Timeline

This was the forced sea voyage across the Atlantic carrying enslaved Africans to the Americas and the West Indies. They were traded for goods and raw materials produced on plantations, which were carried back to Europe. From there, ships traveled back to Africa to pick up their human cargo and start the process all over again in what is now known as the “Triangle Trade”. Great Britain, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Denmark and France trafficked their African prisoners heavily from the 15th century through the first half of the 19th century. Historians estimate that at least 12 million enslaved people were transported in this manner.¹

1. Middle Passage Slave Trade

Ireland during the period of 1536–1691 saw the first full conquest of the island by England and its colonization with mostly Protestant settlers from Great Britain. This would eventually establish two central themes in future Irish history: subordination of the country to London-based governments and sectarian animosity between Catholics and Protestants.¹

During this period, the island was ruled by a series of English and Scottish monarchs, and English influence grew as English settlers began to arrive in Ireland, known as the Plantation of Ireland.²

1. History of Ireland (1536-1691)
2. 16th Century Ireland

In 1607, 104 English men and boys arrived in North America to start a settlement. On May 13 they picked Jamestown, Virginia for their settlement, which was named after their King, James I. The settlement became the first permanent English settlement in North America.¹

1. A Short History of Jamestown

A White sea captain recounts his journey across the Atlantic. The ship arrives at Jamestown, the first reported to have sailed there with a cargo of Africans.

Virginia’s first Africans arrived at Point Comfort, on the southern tip of the Virginia peninsula, late in August 1619. There, “20. and odd Negroes” or more from the English ship White Lion were sold in exchange for food and some were transported to Jamestown, where they were sold again. Three or four days later another English ship, the Treasurer, arrived in Virginia, where its captain sold two or three additional Africans. Historians have long believed these Africans to have come to Virginia from the Caribbean, but Spanish records suggest they had been captured in a Spanish-controlled area of West Central Africa. They probably were Kimbundu-speaking people, and many of them may have had at least some knowledge of Catholicism. While aboard the São João Bautista bound for Mexico, they were stolen by the White Lion and the Treasurer. Once in Virginia, they were dispersed throughout the colony.¹

1. Virginia’s First Africans

On July 9, 1640, a Virginia Court identified the first official slave of the Thirteen Colonies, John Punch. This case represents the shift from indentured servants to racial slavery but more than likely this change in law and view of slavery already began in the years prior. Prior to 1661, slavery was not codified in Virginia and this designated the John Punch case as a pivotal point showing the transition from servitude to slavery.¹

1. The Importance of the John Punch Verdict

Elizabeth Key, an indentured servant, was sold as a servant, but treated as a slave by her new owner. She sued for her freedom and the House of Burgesses ruled in her favor.

Later, that same court passed a law to prevent such occurrences (not of mistreatment, but of servants or enslaved people being able to sue for freedom): the status of a child was now determined by the mother’s status. Slavery became an inheritable condition for people of African descent. Laws and rulings ensured that White property owners would have a permanent work force — one bound to them by law, custom and, increasingly, race.

The General Assembly of the colony of Virginia attempts to better define the conditions by which people were enslaved or free:

WHEREAS some doubts have risen whether children that are slaves by birth, and by the charity and piety of their owners made pertakers of the blessed sacrament of baptisme, should by vertue of their baptisme be made ffree; It is enacted and declared by this grand assembly, and the authority thereof, that the conferring of baptisme doth not alter the condition of the person as to his bondage or ffreedome; that diverse masters, ffreed from this doubt, may more carefully endeavor the propagation of christianity by permitting children, though slaves, or those of greater growth if capable to be admitted to that sacrament.

Bacon’s Rebellion was an armed rebellion in 1676 by Virginia settlers led by Nathaniel Bacon against the rule of Governor William Berkeley. The colony’s dismissive policy as it related to the political challenges of its western frontier, along with other challenges including leaving Bacon out of his inner circle, refusing to allow Bacon to be a part of his fur trade with Native Americans, and attacks by the Doeg people, helped to motivate a popular uprising against Berkeley, who had failed to address the demands of the colonists regarding their safety.

Thousands of Virginians from all classes and races rose up in arms against Berkeley, attacking Native Americans, chasing Berkeley from Jamestown, Virginia, and ultimately torching the capital. The rebellion was first suppressed by a few armed merchant ships from London whose captains sided with Berkeley and the loyalists. Government forces from England arrived soon after and spent several years defeating pockets of resistance and reforming the colonial government to be once more under direct royal control.

It was the first rebellion in the American colonies in which discontented frontiersmen took part (a somewhat similar uprising in Maryland involving John Coode and Josias Fendall took place shortly afterwards). The alliance between European indentured servants and Africans (many enslaved until death or freed), united by their bond-servitude, disturbed the ruling class, who responded by hardening the racial caste of slavery in an attempt to divide the two races from subsequent united uprisings with the passage of the Virginia Slave Codes of 1705. While the farmers did not succeed in their initial goal of driving the Native Americans from Virginia, the rebellion did result in Berkeley being recalled to England.

Virginia lawmakers began finding ways to codify the notion that dark-skinned people and Native Americans were distinctly different from Whites in the eyes of the law – even when they had achieved “free” status. ( See examples: Act I, Act X, Act XIX, Act XXIV).

