis was scrupulous in avoiding controversy. His managers helped him carefully craft his public image so as to be non-threatening to White Americans, emphasizing his modesty, clean lifestyle, and “racial propriety.” In professional boxing, it was Joe Louis that broke the color line, paving the way for a long succession of Black boxing champions including Ezzard Charles, Jersey Joe Walcott, Floyd Patterson, Sonny Liston, Mohamed Ali, Ernie Terrell, Joe Frazier, Jimmy Ellis, George Foreman, and the list goes on.^[75]

*   *   *

The story of Black participation in Olympic sports somewhat parallels the story of professional boxing. Just as some Black boxers managed to sidestep Jim Crow while others fell victim, some aspiring Black Olympians found opportunities to compete while others had their ambitions thwarted. Among some of the first Black athletes to distinguish themselves in Olympic Games were George Poage, who won bronze medals in both the 200-yard and 400-yard hurdles in the 1904 St. Louis games, John Taylor, who won a gold in the 1600 meter relay in the 1908 London games, and William DeHart Hubbard, the first Black athlete to win an individual Olympic gold medal, winning the long jump in the 1924 Paris games.

However, the 1930s was a decade of expanded opportunity for Black athletes, as a few universities in the North and West cautiously accepted small numbers of African Americans into their athletic programs, providing formal training opportunities where few had existed before. The 1932 and 1936 Olympic Games were especially notable, not only for the triumphs of some Black athletes but also for the racist injustices visited upon others.^[76]

In total, six African American athletes qualified for the U.S. Olympic team in 1932.  In an all-time first, Tidye Pickett and Louise Stokes became the first Black women to qualify for a U.S. Olympic track and field team. Unfortunately, both women, who were in their teens at the time, faced racial discrimination at the hands of their own team officials and coaches. Prepared to run in the women’s 4 x 100m relay, U.S. coaches replaced them at the last minute with two White teammates who had previously not even  qualified for the event. The four men on the team had a less fraught experience, racially speaking. Eddie Tolan won gold medals in the 100m and 200m sprints, while Ralph Metcalf won silver in the 100m and bronze in the 200m. Ed Gordon won gold in the long jump, and Cornelius Johnson came in fourth in the high jump.^[77]

When the 1936 Olympics were held four years later in Berlin, the 355 member U.S. Olympic team included an unprecedented eighteen African Americans. Tidye Pickett and Louise Stokes again both qualified to compete and were again both disappointed. This time, Pickett at least got to compete. Pickett, running in the 80m hurdles, sailed through her preliminary heats without a problem, but in the semifinals, she caught her trailing foot on a hurdle, causing her to fall and injure her foot, also ending her bid for an Olympic medal. Louise Stokes fell victim to the same “backroom treachery” that she and Pickett had encountered in 1932. Just minutes before taking the starting blocks for the beginning of the women’s 4 x 100 m relay, Stokes was replaced by a White athlete, once again denying her the opportunity to compete in the Olympics.^[78]

The men’s track and field team was extremely successful. This can best be appreciated by presenting the results in table form:

Results for African American Men in 1936 Olympic Track and Field

Event	Athlete	Result
100m	Jesse Owens Ralph Metcalf	Gold Silver
200m	Jesse Owens Mack Robinson	Gold Silver
400m	Archie Williams James LuValle	Gold Bronze
800m	John Woodruff	Gold
110m hurdles	Fritz Pollard, Jr.	Bronze
4x100m relay	Jesse Owens & Ralph Metcalf (plus two)	Gold
High jump	Cornelius Johnson Dave Albritton	Gold Silver
Long Jump	Jesse Owens John Brooks	Gold (7th place)

Six other black athletes rounded out the 1936 U.S. Olympic team—boxers James Clark, Willis Johnson, Howell King, Art Oliver, Jack Wilson, and weightlifter John Terry. Jack Wilson won the silver medal in bantamweight boxing, and John Terry placed seventh in the featherweight category in weightlifting. But Howell King faced racial hostility from the head boxing coach who favored the alternate, a White boxer named Chester Rutecki, whom King had repeatedly defeated. King was ultimately replaced by Rutecki, and worse, secretely sent home after having sailed all the way across the Atlantic to compete.^[79]

For many years, the story of the 1936 Berlin Olympics was told as the triumph of just one Black athlete, Jesse Owens, and his four gold medals. Sorely neglected has been the story of the other seventeen Black athletes. In fact, African American Olympians, despite comprising only five percent of the U.S. Olympic team, took home thirteen medals, including eight gold, or nearly one-quarter of all the medals and one-third of all the gold medals!

