An Evolving Timeline of Racism & Systemic Oppressions

(Focused on the United States and racism)

Why History Matters

“Knowledge is power, but history is the fruit of power.  Whoever wins in the end gets to frame the story”

Michel Rolph-Trouillot

“There is no such thing as a neutral education process. Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate the integration of generations into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes the "practice of freedom", the means by which men and women deal critically with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.”  

Paolo Freire

History matters because it shapes our narrative about who we are and how we got here.  What is included and excluded is a decision by those in power to shape their narrative.  For the vast majority of people in the United States, their first and last experience with history is during their K-12 years.  The history text books are abridged, chronological and overwhelmingly Eurocentric (white).  This is by design, text book publishers have been driven by the largest market (profit), which historically had been the Texas school district.

Basic History Outline (learned in grade school & high school)

+  A story/ narrative to glorify and inspire national pride (propaganda?) 

+  Who / What is included and excluded is a choice made by school districts with the financial buying power to influence publishers.  Up until 2010, it was overwhelmingly Texas that determined text books (due to the centralization of all buying at the state level).  

+  Even when included: how and where is It included.  How is the narrative framed.   In one history textbook “slaves” were called “workers”

+  The delivery is the most damaging.  History is taught using dates to be memorized and regurgitated, boring students and making no connections to their lives or the connections to other events.

This evolving overview is meant to be a starting point with the hope your curiosity will compel deeper diving into the events to fully grasp the impacts they had on our history and shaping our modern world.

“No pedagogy which is truly liberating can remain distant from the oppressed by treating them as unfortunates and by presenting for their emulation models from among the oppressors. The oppressed must be their own example in the struggle for their redemption.”

Paolo Freire

Historic Quotes on Racism in the US

“It seems almost incredible that the advocates of liberty should conceive of the idea of selling a fellow creature to slavery.  Has the God who made the white man and the black left any record declaring us a different species? Are we not sustained by the same power, supported by the same food. . . . And should we not then enjoy the same liberty. . .?  Whilst so much is being done in the world, to ameliorate the condition of mankind, and the spirit of Freedom is marching with rapid strides and causing tyrants to tremble, may America awake from the apathy in which she has long slumbered.  Our country asserts for itself the glory of being the freest upon the surface of the globe... but one dark spot still dimmed its lustre. Domestic slavery existed among a people who had themselves disdained to submit to a master.”

James Forten 1766-1842

“I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” 

Martin Luther King Jr. From the “I have a dream” speech 1963

“Fellow-citizens, we have had, and still have, great wrongs of which to complain. A heavy and cruel hand has been laid upon us.  .  .  .  As a people, we feel ourselves to be not only deeply injured, but grossly misunderstood. Our white fellow-countrymen do not know us. They are strangers to our character, ignorant of our capacity, oblivious of our history and progress, and are misinformed as to the principles and ideas that control and guide us as a people. The great mass of American citizens estimate us as being a characterless and purposeless people; and hence we hold up our heads, if at all, against the withering influence of a nation's scorn and contempt.”   

Frederick Douglas, 1853

“I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to 'order' than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.” 

Martin Luther King Jr. Letter From A Birmingham Jail, 1963

          In his Letter, King went on to criticize white moderates. He said that a white moderate is someone "who constantly says: 'I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action'; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom." Such a person is, according to King, someone "who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a 'more convenient season.'"

          Ultimately, King wrote that "shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection."

Although written over 55 years ago, the relevance of King's words remains today. So, it makes sense that people are quoting him online, bringing attention to how certain white moderates try to sanitize King's words, and silence Black Lives Matter protesters by telling them to wait for justice.

“Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble.”

John Lewis

“Race is a fiction we must never accept.  Race is a fact we must never forget.”