The Virginia Slave Codes of 1705 (formally entitled An act concerning Servants and Slaves), were a series of laws enacted by the Colony of Virginia’s House of Burgesses in 1705 regulating the interactions between slaves and citizens of the crown colony of Virginia.¹

“That all servants brought into this country without indenture, if the said servants be Christians and of Christian parentage, and above nineteen years of age, shall serve but five years; and if under nineteen years of age, ’till they shall become twenty-four years of age, and no longer…”²

1. An Act Concerning Servants and Slaves
2. Of Servants and Slaves in Virginia

The colonial system of slavery — which was practiced in all of the original 13 British colonies — is referred to as chattel slavery. In this system, enslaved people were the personal property of their owners for life, a source of labor or a commodity that could be willed, traded or sold like livestock or furniture. Chattel slavery was one of the most profitable institutions in history, delivering phenomenal wealth and social and political power to certain segments of U.S. society. By 1860, “the nearly 4 million American slaves were worth some $3.5 billion, making them the largest single financial asset in the entire U.S. economy, worth more than all manufacturing and railroads combined.”¹

From the 17th–19th centuries, 12.5 million enslaved Africans were brought from Central and West Africa to the Americas. Enslaved people were exploited as unpaid labor to build the British colonies and the new American nation. Enslaved labor cleared forests, raised bridges and built ships and mansions, including the White House. It was common to see enslaved Africans toiling in port cities, factories and on large plantations and modest farms.
Enslavers had complete control over the bodies and lives of those they enslaved, as well as their children. Enslaved people could be bought and sold at any time, for any reason. Families were, therefore, often wrenched apart as enslaved people were transferred to the highest bidder. Most enslaved people were trapped in bondage until they died.²

1. Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Slavery Made America,” The Atlantic, June 24, 2014
2. What is chattel slavery and how did it dehumanize Black people?

A major intellectual, religious leader and public figure in English-speaking colonial America, Cotton Mather helped to shape public views on treatment of enslaved Africans, indigenous peoples and the Salem witch trials.

Placerat in etiam inceptos vivamus commodo cras nulla. Augue dapibus id nulla ultrices sit, neque sed leo dapibus. Enim aptent, eros fringilla blandit. Tempor fusce primis pede fringilla facilisi vehicula netus hymenaeos, aenean et sapien cras id sociis sociis Adipiscing sapien aptent consequat habitant feugiat nonummy, malesuada leo varius iaculis ac, nunc parturient.

Dolor nostra et pede netus. Nostra interdum vivamus parturient dictumst montes parturient proin aptent inceptos dapibus tortor ante taciti pulvinar, quam sit. Elit enim conubia taciti tortor imperdiet mattis natoque primis nonummy pellentesque hymenaeos natoque natoque Accumsan litora vivamus neque.

New York forbids blacks, Indians, and mulattos from walking at night without lighted lanterns.

New York forbids freed blacks, Indians, and mulatto slaves from owning real estate and holding property.

Taxonomy, or the science of classification, became a major subject of scientific inquiry during the eighteenth century, spurred by the publication of Carl von Linné’s Systema Naturae (1734), which established a binomial system of classification still used by scientists today. Driven largely by naturalists, the search for a classification system for mankind created a seismic shift in scientific theories of racial difference. Increasingly, physical differences such as hair and skin color were taken as signs that races represented divergent species. Some, who would later be labeled polygenists, believed all races were descended from different ancestors entirely.

Linnaeus’s system of taxonomy revolutionized how biologists categorized and understood relationships between animals. This transformation had a profound effect on theories of race, as Linnaeus and many of his followers defined race as analogous to species. Here, he subdivides Homo sapiens into four races: American, European, Asiatic, and African. In this way, Linnaeus argued that Homo sapiens existed in four basic varieties, defined primarily by geography, rather than by physiological differences.¹

1. Race Deconstructed: Science and the Making of Difference

South Carolina passes the comprehensive “Negro Act,” making it illegal for slaves to move abroad, assemble in groups, raise food, earn money, and learn to read English. Owners are permitted to kill rebellious slaves if necessary.

Buffon’s great work, Histoire natural, général et particulière, was the first modern attempt to systematically present all existing knowledge in the fields of natural history, geology and anthropology in a single publication.

A French naturalist,Buffon disagreed with many of Linnaeus’s theories, including his taxonomic system. Although a monogenist, a believer that all human beings are part of the same species, Buffon promulgated the so-called degeneration theory. This theory proposed that Whites were the original race and all other races were formed through degeneration due to poor climate and diet. ¹

1. Race Deconstructed – Science and the Making of Difference

On August 22, 1781, a jury in Great Barrington, Massachusetts found that an African American woman named Elizabeth Freeman should be freed and was not the legal property of Colonel John Ashley. By winning, Freeman, also known as “Mum Bett,” became the first African American woman to successfully file a lawsuit for her freedom in the state of Massachusetts.¹

1. Elizabeth Freeman, her case for freedom, and the Massachusetts Constitution

Congress set the minimum amount of land that could be purchased at one section—640 acres—and the purchase price at one dollar per acre. Small purchases on credit were not allowed. The $640 minimum purchase placed the cost of western lands far outside the budget of most U.S. citizens. Most of the lands went instead to wealthy land speculators, who were also given the option of buying on credit. The speculators bought lands from the government, divided them up, and then resold them to small farmers at a profit.