After 1936, Black athletes saw continued athletic progress despite persistent societal discrimination. Alice Coachman became the first African American woman to win an Olympic gold medal by winning the high jump competition in the 1948 Olympics, and she would followed in the years to come by a whole host of Black women medal winners, including Mae Faggs, Barbara Jones, Janet Moreau, the incomparable Wilma Rudolph, to name just a few, and this doesn’t even account for the large roster of Black women athletes after 1960 Olympics. The story of Black male Olympians from 1948 on is similar.

Black Power Movement

Northern Powder Keg

When African Americans headed to the North during the Great Migration, they had hoped to find less racial prejudice and greater economic opportunity. Instead, they often encountered racism and discrimination that was little different from that which had existed in the South. Northern and Western cities may not have had explicit Jim Crow laws that legally prevented Black people from entering the same public accommodations as Whites, but racial prejudice and structures of exclusion nevertheless often prevented Blacks from gaining access to good jobs or buying property in desirable areas.

For instance, many White neighborhoods had racially restrictive covenants—contractual agreements among property owners not to sell or rent to individuals of certain races, primarily Black people. While the Fair Housing Act of 1968 made it impossible for Whites to enforce such contracts, it did not prevent Whites from observing the practice as a social norm.^[80]

Another social phenomenon that reinforced segregation became known as White flight. When a Black family moved into an affordable home in a White neighborhood, White home owners sometimes sold their homes and moved, often from urban centers to the newly expanding suburbs. White-flight was further exacerbated by real estate companies who planted fears in the minds of White property owners that if Black people or other minorities moved in, property values would decline. The fear often became a self-fulfilling prophecy as White home owners rushed to sell, setting up a market dynamic that led to property values that were artificially depressed because of White hysteria. White investors often took advantage of the opportunity to acquire rental properties at bargain prices, and their failure to maintain them condemned many urban neighborhoods to death by neglect.

Blacks often found themselves isolated in urban ghettos with few chances of success. Deteriorating urban neighborhoods were further starved of resources and other investments, including access to better-paying jobs and well-resourced public schools, and residents were gradually pushed into ever more substandard housing. “Poverty and segregation led to overcrowding in Black housing, thus [further] hastening its deterioration.”^[81]

Moreover, labor “unions excluded blacks from apprenticeships” and factories “introduced automation or relocated to the suburbs, which were not served by mass transit. Black unemployment was twice that of whites. … Television advertisements of consumer goods heightened the resentments of impoverished young blacks. Merchandise in the ghetto was often inferior but expensive. Short of cash, blacks bought goods on credit for which they paid exorbitant rates.”^[82]

In other words, despite the progress of civil rights advocates in the South, Northern Blacks were seeing little change in their living conditions and economic prospects. Black urban neighborhoods also faced discriminatory policing and brutal, if not murderous, treatment by a predominantly White policing establishment. It was in this context that a more militant strain of Black resistance began to take shape, exploding on the scene in the major cities of the North and the West.

From “Freedom Now!” to “Black Power!”

It was June 1966 when several strands of thought that today we remember as the Black Power Movement first began to come together. Stokely Carmichael, the newly elected chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), “popularized the slogan ‘Black Power’ when he led a chant … at a stop along the March Against Fear, in Greenwood, Mississippi.”^[83]

But the idea of Black Power did not originate with Carmichael (later known as Kwame Ture). As Peniel Joseph has indicated, the radical Black nationalist Marcus Garvey (1887-1940) had promoted a version of it, as had radical Black activists in the Reconstruction era after slavery. Malcolm X, who preached a message of radical Black dignity and self-respect, also contributed to the idea, influencing younger Black activists who had become disillusioned with the glacial pace of change and turned off by what they saw as an undue deference to White sensibilities that moderated the tactics of the established civil rights groups of the era.^[84]

Suddenly Martin Luther King, Jr.’s benign sounding slogan “Freedom Now!” was replaced with the more militant—and for Whites more intimidating—cry of “Black Power!” Then in October, 1966, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California. Stylishly dressing “in black leather jackets, power blue T-shirts, and berets” like that of Che Guevara (the Argentinian-born hero of the Cuban Revolution), the Black Panthers projected a paramilitary image that frightened Whites and alarmed the FBI.^[85]

Fed up with police brutality, Black Panthers decided to assert their right to self-defense and began openly carrying firearms (which was legal under California state law at the time). Heavily armed, they began following the police to surveil their activity in Oakland and throughout the East Bay Area. (As noted in Chapters 1 and 2, this tactic inspired other ethnic groups faced with police harassment, notably the Chicano Brown Berets and the American Indian Movement who also soon adopted the tactic.)