Robert Jensen

"The trouble is deeper than we think, because the trouble is in us.“

James Baldwin 1962

I Dream A World
I dream a world where man
No other man will scorn,
Where love will bless the earth
And peace its paths adorn
I dream a world where all
Will know sweet freedom's way,
Where greed no longer saps the soul
Nor avarice blights our day.
A world I dream where black or white,
Whatever race you be,
Will share the bounties of the earth
And every man is free,
Where wretchedness will hang its head
And joy, like a pearl,
Attends the needs of all mankind-
Of such I dream, my world!
Langston Hughes

Big History of Homo Sapiens and “race”

All fields of the human sciences - evolutionary biology, psychology, neurosciences, anthropology & sociology – are now in agreement that race is a “socially constructed” phenomenon, with no scientific basis.          THERE IS ONLY 1 RACE OF HUMANS – We are all Homo Sapiens.  

Ø  By “socially constructed,” this means it is a human creation, a story invented, it is a myth: yet, it continues to persist in our institutions, systems and our minds; with devastating consequences to our communities today.  It continues to shape how we see ourselves, each other and determine how we treat each other. 

This begs the question: If there is only 1 race (human), then what does “race” {& racism} even mean?  How has it become so central to US society?  Why is it so pervasive in every aspect of our lives from the media, government, economy, legal system, education, sports, voting, etc.?  Why is it on most job applications, government registrations, questionnaires, etc.? 

The following will attempt to shed light on the confusion around race and racism; understanding how we got here, to help us decide where we want to go in the future. 

The Human Genome Project which launched in 1990 to map the full human genome (DNA sequence).  It unveiled its results to the global community in 2000 (it actually was not fully sequenced until 2018, but close enough).  Their conclusion:  race is a social construct with no scientific basis, 2 people with different skin colors from different regions of the world can have greater genetic similarities then with those of the same skin color.  We are one human family.

Science advancements in genetic research has revealed some staggering findings, which are accelerating at a pace beyond comprehension, including such advancements as Crispr gene editing, mRNA vaccinations for Covid and soon for HIV, synthetic hearts (from pigs) and potential to recreate the Wooly Mammoth (extinct prehistoric mammal).

There are about 3 billion genome base pairs that make human beings about 99.9% similar to the other human strangers around us.  We share 99.7% of our DNA with our closest extinct cousins the Neanderthals.  However, recent research has uncovered the fact that our closest relatives, the Bonobos & chimpanzees, are near 98.8% genetically similar to humans.  {special note: humans did NOT descend from either or any existing species, we both share a descendent from an extinct species long, long ago}.  

In addition to this, pigs are about 98% similar, cats are about 90%, dogs are about 84% and even honey bees share 44% of DNA. We share 50% of our DNA with trees, 60% with bananas, and even 25% with daffodils.  We share 70% of DNA with slugs (gross).

The divisions between humans, have been socially constructed by humans.  The root causes for the divisions are varied, with most stemming struggling to survive in our environment –predators, hunger, weather, and diseases. These struggles left deep distress patterns.

Root Cause of how we got here and allowing us to make decisions for what future we want to create.

The Human race, of which there is only ONE - Homo Sapiens- evolved approximately 300,000 years ago in Africa. 

Our species proved more adaptable to the environment then our cousins, of the genus “Homo”, eventually leading to their extinction.  The abundance of flora & fauna was well suited for the hunter gatherer lifestyle of humans.  The population expansion led to the migration from Africa across the earth.  Elevated by their distinguished evolutionary adaptation -the prefrontal cortex, humans adapted to the environment, developed social organizations (clans), enhanced non-verbal and verbal communication, mastery of fire, tools, weapons and other skills.  As clans formed, idiosyncratic cultures emerged across the planet.

         Between 140,000 – 100,000 years ago the San civilization formed in Southern Africa, they are the oldest civilization still alive today.

Approx. 40,000 years ago the Aboriginals settled in Australia, they are the 2nd oldest civilization still alive today.

Approx. 40,000 years ago the Neanderthals (Homo Neandertalus) and the Denisovans in Asia became extinct in Europe, despite 1000s of years coexisting with Homo Sapiens (including interbreeding).  Most humans have trace amounts of Neanderthal and/or Denisovan Genes.

But human survival was always precarious – predators (mostly other human tribes), disease, the shifting climate and access to essential resources posed constant challenges. 