This act created rules for the survey, sale, and settlement of public domain. It also created “townships”; reserving a portion of each township for a local school. From these “land grants” eventually came the U.S. system of “land grant colleges,” the precursor to the state public universities that exist today.¹

The 1785 Land Ordinance Act, which offered 640 acres at $1 per acre, was only available to white people. The nearly 100,000 Whites who came to California after the end of the Mexican-American War were allowed to claim and own “free soil”, while enslaved and free Blacks were banned from doing so.²

1. Land Ordinance of 1785
2. The Inequitable Roots of Home Ownership: Systemic Racism & the Wealth Gap

Article I, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution states: “Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.” The “other Persons” were slaves.

The 1787 Constitutional Convention addressed the apportionment in the House of Representatives and the number of electoral votes each state would have in presidential elections based on a state’s population. The Southern states wanted to count the entire slave population. This would increase their number of members of Congress. The Northern delegates and others opposed to slavery wanted to count only free persons, including free blacks in the North and South.

The three-fifths clause was part of a series of compromises enacted by the Constitutional Convention of 1787. The most notable other clauses prohibited slavery in the Northwest Territories and ended U.S. participation in the international slave trade in 1807. These compromises reflected Virginia Constitutional Convention delegate (and future U.S. President) James Madison’s observation that “…the States were divided into different interests not by their…size…but principally from their having or not having slaves.”

When Constitutional Convention delegate Roger Sherman of Connecticut proposed that congressional representation be based on the total number of inhabitants of a state, delegate Charles Pinckney of South Carolina agreed saying “blacks ought to stand on an equality with whites….” Pinckney’s statement was disingenuous since at the time he knew most blacks were enslaved in his state and none, slave or free, could vote or were considered equals of white South Carolinians. Other delegates including most notably Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania argued that he could not support equal representation because he “could never agree to give such encouragement to the slave trade…by allowing them [Southern states] a representation for their negroes.”

With the convention seemingly at an impasse Charles Pinckney proposed a compromise: “Three-fifths of the number of slaves in any particular state would be added to the total number of free white persons, including bond servants, but not Indians, to the estimated number of congressmen each state would send to the House of Representatives.” The Pinckney compromise was not completely original. This ratio had already been established by the Congress which adopted the Articles of Confederation in 1781 as the basis for national taxation.

Although the three-fifths compromise and others regarding slavery helped hold this new fragile union of states together, many on both sides of the issue were opposed. James Madison and Edmund Randolph of Virginia used the phrase “Quotas of contribution” to argue that slaves should be fully counted, one for one, and opposed the compromise.

Northern opponents correctly pointed out that slaveholding states had more representatives than if only the free white population was counted. By 1793, slaveholding states had 47 congressmen but would have had only 33 if not for the compromise. During the entire period before the Civil War slaveholding states had disproportionate influence on the Presidency, the Speakership of the House of Representatives, and the U.S. Supreme Court because of the compromise. By the 1830s abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison of Massachusettsused the clause in their argument that the Federal government was dominated by slaveholders.

The three-fifths clause remained in force until the post-Civil War 13th Amendment freed all enslaved people in the United States, the 14th amendment gave them full citizenship, and the 15th Amendment granted black men the right to vote. (Portions of this description were copied from Malik Simba’s article on blacklist.org).

The U.S. Constitution was ratified with the provision that the slave trade continue for another 20 years. It required states to aid slaveholders in the recovery of fugitive slaves.¹

Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3:

No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.

1. Fugitive Slave Clause

The Federalist Papers were a series of 85 essays urging New Yorkers to ratify the proposed United States Constitution, which was drafted in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787.

The central theme of this compact, authored by Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and James Madison, is to establish a Federal Government with specific authority and power to carry out its limited but important duties in a way that the Federal Government authorized under the Articles of Confederation could not. Thomas Jefferson regarded the Federalist Papers as the best source of information on “the genuine meaning” of the U.S. Constitution.¹

Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people–a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence.

John Jay

1. Federalist Papers: Primary Documents in American History

The First Congress (1789-1791) established federal procedures and criteria for foreign-born individuals to become U.S. citizens. These criteria permitted free whites of good character with two years’ residence in the United States to become naturalized citizens. Congress also allowed citizens’ children born outside the U.S. to be considered natural-born citizens. Over the following centuries, Congress readdressed the issue in a series of naturalization acts that sometimes excluded, but increasingly included, people of diverse races and origins.¹

1. H.R.40, Naturalization Bill, March 4, 1790

Johann Blumenbach was appointed professor of medicine and curator of the Museum of Natural History at the Georg-August-University Göttingen. Although there were many classifiers in the 18th century, he is one of the first to study humankind as part of natural history in a quantitative fashion, rendering him one of the founders of anthropology. Exploring the biodiversity of humans mainly by comparing skull anatomy and skin color, Blumenbach lays out the scientific template for contemporary race categories in On the Natural Varieties of Mankind.

He is best known for establishing a five-part naming system in 1795 to describe what he called generis humani varietates quinae principes, species vero unica (five principle varieties of humankind, but one species). In his view, humans can be divided into varieties (only in his later work does he adopt the term “races”) referred to as Oriental, American Indian, Caucasian, Malay, and Ethiopian. He assumes that all morphological differences between the varieties are induced by climate and life style.¹

Blumenbach strongly opposes slavery and believes in the potential equality of all people. Nevertheless, he maps a hierarchical pyramid of five human types, placing “Caucasians” at the top because he believes a skull found in the Caucasus Mountains is the “most beautiful form of the skull, from which…the others diverge.” This model is widely embraced, and Blumenbach inadvertently paves the way for scientific claims about White superiority.²

1. Blumenbach and the Concept of Race
2. Race – The Power of an Illusion – Go Deeper

Thomas Jefferson wanted control of the Mississippi River which directly and indirectly drains 44 states. He saw the value of “free transit of the Mississippi to the sea” for better and quicker trade routes.