A year later, when the Panthers were forced to abandon armed surveillance due to changes in California’s gun laws, they turned their attention to community service, “creating local chapters offering free breakfast programs, health clinics, legal and housing aid, drug rehabilitation, and a prison busing program that helped people visit loved ones in prison.” After its establishment, the Black Panther Party grew so rapidly that by the late ’60s, there were some three to five thousand members in over two dozen cities across the country.^[86]

In addition to policing the police and creating community service organizations, the Black Panthers pursued a revolutionary politics grounded in anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism, and anti-fascism. Picking up on Carmichael’s identification of “institutional racism” as at the root of racial oppression in America, the Panthers attacked police brutality, racially motivated incarceration, racial and economic exploitation, and the neglect of Black history in public education, demanding remedies for all of these injustices.^[87]

The militant and uncompromising rhetoric of many Black Power advocates scandalized the nation. Whites reflexively interpreted the slogan of “Black Power!” as a call for retribution. U.S. law enforcement agencies, especially the FBI under the heavy-handed leadership of Director, J. Edgar Hoover, responded by “deploying counterintelligence measures that monitored, harassed, imprisoned, and at times led to the deaths of scores of activists.”^[88] These external threats as well as the usual internal divisions and infighting that often plague social movements led to the eventual dissolution of the Black Panther Party in 1982.

However, the wider Black Power Movement changed American society in innumerable ways that went beyond the realm of politics and justice, seeping into the broader culture in untold ways.

The Black Arts Movement

Often called the “aesthetic and spiritual sister” of the Black Power Movement, the Black Arts Movement (BAM) celebrated Black identity and African heritage. Rejecting Eurocentric aesthetics and echoing themes from the Harlem Renaissance of a generation earlier, artists in the Black Arts Movement produced literature, music, dance, visual art, and theater that were inherently Afrocentric, politically engaged, and reflective of Black lives. Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones) shaped the ethos of the movement in an angry and provocative essay entitled “The Revolutionary Theatre,” commissioned by the New York Times, whose editors subsequently declined to publish it, claiming they did not understand it.

Prefiguring the hip-hop (rap) era that still lay ahead, musicians like Nina Simone, Gil Scott-Heron, and The Last Poets blended music and spoken word to create anthems of protest and empowerment. Indeed, Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” is perhaps a more accessible variation on Baraka’s somewhat obscure essay.

Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam” (1964) captured Black anger at the racially motivated murders of Emmett Till and Medgar Evers in Mississippi, and the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, that killed four Black children. Simone has characterized it as her first civil rights song, which she said, “erupted out of me quicker than I could write it down.”^[89] The song quickly became an anthem for the civil rights movement and a powerful example of how art can serve as a means of protest in the face of injustice. “In 2019, ‘Mississippi Goddam’ was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Recording Registry for being ‘culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant’.”^[90]

In the literary realm, poets like Maya Angelou, Nikki Giovanni, and Sonia Sanchez infused their poems with the vibrancy and complexity of Black womanhood. Other writers like Toni Morrison, Jay Wright, and Ishmael Reed, while not directly associated with the Black Arts Movement, nevertheless shared some of its artistic and thematic concerns. In summing up the significance of the movement, Reed, who was neither an apologist nor an advocate of BAM, has said,

I think what Black Arts did was inspire a whole lot of Black people to write. Moreover, there would be no multiculturalism movement without Black Arts. Latinos, Asian Americans, and others all say they began writing as a result of the example of the 1960s. Blacks gave the example that you don’t have to assimilate. You could do your own thing, get into your own background, your own history, your own tradition and your own culture. I think the challenge is for cultural sovereignty and Black Arts struck a blow for that.^[91]

Visual artists also played a critical role in the Black Arts Movement. For example, painters such as Romare Bearden, Faith Ringgold, and Jacob Lawrence painted a broad range of subjects, from the historical, political, religious, and fantastical to the simple celebrations and rituals of everyday Black life. But perhaps one of the most emblematic works of the Black Arts Movement was the Wall of Respect. Created in 1967 by a group of artists in Chicago, the Wall of Respect transformed a nondescript wall on the South Side of Chicago into a vibrant mural, featuring prominent African American musicians, activists, athletes, writers, and political leaders. Unfortunately, the mural remained intact for only a few years, as the building on which it had been painted was damaged by fire in 1971 and torn down in 1972, but the work inspired community mural projects across the United States and internationally.^[92]

Black Pride

An important consequence of the Black Power Movement was that it encouraged unabashed and public affirmations of Black Pride, especially among younger African Americans of the time. Messages of Black Pride found expression in the works of some African American popular musicians. James Brown’s popular hit, “Say It Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud,” is a notable example.