         It was only very recently in our species history, just 10- 13,000 years ago that we began shifting from hunter/gatherer to an agrarian lifestyle.  This began in various places in the world, but it was in the Mesopotamia valley (modern day Iraq) in southwest Asia, that large scale settled, communities began to develop (8,000 years ago).  This new organization required new systems of community organization, politics, economics to function.  At its core, agrarian societies had 3 key components, labor, distribution & ownership.  The upside of settled agrarian societies was the creation of surplus food, the down side was managing greater complexity in the social structure:  decision making (power) was centralized and social hierarchies were created.

          The shift to settled Agrarian societies did not happen evenly, nor were the knowledge and skills developed evenly.  They did manage to get shared through informal channels and in more recent time through formal channels of nomads, trade, empire expansion, and most recently via modern technologies.

It was also around this time in Europe (approx. 10,000 – 20k years ago) that the 2 genes responsible for melanin expression in skin = skin color, mutated to create low to no melanin in skin = white skin colored people emerged.  Just 2 genes (SLC24A5/SLC4582 genes on Chromosome 15), of the approximate 23,000 active (protein coding) genes in every human being.  This slight mutation proved advantageous for the humans of northern Europe given the cloudier, less UV intense climate.  It gave them an edge in the natural selection process, affording the trait to proliferate.

Stability and safety (physical/ psychological) in abundance has never existed in human history, there have been rare moments that got close, but they were very short lived.

PRECURSOR of Race & Racism (classism, sexism, anti-Semitism….)

       Race & Racism did not drop out of a coconut tree, nor was its social construction a straight line.  Its ability to metastasize was the Petrie dish of human civilization during Medieval Europe. 

       Long before Medieval Europe, at the dawning of agrarian societies (so called “civilizations” - roughly 10k years ago) dominant social hierarchies were developed.  The two major hierarchies were the centralizing of power in men’s control, relegating women a lower social rank (sexism) and political power controlled by the owning class, relegating working class, peasants and slaves to the lowest rank (classism).  These were firmly entrenched and were the unquestionable ‘norms’ across the world. 

        Another force was religion, its significance for rationalizing the world, social cohesion, and social control was omnipresent well before agrarian societies. Its rise as a divisive force emerged with religious empires starting with Christianity and then Islam.

        It is the confluence of these forces that we find medieval Europe.  Power struggles between inter-European groups, as well as continental powers had been raging for centuries. 

       The rise of holy wars was relatively new, with the Crusades (the 1st in 1095 A.D.).

1215 Lateran IV (Pope Innocent III)- Catholic church 12th Ecumenical Council.  It addressed crusades, made marriage a church sacrament (prior to this it was economic/ political arrangement outside of church) and treatment of Jews as heretics.  It rabidly advanced the development of anti-Semitism in Christian Europe.  It officially marginalized Jews as 2nd class citizens, requiring dress codes, denying property rights, mobility and limiting jobs to money lending, rent seeking (jobs considered a sin by Christianity). 

The council also granted recognition to Friars (aka Order of Franciscans) who were a fervent lot, dedicated to living impoverished, ascetic lives, amongst the peasants to inspire their faith. 

Canon 68 - required Jews & Muslims to wear distinguishing clothing, so not to confuse them with true Christians

Canon 69 - barred Jews from public offices (civil servants)

Canon 70 - Jewish conversion to Christianity, once done cannot be undone

Canon 71 - On Crusading against Muslims

In total, it centralized power and worked to marginalize others, setting the stage for a “persecuting society”.  Those targeted were Jews (anti-Semitism), Muslims (anti-Muslim) and LGBTQ (heterosexism/ homophobia).  These were not new targets, but the result of Lateran IV was a heightened attack and dehumanization against these people.

        With all of this metastasizing, we jump forward to the late medieval Europe of the 1400s and the rising Ottoman Empire.  The largest trading route in the world was the Silk Road.  It had existed for over 3 centuries, allowing the flow of goods from Asia to Europe to Africa through an elaborate network of routes and tradespeople.  The Ottoman Empire effectively blocked Europe from this vital network.  As a result, the Kings, Quens and owning class Europeans lost access to their coveted silk textiles, tea, spices, dyes, paper, porcelain, aromatics, etc.  This was quite disruptive to the ruling classes of Europe, triggering a reaction to find new trade routes.