James Monroe and Robert R. Livingston traveled to Paris to negotiate the purchase. It was the largest territorial gain in U.S. history, stretching from the Mississippi River to the Rocky mountains and doubled the size of the U.S.

It was purchased from Napoleon for $15,000,000 (worth $16 billion today) as he needed the money because he was afraid he might have to go to war with the United Kingdom.

It included Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska and portions of what is now Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, New Mexico and Texas, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado and Louisiana (including New Orleans).

As a law enforcement agency, the Rangers were unofficially founded in 1823 for the purpose of a “punitive expedition against a band of Indians,” according to the Texas State Historical Association. They continued to drive indigenous people from their homelands during the Cherokee War in 1839, as well as the Council House Fight and Battle of Plum Creek against the Comanches in 1840.

In the mid-1800s, the Rangers captured runaway enslaved Black people seeking freedom in Mexico through the Callahan Expedition, according to the Texas State Historical Association.

In 1918, the Rangers slaughtered Tejanos during the Porvenir massacre, said John Morán González, a literature professor and the director of the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. According to the Texas Observer, the massacre occurred when a group of Rangers, U.S. Army soldiers and ranchers arrived at the Porvenir village near El Paso in pursuit of revenge for a series of cattle raids by Tejanos along the border. A 2018 El Paso Times article reported there was no evidence implicating the Porvenir villagers in the cattle raids, but the Rangers nevertheless separated 15 men and boys from their families and executed them.

The Porvenir massacre is one of many past acts of violence committed by the Texas Rangers against people of color in the state, including indigenous Texans, Black Texans and Tejanos, or Mexican Americans from the South Texas region, from the 19th century through the 20th century.

In the mid-1950s, Rangers helped the Texas governor, Allan Shivers, resist a federal court order for Mansfield High School to desegregate, according to the Texas Historical Association.

The Department of Public Safety investigative agency did not directly comment on calls to change its name, but wrote in a statement that it is “aware of recent stories about the history of the Texas Rangers and defers judgment on the veracity of those depictions to Texas historians.”¹

1. The Texas Tribune

• 1830 – Indian Removal Act – signed into law by President Andrew Jackson on May 28, 1830, authorized the president to grant unsettled lands west of the Mississippi in exchange for Indian lands within existing state borders.
• 1851 – Indian Appropriation Act – allocated funds to move Western tribes onto Indian reservations where they would be “protected” and enclosed by the United States government.
• 1871 – Indian Appropriation Act – declared that Indigenous people were no longer considered members of “sovereign nations” and that the US government could no longer establish treaties with them.
• 1889 – Appropriation Act – signed by President Grover Cleveland, officially opened “Unassigned Lands” to non-native settlers under tenets of the Homestead Act.

Guided by policies favored by President Andrew Jackson, who led the country from 1828 to 1837, the Trail of Tears (1837 to 1839) was the forced westward migration of American Indian tribes from the South and Southeast. Land grabs threatened tribes throughout the South and Southeast in the early 1800s. Across the United States, the Federal Government consolidated and relocated tribes to reservations forcing them to surrender their lands in pieces by negotiating one treaty after another with the tribes.¹

In 1838, President Martin Van Buren sends federal troops to march the remaining southern Cherokee holdouts 1,200 miles to Indian territory in the Plains. Disease and starvation are rampant, and thousands die along the way, the tortuous journey inspiring the nickname “Trail of Tears.”

1. Multi-State: Trail of Tears National Historic Trail (National Park Service)

Irish immigration increases due in part to the Irish potato famine. Called the “2nd Wave of Immigration” this time period sees entire families, not just Irish men, coming to the U.S. In the 1840’s over a million Irish arrive, comprising nearly half of all immigrants at the time. Irish Catholics in New York City struggle for local neighborhood control of schools as a way of preventing their children from being force-fed a Protestant curriculum.

U.S. annexes Texas with full citizenship rights for free Whites and “White Mexicans” residing prior to 1845. The term “White Mexicans” refers to fair-skinned descendents of the Spanish without Indian heritage or appearance.

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo transferred the northern half of Mexico to US control. It is a central document in US history, as well as in Mexican history.

• Mexican-American war (1845-1848), instigated by the U.S. in order to acquire more territory, ends with Mexico ceding half of its land to the United States for $15 million. This includes California, northern Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Oklahoma, Kansas, Wyoming and parts of what is now Colorado.
• This land is home to a quarter million Native Americans and 80,000 Spanish speaking residents.
• The U.S. gains a third of its land mass.
• The treaty maintains that the land belonging to Mexican Americans is protected under the law, but later in 1850, citizenship rights are turned over to states rights.¹

1. What the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo Actually Says

In 1850, the California legislature passed a Foreign Miners’ Tax that required miners who were not U.S. citizens to pay $20 every month for the right to mine in the state. In reality, the tax was only collected from Chinese and Latino miners, while European miners were not forced to pay it.¹

1. American Social History Project – Center for Media and Learning

In 1850 and 1851, the California Legislature enacted laws concerning crimes and punishments that prohibited Indians, or black or mulatto persons from giving “evidence in favor of, or against, any white person.” The 1850 statute defined an Indian as having one-half Indian blood. The 1851 statute defined an Indian as “having one fourth or more of Indian blood.”

