Racism against African Americans
In the context of racism in the United States, racism against African Americans dates back to the colonial era, and continues to be a persistent issue in American society in the 21st century.
From the arrival of the first Africans in early colonial times until after the American Civil War, most African Americans were enslaved. Even free African Americans have faced restrictions on their political, social, and economic freedoms, being subjected to lynchings, segregation, Black Codes, Jim Crow laws, and other forms of discrimination, both before and after the Civil War. Thanks to the civil rights movement, formal racial discrimination was gradually outlawed by the federal government and came to be perceived as socially and morally unacceptable by large elements of American society. Despite this, racism against Black Americans remains in the U.S., as does socioeconomic inequality between black and white Americans. In 1863, two years prior to emancipation, Black people owned 0.5 percent of the national wealth, while in 2019 it is just over 1.5 percent.
In recent years research has uncovered extensive evidence of racial discrimination in various sectors of modern U.S. society, including the criminal justice system, [|businesses], the economy, [|housing], [|health care], the media, and [|politics]. In the view of the United Nations and the US Human Rights Network, "discrimination in the United States permeates all aspects of life and extends to all communities of color."
Citizenship and voting rights
The Naturalization Act of 1790 set the first uniform rules for the granting of United States citizenship by naturalization, which limited naturalization to "free white person", thus excluding from citizenship Native Americans, indentured servants, slaves, free Blacks, and later Asians. Citizenship and the lack of it had special impact on various legal and political rights, most notably suffrage rights at both the federal and state level, as well as the right to hold certain government offices, jury duty, military service, and many other activities, besides access to government assistance and services. The second Militia Act of 1792 also provided for the conscription of every "free able-bodied white male citizen". Tennessee's 1834 Constitution included a provision: "the free white men of this State have a right to Keep and bear arms for their common defense."Citizenship, however, did not guarantee any particular rights, such as the right to vote. Black Americans, for example, who gained formal U.S. citizenship by 1870, were soon disenfranchised. For instance, after 1890, less than 9,000 of Mississippi's 147,000 eligible African-American voters were registered to vote, or about 6%. Louisiana went from 130,000 registered African-American voters in 1896 to 1,342 in 1904. They were also subjected to Black Codes and discriminated against in the Southern states by Jim Crow laws. Voter suppression efforts around the country, though mainly motivated by political considerations, often effectively disproportionately affect African Americans and other minorities. In 2016, one in 13 African-Americans of voting age was disenfranchised, more than four times greater than that of non-African-Americans. Over 7.4% of adult African-Americans were disenfranchised compared to 1.8% of non-African-Americans. Felony disenfranchisement in Florida disqualifies over 10% of its citizens for life and over 23% of its African-American citizens.
Antebellum period
, as a form of forced labor, has existed in many cultures, dating back to early human civilizations. Slavery is not inherently racial per se. In the United States, however, slavery, having been established in the colonial era, became racialized by the time of the American Revolution, when slavery was widely institutionalized as a racial caste system which was based on African ancestry and skin color.Slavery
The Atlantic slave trade prospered, with more than 470,000 persons forcibly transported from Africa between 1626 and 1860 to what is now the United States. Prior to the Civil War, eight serving presidents were slaveholders, and slavery was protected by the U.S. Constitution. Creating wealth for the White elite, approximately one in four Southern families held Black people in slavery prior to the Civil War. According to the 1860 U.S. census, there were about 385,000 slave owners out of a White population of approximately 7 million in the slave states. White European Americans who participated in the slave industry sought to justify their economic exploitation of Black people by creating a "scientific" theory of White superiority and Black inferiority. Thomas Jefferson, a slave owner himself, called for science to determine the obvious "inferiority" of Black people that is regarded as "an extremely important stage in the evolution of scientific racism." He concluded that Black people were "inferior to the whites in the endowments of body and mind."Groups of armed White men, who were called slave patrols, were formed to monitor enslaved Black people. First established in South Carolina in 1704 and later established in other slave states, their function was to police slaves, especially runaways. Slave owners feared that slaves might organize revolts or rebellions, so state militias were formed to provide a military command structure and discipline within the slave patrols so they could be used to detect, encounter, and crush any organized slave meetings which might lead to revolts or rebellions.