The Iberian Peninsula In the early 1400s was a battleground between Europeans and Muslims.  Muslims had been in control of the majority of it since 715 AD. The Spanish & Portuguese were ascending in population and power, creating the opportunity to slowly reclaim land.  Their key source of success was shipbuilding and seafaring.  As their empires reclaimed land from the Muslim’s they also grew in their exertion of power more broadly.

 There were also a sizeable population of Jewish people living on the peninsula, who coexisted peacefully with the Muslims (whom were much more tolerant of Jews than Europeans).  As the Europeans reclaimed the land and domination over its inhabitants, they began enforcing laws and ideologies to subjugate them.  One particularly nefarious ideology targeting Jewish people was “limpieza de Sangre” = the cleanliness of blood.  This mainstreamed an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory of “blood libel” originating in the 11th century, in which Christians believed Jews used the blood of stolen Christian babies for their religious practices (mocking the eucharist).  This unfounded belief would spread across Europe and seep into subsequent laws created in the Americas (reference: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-racism-was-first-officially-codified-in-15thcentury-spain)

In this conflagration, the timeline unfolds.

TIMELINE of Race & Racism

1444 Portugal – the first boat of enslaved West Coast Africans arrived in Lisbon for sale. Sanctioned by the King of Portugal, Alfonso V, under the control of his nephew Prince Henry the Navigator.

Although this historically ties directly to the millennia of human slavery which falls under the oppression of classism, it was the birth of what would become a new oppression = racism.  The following timeline reveals how it metastasized.

1452 Doctrine of Discovery - Pope Nicholas V issued the Papal Bull “Dum Diversas” in response to the King of Portugal’s exploits in Africa and enslaving Africans.  As the most powerful person in Europe, this edict (and 2 additional: 1455 “Romanus Pontifex”, 1493 “Inter Caetera”) would unleash the worst moral and political impulses in European leaders and opportunists to exploit, colonize, enslave and kill non-white, Christian people.   It set the moral foundation for Black slavery and global colonization that would cause grave harm to indigenous communities the world over for the next 500 years.  This is not to say, it was the starting point: slavery, exploitation, anti-Semitism, anti-Muslim sentiments had long been around.  This just fanned the flames of human’s worst impulses.

Dum Diversas was repealed in 2023 by Pope Francis.  He described it as political and not a moral doctrine, but has failed to take any accountability for the harm it has caused the world.

“Dum Diversas” extracts:

1. As we indeed understand from your pious and Christian desire, you intend to subjugate the enemies of Christ, namely the Saracens, and bring [them] back, with powerful arm, to the faith of Christ, if the authority of Apostolic See supported you in this. Therefore we consider, that those rising against the Catholic faith and struggling to extinguish Christian Religion must be resisted by the faithful of Christ with courage and firmness, so that the faithful themselves, inflamed by the ardor of faith and armed with courage to be able to hate their intention, not only to go against the intention, if they prevent unjust attempts of force, but with the help of God whose soldiers they are, they stop the endeavors of the faithless, we, fortified with divine love, summoned by the charity of Christians and bound by the duty of our pastoral office, which concerns the integrity and spread of faith for which Christ our God shed his blood, wishing to encourage the vigor of the faithful and Your Royal Majesty in the most sacred intention of this kind, we grant to you full and free power, through the Apostolic authority by this edict, to invade, conquer, fight, subjugate the Saracens and pagans, and other infidels and other enemies of Christ, and wherever established their Kingdoms, Duchies, Royal Palaces, Principalities and other dominions, lands, places, estates, camps and any other possessions, mobile and immobile goods found in all these places and held in whatever name, and held and possessed by the same Saracens, Pagans, infidels, and the enemies of Christ, also realms, duchies, royal palaces, principalities and other dominions, lands, places, estates, camps, possessions of the king or prince or of the kings or princes, and to lead their persons in perpetual servitude, and to apply and appropriate realms, duchies, royal palaces, principalities and other dominions, possessions and goods of this kind to you and your use and your successors the Kings of Portugal.