The 1850 Act for the Government and Protection of Indians facilitated removing California Indians from their traditional lands, separating at least a generation of children and adults from their families, languages and cultures. This California law provided for “apprenticing” or indenturing Indian children and adults to Whites, and also punished “vagrant” Indians by “hiring” them out to the highest bidder at a public auction if the Indian could not provide sufficient bond or bail.¹

1. Early California Laws and Policies Related to California Indians – by Kimberly Johnston-Dodds

Growing anti-Chinese sentiments accelerates the changes of racial restrictions in law. The superseding 1855 Act to establish Common Schools counted only “the number of white children in each county between the ages of four and eighteen years” and allowed the establishment of a school upon “the petition of fifty heads of white families”. In 1860, California amended the 1855 law to bar “Negroes, Mongolians, and Indians” from public schools, and granted the California State Superintendent of Public Instruction, then Andrew J. Moulder, the authority to withhold state funds from districts violating the amended code. The legislation allowed the establishment of segregated schools. The establishment of segregated schools was reiterated in the 1863 law, when the term “Common Schools” was replaced by “Public Schools” and reinforced in 1864, when a requirement was added that a petition by the guardians of “ten or more colored children” was needed to establish a segregated school.

In 1866, the law was rewritten specifically to restrict enrollment in public schools to “all white children, between five and twenty-one years of age”, and required that “children of African or Mongolian descent, and Indian children not living under the care of white persons” be educated in segregated schools, with an exception made for the enrollment of “half-breed Indian children, and Indian children who live in white families or under guardianship of white persons” into public schools upon a majority vote of the local school board.¹

1. Tape v. Hurley, 66 Cal. 473, (1885)

In Dred Scott v. Sandford (argued 1856 — decided 1857), the Supreme Court ruled that Americans of African descent, whether free or slave, were not American citizens and could not sue in federal court. The Court also ruled that Congress lacked power to ban slavery in the U.S. territories. Finally, the Court declared that the rights of slaveowners were constitutionally protected by the Fifth Amendment because slaves were categorized as property.¹

1. Landmark Cases – Dred Scott v. Sanford

To help develop the American West and spur economic growth, Congress passed the Homestead Act of 1862, which provided 160 acres of federal land to anyone who agreed to farm the land. The act distributed millions of acres of western land to individual settlers. Until the Civil War, opposition from Southern legislators, who feared homesteaders would work to prevent slavery in new territories, and some Northern legislators, who feared the cheap land would lower property values and lure laborers west, prevented passage of the legislation. But with the dramatic departure of the Southern senators in 1861, supporters finally succeeded. Similar legislation, the Southern Homestead Act of 1866, offered the same promise to loyal Southerners and freedmen who could settle public lands. Passage of these acts encouraged farming of more land during the war years and continued to do so for decades to come. By 1890 the federal government had granted 373,000 homesteads on some 48 million acres of undeveloped land.¹

Requirements for obtaining land included:

1. Successfully living on the land for five years,
2. Building a 12′ x 14′ structure and
3. Being a White person “in good standing”

By the end of the 1800’s, ¾ of Whites owned land. Forty-six Whites alive today benefitted from this Act.

1. The Civil War: The Senate’s Story

In 1862, the United States enacts the Homestead Act, providing that every American citizen above the age of 21, with a mere registration fee of 10 U.S. dollars, can acquire no more than 160 acres (about 64.75 hectares) of land in the west. Lured by the land, White people swarm into Indian areas and start a massacre resulting in the death of thousands of Indians.

Leaders of the U.S. government at that time openly claim that the skin of Indians could be peeled off to make tall boots,that Indians must be annihilated or driven to places that no one would go, that Indians had to be wiped out swiftly, and that only dead Indians are good Indians. American soldiers see the slaughter of Indians as natural, even an honor, and will not rest until they are all killed. Similar hate rhetoric and atrocities abound, and are well documented in many Native American extermination monographs.¹

In 1864 Congress makes it illegal for Native Americans to be taught in their native languages. Native children, as young as four years old, are taken from their parents and sent to Bureau of Indian Affairs off-reservation boarding schools. Richard Henry Pratt, U.S. Army officer and educator, sums up the schools’ mission: “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”

1. Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China -The American Genocide of the Indians – Historical Facts and Real Evidence

Even after the Emancipation Proclamation, two more years of war, service by African American troops, and the defeat of the Confederacy, the nation was still unprepared to deal with the question of full citizenship for its newly freed black population. The Reconstruction implemented by Congress, which lasted from 1866 to 1877, was aimed at reorganizing the Southern states after the Civil War, providing the means for readmitting them into the Union, and defining the means by which whites and blacks could live together in a nonslave society. The South, however, saw Reconstruction as a humiliating, even vengeful imposition and did not welcome it.

During the years after the war, black and white teachers from the North and South, missionary organizations, churches and schools worked tirelessly to give the emancipated population the opportunity to learn. Former slaves of every age took advantage of the opportunity to become literate. Grandfathers and their grandchildren sat together in classrooms seeking to obtain the tools of freedom.