But it was not simply that Black people began to take an interest in African heritage and culture, or to honor and celebrate the accomplishments of African Americans. It was more intimate than that. Black people began to explicitly push back against white-supremacist attitudes that denigrated Black bodies, and especially Black facial features and Black hair. “Black is beautiful” became a slogan that signaled the repudiation of White standards of beauty in favor of Black standards featuring “natural hairstyles like the ‘Afro’ and the variety of skin colors, hair textures, and physical characteristics found in the African American community.”^[93] Many Black men and women wore their hair Afro style, but Black women, in particular began wearing exalted versions, establishing a trend that has continued to this day. (See this gallery for a vivid illustration.)

Another fashion trend during the rise of Black Power was the use of traditional African clothing. For instance, in the early 1970s, kente cloth and dashiki clothing grew popular, especially among African Americans that embraced the Black Power message.

​

Black Pride Televised

Although Black poverty did not just disappear with the rise of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, the general increase in prosperity in the U.S. during the 1960s did support a growing Black middle class with money to spend, and the wide-spread penetration of commercial television into households across America did a lot to increase Black visibility in a growing entertainment industry. One of the landmark programs of the era was Soul Train. The brainchild of Chicago radio announcer, news reporter, and television host Don Cornelius, Soul Train began airing in 1971 and enjoyed a thirty-five-year run. It showcased Black music artists and their contributions to various genres, including soul, R&B, funk, disco, and later hip-hop. At a time when the media often perpetuated negative  and stereotypical image of Blackness, Soul Train presented Blacks as stylish, talented, and confident.

Soul Train was famous for its “Soul Train Line,” where dancers showcased the latest dance trends while also celebrating Black fashion, hairstyles, and personal style. Soul Train had a significant impact on popular culture as a whole, transcending racial and cultural boundaries, while at the same time contributing to the mainstream adoption of Black cultural elements.

Prior to the 1970s, Black representations on television were scant, and depictions of Black life were invariably demeaning and stereotypical. But as the 1970s got underway, “actors, producers and writers … created and starred in shows that pushed boundaries and broke barriers.” In addition to programs like Soul Train, situation comedies normalized and humanized Black family life through programs like Good Times (1974–1979), which “showed how the family members stuck by each other in the face of unemployment, crime, racial bigotry and loss.” The Jeffersons (1975–1985) “offered sharp commentary on race issues” and “was also the first to feature an interracial couple (neighbors Helen and Tom Willis).”^[94]

During the 1980s, The Cosby Show (1984–1992) broke new ground by featuring a well-off Black Brooklyn family headed up by Heathcliff Huxtable and his wife Claire, who were a doctor and a lawyer, respectively. In between laughs, the show “gave a wide audience a deep look at African American family life, culture and history.” The Cosby spinoff A Different World (1987–1993) followed one of the Huxtable daughters, Denise (Lisa Bonet), “to the fictional Hillman college,” casting the main characters as gifted Black college students rather than criminals or dropouts and giving many Americans “an introduction to historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs).”^[95] By the 1990s, with the appearance of The Fresh Prince of Belair (1990–1996) and In Living Color (1990–1994), the release of new Black TV sitcoms was no longer a remarkable event, although thematically, the programs were perhaps no longer breaking much new ground.

Recognizing that civil rights alone were not sufficient to combat the institutional racism upon which American society had been built, the Black Power Movement went beyond the civil rights agenda to promote the radical Black dignity that Malcolm X had insisted upon. Peniel Joseph’s remarks on the significance of the Black Power Movement are worth taking note of here. According to Joseph,

Black Power touched every facet of American life, from the reimagining of beauty, dance, and aesthetics; … to the creation of Black Studies departments and programs, along with cultural centers, at universities and colleges; to the election of a new generation of Black politicians. … Perhaps most profoundly, Black Power transformed America’s racial consciousness—for all its citizens. The era’s political radicalism inspired people of color to more fully embrace the historical and cultural roots of their identities. And Black Power, more so than the mainstream civil rights movement, ended the invisibility of white privilege, rendering it clear for all to see.^[96]

Chapter 4 Study Guide/Discussion Questions

Activity 4.1

Discuss the significance of the following periods with respect to the status of African Americans in the United States?

Organize the information in a table like the one below. Compare your responses with those of your fellow reader.