We carefully ask, require, and encourage your same Royal Majesty, girded by the sword of virtue and fortified with strong courage, for the increase of the divine name and for the exaltation of faith and for the salvation of your soul, having God before your eyes, may you increase in this undertaking the power of your virtue so that the Catholic faith may, through your Royal Majesty, against the enemies of Christ, bring back triumph and that you earn more fully the crown of eternal glory, for which you must fight in lands, and which God promised to those who love Him, and our benediction of the See and grace.

1453  Gomez de Zurara publishes “The Chronicles of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea” the first European book on Africa.  Commissioned by the King of Portugal (Alfonso V) glorifying his nephew, Prince Henry the navigator’s profiteering from gold (from the gold coast) and African slave trade (begun in 1434): 

Zurara established the notion of the “virtuous” Europeans who could civilize the Sub-Saharan African “savages … who live like animals”, “like beasts, without any custom of reasonable beings”. “They had no understanding of good, but only knew how to live in a bestial sloth.”, “as black as Ethiops, and so ugly.”

{Note: By 1466, King Afonso was accumulating more capital from selling enslaved Africans to foreigners “than from all the taxes levied on the entire kingdom”}

Source: Dr. Ibram Kendi “Stamped from the Beginning”

UNPACKING Zurara:

1. The most challenging piece is the language used. From the title “Discovery” & “Conquest”  The absurdity and offensiveness of it should strike us first.  But the hard reality - these ignorant and degrading tropes continue to this day in statements like “shithole countries” from Donald Trump and “welfare queens” quipped by Ronald Reagan.  They are ubiquitous and exist inside all of our subconscious.  Next Month’s lunch and learn we will explore “unconscious bias” to expose the subtle and not so subtle impacts of this kind of language.

2. White /European Supremacy, expressed through anti-Blackness, first entered into written record.  Setting the prejudices in place to justify the cruel and inhumane trade in African lives established the oppression of Racism.  Racism, like all other oppressions is defined as Prejudice + systemic/ institutional/ social power.  In this first instance the prejudice based on skin color + the institution of ‘slave trading’ = racism.   Note:  Europe under Christianity had long held views of superiority to other religions, specifically Islam (Crusades) but also Judaism (anti-Semitism), both of which experienced harsh treatment under the Inquisitions. Nationalism/ Ethnocentrism (allegiance to ruling authority) was centuries old.

3. Slavery – as an institution has been used all over the world, by most cultures, in various forms for 1,000s of years and is still being used.  In most cases, it was a punishment bestowed on captured “rival” clan members (with limitations).  Since the rise of agrarian civilizations, it took on a more deliberate intention – forced labor for the production of surplus crops.  The rise of most civilizations and the “wonders” they created were built on the backs and lives of enslaved peoples (i.e. The Pyramids, Mayan Temples, Angkor Wat).   .   .  Slavery falls under the oppression called classism the systematic exploitation of poor/ low income people by the ruling/ owning class (the 1%).   Portugal, like all of Europe was just emerging from the economic system of Feudalism (“Dark Ages”) which was a slave based system – “serfs” - 90% of population were poor, landless people (all the land was owned by the ruling nobility).  Slavery of Europeans by Europeans was still a common practice.

4. It is important to step back and see this moment for what it is.  Zurara, framed an idea initiating skin color as a human hierarchy.  But did it need to be accepted?  Could the people of Portugal and Europe have rejected it?   As devoutly Christian peoples, a simple invocation of Christian principles:

“God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them”

“Do onto others as you want done onto you” Golden Rule

“Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself”

And other scriptures invoked in more recent times to correct the moral failings of racism, by Abolitionists, Revivalists and Martin Luther King Jr.

1455 Doctrine of Discovery - Pope Nicolas V issued the Papal Bull “Romanus Pontifex”  - As the most powerful person in Europe. 