After the Civil War, with the protection of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act of 1866, African Americans enjoyed a period when they were allowed to vote, actively participate in the political process, acquire the land of former owners, seek their own employment, and use public accommodations. Opponents of this progress, however, soon rallied against the former slaves’ freedom and began to find means for eroding the gains for which many had shed their blood.¹

1. Library of Congress: Reconstruction and Its Aftermath

Ex-Confederates, to regain some sort of control during Reconstruction, form secret organizations that use intimidation and terrorism against Blacks and unionists. Names like Pale Faces, Sons of Midnight and Knights of the White Camellia were used. A group forms in Pulaski, Tennessee named the Ku Klux Klan, which grows to be the largest and best known of the groups opposing Reconstruction governments and attempts by freed Blacks to receive their rights.

• The Fourteenth Amendment, endowing African Americans with citizenship, passes throughout the country.
• A clause in the 14th Amendment, “excluding Indians not taxed”, prevents Native American men from receiving the right to vote. (see Section 2 Apportionment of Representation)
• Though this amendment establishes full citizenship rights for people of Mexican heritage born in the U.S., often the Indian heritage of Mexicans is used to exclude and deny them rights.¹

1. Constitution Annotated – Fourteenth Amendment Equal Protection and Other Rights

Reconstruction ends in 1877 when federal troops, which had occupied the South since the end of the Civil War, are withdrawn. Southern Whites regain political control of the South and lay the foundations of legal segregation and White supremacy.

This was the first significant law restricting immigration into the United States. It provided an absolute 10-year ban on Chinese laborers immigrating to the United States. For the first time, federal law proscribed entry of an ethnic working group on the premise that it endangered the good order of certain localities.¹

1. National Archives – Chinese Exclusion Act (1882)

This Supreme Court ruling struck down legislation aimed at closing Chinese-operated laundries in San Francisco and guaranteed non-citizens the Constitution’s protections. It was the first case to use the “equal protection” clause of the 14th Amendment, which prohibits states from denying any person within their jurisdiction the equal protection of the law. In a unanimous decision the Supreme Court ruled laws with discriminatory intent were unconstitutional. This landmark case has been cited over 150 times since the Court’s decision.¹

1. Landmark Cases – C-Span

In the Plessy v. Ferguson decision, the U.S. Supreme Court rules that Louisiana has the right to require “separate but equal” railroad cars for Blacks and Whites. This decision means that the federal government officially recognizes racial segregation as legal. One result is that southern states pass laws requiring racial segregation in many different areas of life including public schools.

U.S. v Wong Kim Ark established an important precedent in its interpretation of the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Wong Kim Ark, who was born in San Francisco in 1873, had been denied re-entry to the United States after a trip abroad, under a law restricting Chinese immigration and prohibiting immigrants from China from becoming naturalized U.S. citizens. He challenged the government’s refusal to recognize his citizenship, and the Supreme Court ruled in his favor, holding that the citizenship language in the Fourteenth Amendment encompassed the circumstances of his birth and could not be limited in its effect by an act of Congress.¹

1. Oyez – United States v. Wong Kim Ark

The case began after Citizens United, a conservative non-profit organization, sought to air and advertise a film critical of then Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton shortly before the 2008 Democratic primary elections. Broadcasting the film would have been a violation of the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, which prohibited any corporation, non-profit organization, or labor union from making an “electioneering communication” within 30 days of a primary or 60 days of an election, or making any expenditure advocating the election or defeat of a candidate at any time. Citizens United challenged the constitutionality of this law, and its case reached the Supreme Court.

On January 21, 2010, in a majority opinion joined by four other justices, Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy held that the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act’s prohibition of all independent expenditures by corporations and unions violated the First Amendment’s protection of free speech. The court overruled Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce (1990), which had allowed a prohibition on election spending by incorporated entities, as well as a portion of McConnell v. FEC (2003) that had upheld restricted corporate spending on “electioneering communications.” The ruling effectively freed corporations (including incorporated non-profit organizations) to spend money on electioneering communications and to directly advocate for the election or defeat of candidates. In a dissenting opinion, Associate Justice John Paul Stevens argued that the court’s ruling represented “a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self government.”¹

The Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. FEC allowed corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence American politics. But, the American public is kept from understanding the full impact of new corporate money in politics because of the explosion of secret political spending and the failure to adopt common sense disclosure requirements.

Since Citizens United, more than $600 million in dark money has been spent in U.S. elections through 501(c)(4) and (c)(6) organizations that do not have to disclose their funders. Secret corporate political spending threatens the integrity of our democratic self-government, as those with the deepest pockets can overwhelm other voices. This financial influence leads to the needs and wants of corporations being prioritized and can skew important public policy outcomes, often in ways that perpetuate racial inequities. But while politicians typically know who is spending money to support their political fortunes, the public is denied the ability to properly assess when “elected officials are ‘in the pocket’ of … moneyed interests.”²

1. Citizens United v. FEC
2. The Racial Equity Impact of Secret Political Spending by Government Contractors

Executive Order 13769, titled Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States, labeled the “Muslim ban” by critics, or commonly referred to as the Trump travel ban, was an executive order by US President Donald Trump. Except for the extent to which it was blocked by various courts, it was in effect from January 27, 2017, until March 6, 2017, when it was superseded by Executive Order 13780, a second order sharing the title “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States”.

Executive Order 13769 lowered the number of refugees to be admitted into the United States in 2017 to 50,000, suspended the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP) for 120 days, suspended the entry of Syrian refugees indefinitely, directed some cabinet secretaries to suspend entry of those whose countries do not meet adjudication standards under U.S. immigration law for 90 days, and included exceptions on a case-by-case basis. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) listed these countries as Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Yemen. Iraq was also included until it was dropped following sharp criticism from the Iraqi government and promises of improved vetting of Iraqi citizens in collaboration with the Iraqi government. More than 700 travelers were detained, and up to 60,000 visas were “provisionally revoked”.