Controlling free Blacks
During the 1820s and 1830s, the solution of the American Colonization Society to the presence of free Black people was to persuade them to emigrate to Africa. In 1821, the ACS established the colony of Liberia, and persuaded thousands of former slaves and free Blacks to move there. Some slaves were manumitted on the condition that they emigrate. The slave states made no secret that they wanted to get rid of free Blacks, who they believed threatened their investment, the slaves, encouraging escapes and revolts. The support for the ACS was primarily Southern. The founder of the ACS, Henry Clay of Kentucky, stated that because of "unconquerable prejudice resulting from their color, they never could amalgamate with the free whites of this country. It was desirable, therefore, as it respected them, and the residue of the population of the country, to drain them off". Thousands of Black people were resettled in Liberia, where they formed an American English-speaking enclave which could not assimilate back into African life and as a result, most of them died of tropical diseases.White supremacist American governments emphasized the importance of the subjugation and control of other racial populations. In 1824 the Senate of South Carolina enacted a resolution echoing the wording of the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution of the United States, declaring that the paramount objective of its government was to prevent the insubordination of black citizens and any possible slave rebellions as well as any social or political causes which might instrumentally lead to such insubordination or insurrection, and declaring that this purpose was paramount over all other laws, constitutions, and domestic or international agreements:
Domestic slave trade
The importation of slaves into the United States was outlawed by federal law from 1808, but smuggling continued, the last known ship to bring enslaved Africans to the United States being the Clotilda in 1859 or 1860. The domestic trade in human beings continued to be a major economic activity. Maryland and Virginia, for example, would export surplus slaves to the south. Enslaved family members could be split up never to see or hear of each other again. Between 1830 and 1840, nearly 250,000 slaves were taken across state lines. In the 1850s, more than 193,000 were transported, and historians estimate nearly one million in total were traded.The historian Ira Berlin called this forced migration of slaves the "Second Middle Passage", because it reproduced many of the same horrors as the Middle Passage. These sales of slaves broke up many families, with Berlin writing that whether slaves were directly uprooted or lived in fear that they or their families would be involuntarily moved, "the massive deportation traumatized black people". Individuals lost their connection to families and clans. Added to the earlier colonists combining slaves from different tribes, many ethnic Africans lost their knowledge of varying tribal origins in Africa. Most were descended from families who had been in the U.S. for many generations.
Civil War and emancipation
During the American Civil War, the Militia Act of 1862, for the first time, allowed African Americans to serve in the Union militias as soldiers. However, Black members were discriminated against in pay, with Black members being paid half of White members. Besides discrimination in pay, colored units were often disproportionately assigned laborer work, rather than combat assignments. General Daniel Ullman, commander of the United States Colored Troops, remarked "I fear that many high officials outside of Washington have no other intention than that these men shall be used as diggers and drudges." Black members were organized into colored regiments. By the end of that war, in April 1865, 175 colored regiments were constituting about one-tenth of the Union Army. About 20 percent of colored soldiers died, their death toll being about 35 percent higher than that of white Union troops. The 1862 Militia Act, however, did not open military service to all races, only to Black Americans. In the Confederate army, non-white men were not permitted to serve as soldiers.President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, which took effect on January 1, 1863, marked a change in the federal government's position on slavery.. Though the proclamation was welcomed by abolitionists, its application was limited. It did not apply, for example, to the nearly 500,000 slaves in the slave-holding border states of Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, and the new state of West Virginia, and it also did not apply in parts of Louisiana and Virginia that were occupied by Union forces. In those states, slavery remained legal until abolished by state action or by the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in December 1865.
While personally opposed to slavery, Lincoln accepted the federal consensus that the Constitution did not give Congress the power to end it. But he was also Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy. An action based on military necessity, against states that were in rebellion, would be appropriate as a step towards their defeat. The South of course interpreted the Emancipation Proclamation as a hostile act, but it allowed Lincoln to abolish slavery to a limited extent, without igniting resistance from anti-abolitionist forces in the Union. The slaves were not immediately affected by the proclamation, but advancing Union armies freed them.
About four million Black slaves were freed in 1865. Ninety-five percent of Black people lived in the South, comprising one-third of its total population, while only five percent of Black people lived in the North, comprising only one percent of its total population. Consequently, fears of eventual emancipation were much greater in the South than in the North. Based on 1860 census figures, eight percent of males who were aged 13 to 43 died in the Civil War, including six percent in the North and eighteen percent in the South.
Though the Thirteenth Amendment formally abolished slavery throughout the United States, some Black Americans became subjected to revised forms of involuntary labor, particularly in the South, through the use of Black Codes that restricted African Americans' freedom and compelled them to work for low wages, and through the use of the exception in the Thirteenth Amendment, which permitted slavery "as a punishment for crime". They were also subject to White supremacist violence and selective enforcement of statutes.
Land redistribution programs, such as the Homestead Acts, were most often closed to African Americans, though some did succeed in obtaining land.