1478  Spanish Inquisition -   The Pope (Sixtus IV) approved the establishment of the Spanish Inquisition.  Its purpose was to investigate the cleanliness of blood of Moorish (Dark skinned /Muslim) & Jewish converts to christianity.  Clean blood was christian & European, unclean was savage non-christian.  This was the establishment of white supremacy.  For the first time in the world, the concept of race based on blood was used as law.   White Supremacy allowed Europeans to accept the enslavement and extermination of “other” peoples.  The inquisition led to mass deportation of Jews  in 1492 and then Muslims.  A process that would be repeated.    It was Gods Will    (From ‘Exterminate All The Brutes’, 2019)

“Age of Exploration” or would “Exploitation” be more accurate?

This immature ideology of the “Virtuous” European (white), superior to the “Savage” others (Black, Indigenous) would expand from the Sub-Saharan African Slave trade to a global ideology driving the ‘discovery and conquest’ under Colonialism:

“The Age of Exploration” inspires visions of wonder and awe, a National Geographic or Jacques Cousteau adventure.  The distances and scope were magnificent, the undertakings dangerous and brutal.  But “exploration” they most certainly were not.  These were financial adventures backed by the ruling kings and queens of Europe with one goal in mind – acquiring wealth, specifically access to trade with India (spices), China (silk), gold and other resources.  The urgency was due to the loss of the over 1000-year-old “Silk Routes”, which had linked Asia and Europe in trading of not just material goods, but ideas.  This was severed by the rise of the Ottoman Empire (Muslims).

European during this period was struggling with internal conflicts – Reformation (1519), Rise of nations vs Rome Hapsburg empire creating the 80 Years War, Spanish Armada (1588) transferred the balance of European power from Hapsburg Spain/Portugal to England.

Spain continued to colonize large areas of Central & South America, Florida, reaching California (bringing African slaves in 1526).  Portugal colonized Brazil and a few Caribbean islands.  France claimed and colonized present-day Quebec and the Louisiana Territory.  England laid claim to the northeast part of North America (above Florida), but attempts to colonize failed.

1492 Taino people Invaded by Columbus (Spain) -  Columbus, as I was taught, was a noble, brave hero.   I was told he was searching for trade route to India (“Indians”) but discovered the Americas instead.  This myth is no longer being taught to my child.  The actual story of his cruel treatment of the Taino people, whom welcomed him in peace, but received demands for gold and goods, as well as slaves.   

He, as well as all other colonizers introduced diseases unfamiliar to the Indigenous peoples of the Americas - smallpox, measles, cholera & typhus which killed 80-95% of the Indigenous peoples. 

Watch:  Columbus in America (Full Documentary) - YouTube

1493 Doctrine of Discovery - Pope Alexander VI issued the Papal Bull “Inter Caetera”  - As the most powerful person in Europe. Establishing the moral (divine?) right to invade and control the land of non-christian people. The Bull stated that any land not inhabited by Christians was available to be "discovered," claimed, and exploited by Christian rulers and declared that "the Catholic faith and the Christian religion be exalted and be everywhere increased and spread, that the health of souls be cared for and that barbarous nations be overthrown and brought to the faith itself." This "Doctrine of Discovery" became the basis of all European claims in the Americas as well as the foundation for the United States’ western expansion. In the US Supreme Court in the 1823 case Johnson v. McIntosh, Chief Justice John Marshall’s opinion in the unanimous decision held "that the principle of discovery gave European nations an absolute right to New World lands." In essence, American Indians had only a right of occupancy, which could be abolished.

1607 Jamestown, Virginia:  The first viable English colony in North America.  A new life in the New World offered a glimmer of hope from the stagnant economy, state sanctioned religions and overcrowding of Europe, this explains how one-half to two-thirds of the immigrants who came to the American colonies arrived as ‘indentured servants’.  For the elites, it was an opportunity for gaining wealth from the resources of the Americas.