The signing of the Executive Order provoked widespread condemnation and protests and resulted in legal intervention against the enforcement of the order. Critics referred to it as a “Muslim ban,” because President Trump had previously called for a temporary ban on Muslims entering America, and because all of the affected countries had a Muslim majority, although the affected Muslims were only 12% of the global Muslim population. Saudi Arabia was also notably excluded, despite alleged Saudi involvement in the September 11 attacks (in which 15 out of the 19 hijackers were Saudi). This was analysed as being due to the American oil trade with the country, from whom America buys 498,000 barrels of crude oil per day. A nationwide temporary restraining order (TRO) was issued on February 3, 2017 in the case Washington v. Trump, which was upheld by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit on February 9, 2017. Consequently, the Department of Homeland Security stopped enforcing portions of the order and the State Department re-validated visas that had been previously revoked. Later, other orders (Executive Order 13780 and Presidential Proclamation 9645) were signed by President Trump and superseded Executive Order 13769. On June 26, 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the third Executive Order (Presidential Proclamation 9645) and its accompanying travel ban in a 5–4 decision, with the majority opinion being written by Chief Justice John Roberts.

On January 20, 2021, President Joe Biden revoked Executive Order 13780 and its related proclamations with Presidential Proclamation 10141.[efn]Executive Order 13769[/efn_note]

The Unite the Right rally was a White supremacist rally that took place in Charlottesville, Virginia, from August 11–12, 2017. Marchers included members of the alt-right, neo-Confederates, neo-fascists, white nationalists, neo-Nazis, Klansmen, and far-right militias. Some groups chanted racist and antisemitic slogans and carried weapons, Nazi and neo-Nazi symbols, the Valknut, Confederate battle flags, Deus vult crosses, flags, and other symbols of various past and present antisemitic and anti-Islamic groups. The organizers’ stated goals included the unification of the American white nationalist movement and opposing the proposed removal of the statue of General Robert E. Lee from Charlottesville’s former Lee Park. The rally sparked a national debate over Confederate iconography, racial violence, and white supremacy.

The rally occurred amid the controversy generated by the removal of Confederate monuments by local governments following the Charleston church shooting in 2015, where a white supremacist shot and killed nine black members, including the minister (a state senator), and wounded others. The rally turned violent after protesters clashed with counter-protesters, resulting in more than 30 injured.

On the morning of August 12, Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe declared a state of emergency, stating that public safety could not be safeguarded without additional powers. Within an hour, at 11:22 a.m., the Virginia State Police declared the rally to be an unlawful assembly.

At around 1:45 p.m., self-identified white supremacist James Alex Fields Jr. deliberately rammed his car into a crowd of counter-protesters about 1⁄2 mile (800 m) away from the rally site, killing Heather Heyer and injuring 35 other people. Fields fled the scene in his car but was arrested soon afterward. He was tried and convicted in Virginia state court of first-degree murder, malicious wounding, and other crimes in 2018, with the jury recommending a sentence of life imprisonment plus 419 years. The following year, Fields pleaded guilty to 29 federal hate crimes in a plea agreement to avoid the death penalty in this trial.

US President Donald Trump’s remarks about the rally generated negative responses. In his initial statement following the rally, Trump condemned the “display of hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides”. This first statement and his subsequent defenses of it, in which he also referred to “very fine people on both sides”, were criticized as implying a moral equivalence between the white supremacist protesters and the counter-protesters. Trump later stated (in the same statement) that “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally–but you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists”.¹

1. Unite the Right Rally

The Jan. 6 Committee has been uncovering what led up to the insurrection, but lurking beneath the hearings is a sometimes unspoken reason — race and the loss of White power.

JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:

The January 6 committee hearings painted an elaborate and often damning portrait of former President Donald Trump’s role in the insurrection. But race is also playing a central, if sometimes unspoken, role. NPR’s Sandhya Dirks has more.

SANDHYA DIRKS, BYLINE: There’s this striking moment back at the very beginning of the hearings in Senator Bennie Thompson’s opening statement.

BENNIE THOMPSON: I’m from a part of the country where people justify the actions of slavery, Klu Klux Klan and lynching. And reminded of that dark history as I hear voices today try and justify the actions of the insurrectionists on January 6, 2021.

DIRKS: Thompson draws a direct line from the lost cause to the big lie. Hakeem Jefferson, a political scientist at Stanford, says Thompson’s very presence as an elder Black Southern man at the helm of the hearings holds meaning.

HAKEEM JEFFERSON: To see someone who looks like Bennie Thompson wield this amount of institutional power against a person like Donald Trump, who is awash in the markings of whiteness and privilege and all that it affords.

DIRKS: Whiteness, Jefferson says, is at the center of the events this hearing is interrogating.

JEFFERSON: January 6 was a racial backlash.

DIRKS: More precisely, he says, it’s part of an ongoing white backlash against the very perception of racial progress.

JEFFERSON: Some white people are really concerned about a loss of power and status in American society.

DIRKS: At the heart of January 6, Jefferson says, is a story about power – white power.

JEFFERSON: It’s not about power that’s maintained by burning crosses. It’s about the power that’s maintained about telling some stories and not some others in schools. It’s about the power to elect people who you think will do your bidding.