Activity 4.2

Identify at least 6 forms of resistance to enslavement exercised by Blacks during the pre-Civil War era. Give examples to illustrate each one.

Organize the information in a table like the one below. Add rows as necessary. Compare your responses with those of your fellow reader.

Activity 4.3

Based on your understanding of the material in subsections 4–6 of the chapter, put yourself in the shoes of a newly-freed slave. Choose three of the five questions below to discuss with one or more fellow readers.

1. How would the promise of freedom impact your aspirations and dreams for a better life? What immediate challenges and opportunities would you face in the aftermath of the Civil War and the beginning of Reconstruction?
2. How would the presence of the Ku Klux Klan and their acts of violence influence your decisions and sense of safety during Reconstruction? What strategies and precautions might you consider in response to the activities of the Ku Klux Klan as you sought to secure your newfound freedom and rights?
3. How would the presence of the Ku Klux Klan affect your efforts to participate in the political process and exercise your rights as a citizen.
4. What would be your motivations and considerations for deciding whether to participate in the Great Migration? How would you weigh the potential benefits of moving to the North against the challenges of leaving your home?
5. How would you respond to the challenges posed by the rise of Jim Crow laws and the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction. Would you stay to fight for your rights or would you participate instead in the Great Migration in pursuit of a more secure future in the North?

Activity 4.4

Identify some key organizations, figures and events in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, including their objectives and the tactics that they used to break the back of Jim Crow.

Organize the information in a table like the one below. Add rows as necessary. Compare your responses with those of your fellow reader.

Activity 4.5

After reading subsection 8 of the chapter, answer and discuss the following questions with those of one or more fellow readers.

1. How did the political messaging and the tactics of the Black Power Movement, as exemplified by figures like Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, and the Black Panther Party, differ from those of the Southern Civil Rights Movement?
2. Describe some of the ways in which the Black Power Movement represented a more inward looking project focused on bolstering Black culture and Black identity.
3. Give several examples that illustrate the gradual movement of media and popular culture towards greater inclusiveness whereby African Americans gained increased opportunity, representation, and visibility in the entertainment industry.

Media Attributions

• Africans in Virginia, 1619 © Howard Pyle is licensed under a Public Domain license
• Frederick Douglass ambrotype, (1856) © Unidentified photographer is licensed under a Public Domain license
• Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Civil Rights March on Washington, D.C. © Rowland Scherman is licensed under a Public Domain license
• Nicole Hannah-Jones © Alice Vergueiro/Abraji is licensed under a CC BY (Attribution) license
• Slave Ship © Author Unknown is licensed under a Public Domain license
• Picking Cotton © Author Unknown is licensed under a Public Domain license
• Mother Bethel AME Church © Smallbones is licensed under a CC0 (Creative Commons Zero) license
• Gallery Images: African Americans who escaped their enslavement
  • Sojourner Truth, 1870 © Randall Studio is licensed under a Public Domain license
  • William Wells Brown © William Wells Brown is licensed under a Public Domain license
  • Henry Bibb © Author Unknown is licensed under a Public Domain license
  • Frederick Douglass (1840s) © Unidentified Photographer is licensed under a Public Domain license
  • Ellen Craft in disguise © Macmillan is licensed under a Public Domain license
  • Harriet Jacobs © C.M. Gilbert/Gilbert Studios is licensed under a Public Domain license
  • Harriet Tubman © Horatio Seymour Squyer is licensed under a Public Domain license
  • Solomon Northup © Frederick M. Coffin is licensed under a Public Domain license
• Elizabeth Freeman © Susan Anne Ridley Sedgwick is licensed under a Public Domain license
• Harriet Tubman, Civil War Woodcut © John G. Darby, W.J. Moses is licensed under a Public Domain license
• First Colored Senator and Representatives © Currier & Ives. is licensed under a Public Domain license
• Jump Jim Crow © Edward Williams Clay is licensed under a Public Domain license
• Isaac Woodard, 1946 © J. DeBisse is licensed under a Public Domain license
• Elizabeth Eckford of the Little Rock Nine, 1957 © Johnny Jenkins is licensed under a Public Domain license
• US Marshals with Young Ruby Bridges on School Steps © Uncredited DOJ photographer is licensed under a Public Domain license
• Rosa Parks with Martin Luther King Jr. in the background © Author Unknown is licensed under a Public Domain license
• Malcolm X © Ed Ford is licensed under a Public Domain license
• Black Panther Party Armed Guards is licensed under a All Rights Reserved license. Used with permission under Fair Use
• Wall of Respect © Robert Abbott Sengstacke is licensed under a All Rights Reserved license Used with permission under Fair Use