Indentured Servants typically worked seven to 14 years in exchange for passage, room, board, lodging and freedom dues. While the life of an indentured servant was harsh, restrictive and short (many died due to the harsh conditions), it was different from ‘slavery’ in a couple ways: it was a legally recognized contract under British Common law (mostly), they had some rights like the ability to marry, but pregnancy and maternity care added time to the contract.  For those that survived the work and received their freedom package, some had contracts which may have included up to 25 acres of land, a year's worth of corn, arms, a cow and new clothes. 

Slavery had neither British Common Law nor international law defining or protecting it.  The laws would be created in the Americas, mostly in terms of property and economic laws.  In the British colonies (of what would become the USA), they would be taken to new levels as racism evolved.

1619 - African slaves (Indentured servants) arrive in Virginia (Spain brought slaves to present day U.S. territory in 1526) on the “White Lion”. 

Anthony Johnson (“Antonio the Negroe”)- arrived on the White Lion (a pirate ship that had 20 Black slaves, which it traded for food) in Jamestown, Va. He bought his freedom and was given land by slave owner.  He would go on to create a successful Tobacco plantation of 250 acres, worked by many white indentured servants and 1 Black slave.  Upon his death, Virginia colony declared that as a negroe he was “alien” and all his families property and wealth was taken by the government.

1620  Mayflower – a Dutch vessel, only 35% Pilgrims on board.  Origin story of U.S. Thanksgiving, it was Indigenous tradition introduced by Wampanoag (Algonquin speaking).

The tribe helped the Pilgrims survive for their first Thanksgiving. They still regret it 400 years later.

Long marginalized and misrepresented in U.S. history, the Wampanoags are bracing for the 400th anniversary of the first Pilgrim Thanksgiving in 1621.

1624 Virginia - William Tucker was the first known Black person to be born in the 13 colonies. He was born in Jamestown, Virginia in 1624. According to BlackPast.org, his parents were indentured servants and part of the first group of Africans brought to colonial soil by Great Britain.

1633/34 - Small Pox epidemic kills 70% of Native Americans in New England.

1636/7 - Pequot War - first large scale conflict between settlers in Connecticut and Native Americans. Women, kids and enslaved experienced the greatest casualties.

1641 Massachusetts becomes the first colony to legalize slavery. This is done through the passage of the Body of Liberties. Under section 91 it states:

“There shall never be any bond slavery, villeinage, or captivity amongst us unless it be lawful captives taken in just wars, and such strangers as willingly sell themselves or are sold to us. And these shall have all the liberties and Christian usages which the law of God established in Israel concerning such persons cloth morally require. This exempts none from servitude who shall be judged thereto by authority.”

1662 Virginia Slave laws – The first law in recorded human history targeting a ‘race’ of people (“negroes”).  It effectively ended freedoms for Black people, reducing them to chattel.  Enslaving children of Black woman in perpetuity.

Laws of Virginia Act XII

Negro womens children to serve according to the condition of the mother.

“Whereas some doubts have arisen whether children got by any Englishman upon a Negro woman should be slave or free, be it therefore enacted and declared by this present Grand Assembly, that all children born in this country shall be held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother; and that if any Christian shall commit fornication with a Negro man or woman, he or she so offending shall pay double the fines imposed by the former act.”

1664 Maryland anti-miscegenation (having or pertaining to marriage, habitation & sexual relationships) law –legally punishes “British and other freeborn women who marry enslaved Negro men” by subjecting them and their children to servitude.  Note: this law did not outlaw marriages!  In fact, these marriages were not uncommon.  For the ruling, slaveholding elites (the 1%) they were intolerable.

“For as much as diverse freeborn English women forgetful of their free condition and to the disgrace of our nation do intermarry with Negro slaves by which also diverse suits may arise touching the [children] of such women and a great damage doth befall the Masters of such Negroes for prevention whereof for deterring such freeborn women from such shameful matches,

Be it further enacted by the authority advice and consent aforesaid that whatsoever freeborn woman shall intermarry with any slave from and after the last day of this present assembly shall serve the master of such slave during his life of her husband, and that the [children] of such freeborn women so married shall be slaves as their fathers were.  And be it further enacted that all the [children] of English or other freeborn women that have already married Negroes shall serve the masters of their parents til they be thirty years of age and no longer.”