DIRKS: Over on Fox News, hosts like Tucker Carlson, who has peddled almost every conspiracy and lie about January 6, have consistently said that race or racism has nothing to do with it. Here he is in June, after falsely implying that the election could very well have been stolen.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, “TUCKER CARLSON TONIGHT”)

TUCKER CARLSON: A lot of the protesters on January 6 were very upset about that. And they should have been. All of us should be. But the January 6 committee ignored all of that completely. Instead, on the basis of zero evidence – no evidence whatsoever – they blame the entire riot on white supremacy.

DIRKS: Of course, the January 6 committee hasn’t really done that. The hearings haven’t mentioned race much. And it is a central part of their case that rioters showed up precisely because they believed Trump’s lie about a stolen election. But who believed that lie and why they believed it has everything to do with race, says Robert Pape, director of the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats.

ROBERT PAPE: What we’re really observing are the consequences of the fear of white status decline.

DIRKS: Pape has been researching those who were arrested for storming the Capitol. He says they don’t fit the old profiles of extremism.

PAPE: The counties that lost the most non-Hispanic white population are the counties that produced the most January 6 insurrectionists.

DIRKS: Most are white and male, but more than half are white-collar – doctors, lawyers. And they come from cities and suburbs, many from places Biden won. Pape says his research shows that a driving force among insurrectionists and those that support them is a fear of a white majority becoming a minority and having to give up power.

PAPE: These are the parts of the country where diversity is happening the fastest. This is dovetailing with rhetoric by politicians and by media figures, stoking fear about the great replacement.

DIRKS: To put it simply, they came from places that used to be almost all white and aren’t anymore.

PAPE: Nearly 90% are not members of these militant extremist groups.

DIRKS: That’s the racist conspiracy theory that Black and brown people are replacing white people as part of a nefarious Democratic plan to take power and steal elections, a theory peddled by people like Tucker Carlson. And it’s believed not just by many of the people who stormed the Capitol but by the vast majority of Republicans. Here’s political scientist Hakeem Jefferson again.

JEFFERSON: What’s dangerous is when a group like this begins to adopt the mindset, or the rhetoric, of an oppressed minority.

DIRKS: Dangerous because, Jefferson says, when members of a group that still holds very real privilege, like white people, imagine themselves on the margins, that’s when violent white nationalism takes hold. The narrative the January 6 committee has presented for the most part has been told in the voices of Republicans and former Trump loyalists. There was one notable exception – Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Shaye Moss.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

SHAYE MOSS: I’ve always been told by my grandmother how important it is to vote and how people before me, a lot of people, older people in my family did not have that right.

DIRKS: Moss and her mom are both poll workers who Trump attacked by name, leading to death threats and racist attacks. Political scientist Akeem Jefferson says what these two women represent is not a political party or person in power but the right of average people to vote, a right that for many was only achieved within recent memory.

JEFFERSON: So many Black people and Black women in particular work on these front lines of democracy.

DIRKS: Jefferson says our fragile and incomplete multiracial democracy is in peril. It’s not just January 6. It’s also a slow-moving threat from the right, the Supreme Court, gerrymandering, voter suppression laws like some of the ones now on the books in Georgia overseen by Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. He was lauded at the hearings for standing up for democracy and against Trump. But back home, the laws he’s championed have made it harder for people of color to vote.

JEFFERSON: January 6 was a racial project, but the everyday undoings and attacks on American democracy are also a part of a racial project. So yeah, it’s the elephant in the room, but it’s the whole damn room. This is all about race, all the time.

DIRKS: It continues a larger, longer battle that has never really ended over whose votes get counted and whose votes get to count.¹

1. The Unspoken Role of Race in the Jan. 6 Riot

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump relies on racism as a strategy to divide the country for the benefit of himself and other wealthy Americans. He uses racism by triggering two major sources of anxiety for many White people:

1. Economic insecurity and
2. Demographic change.

This is done primarily through “Dog Whistle Politics” – the use of racist appeals to White voters intended to provoke resentment against people of color and government, but using language that is not directly about race. Dog whistle politics tell a simple story:

• Fear people of color
• Hate the government
• Trust the market

Economics and race are connected in the sense that conservatives have been telling Whites, “Don’t worry about increasing concentrations of wealth. Instead, focus your intentions on people of color.”¹

1. Trump’s Racism Isn’t Just Racism, It’s a Strategy

The movement to end legal abortion has a long, racist history, and like the “great replacement” theory — the debunked conspiracy theory promoted by some Republican politicians who claim that Democrats support more immigration to “replace” White American voters – it has roots in a similar fear that White people are going to be outnumbered by people believed to hold a lower standing in society. Those anxieties used to be centered primarily around various groups of European immigrants and newly emancipated slaves, but now they’re focused on non-white Americans who, as a group, are on track to numerically outpace non-Hispanic White Americans by 2045, according to U.S. Census projections.

It’s been decades since the anti-abortion movement first gained traction — and the movement has changed in certain ways — but this fundamental fear has never left, as demonstrated by attacks on people of color, such as the shooter in Buffalo, New York, who expressed concern about the declining birth rates of White people. That’s because the anti-abortion movement, at its core, has always been about upholding White supremacy.¹ Read this article to learn more about the evolution of the fight to ban abortion based on the great replacement theory.

1. How The Fight To Ban Abortion Is Rooted In The ‘Great Replacement’ Theory