“Coverture Laws” -  The English Common law, created in the 12th century, which gave men full legal control over their wives and children.  It included all decision making, assets and rights.  This included the right to discipline both, with some restrictions = the “rule of thumb” – A man could legally beat a woman or child with anything no larger than their thumb.   The husband/father had only one role to play – to Protect.  {This needs fact checking!}

1669 Virginia law - legalizing the killing of a human

Act 1: whereas the only law in force, for the punishment of refractory servants, resisting their master,  mistress or overseer, cannot be inflicted upon Negroes, nor the obstinacy of many of them, by other then violent means suppressed.  Be it enacted, and declared by this grand assembly, if any slave resists his master (or other by his masters order correcting him) and by the extremity of the correction, should chance to die that his death shall not be accompted felony, but the master (or that other person appointed by the master to punish him) be acquit from molestation, since it cannot be presumed malice (which alone makes murther felony), should induce any man to destroy his own estate.

1672 King Charles II of England granted monopoly power to the Royal African for 1,000 years controlling all trade with Africa - almost entirely the slave trade to the Caribbean & North America.  The Company was run by the Kings brother - the Duke of York and the King was to receive 10% of profits as well as the major shareholder.  The King was trying to break into the profits controlled by the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch & French.  The company would be deregulated in 1712 after multiple petitions by “independent” mariners and ports outside of London arguing their “freedom of trades are the fundamental point of English liberty”

White colonizer’s attitudes towards the Native Peoples expressed in documents from this time described them as “primitives”, “heathens”, “savages.”

1674/6 - King Philip War - series of events prior led to British attacking the Wampanoeg based on claim of defense against an attack.  In reality it was a pretext for a land grab.  The nation’s leader Osumekwen (great sage).  His son, Waemsuda, his son Metacam (Satchum = indigenous term for king & Squaw Satchum indigenous term for queen) anglicized his title to “King Philip.” 

The issues arising between the colonizers and Wampanoeg: The terms of “land deeds” (rent, usage or ownership) were based on English contracts, the English would often overextend them, in particular the grazing of their animals on Wampanoeg land.  Any charges of grievances had to be settled in English courts.  Court decisions favored the colonizers.

Fighting wide spread in New England.  Chief Metacam caught killed and head placed on a spike in Plymouth: 600 colonizers killed (5% of population), 1000s of Indigenous killed, 1000 enslaved, all others fleeing territory.  Edward Randolph investigated the war and reported a colonist saying it was a result of “Divine punishment for their own sinfulness”

1676 Virginia:  Bacon’s Rebellion - The alliance between European indentured servants and Africans (a mix of indentured, enslaved, and free Black People) disturbed the colonial upper class. They 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. 

1680 (approx.) - Black slaves outnumber white slaves in the British colonies.  More Black people in agriculture than whites, cleared more colonial land, produced more goods than whites in trade with Great Britain - 80% of all colonial exports.  Black slavery provided the productivity & wealth to the colonies but at great cost to humanity and morality. The exploitation and inhumanity must be considered.

1681 Maryland anti-miscegenation Law - prohibited the marriage of “WHITE” people to enslaved or indentured people.  The penalty was the loss of free status, becoming enslaved, as well as the enslavement of offspring (ref: 1662 Virginia law).  

This law was the first in human history - legally establishing skin color as a category (not class, nation of origin or condition of servitude).  The USA would be the only country in the world with such laws, until Nazi Germany and Apartheid South Africa, both of which studied the U.S. as precedent for their laws. 

This law and numerous other versions states enacted (Anti-Miscegenation) would be overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1967- Loving vs Virginia.  Alabama was last state to officially overturn them in 2000 (but 40% of Alabama citizens voted to keep it!)

Court records reveal this law to disproportionally target white women and Black/ Indigenous men.

“Divide & Conquer” was a strategy sent by the colonial elites to England to keep the colonies in order.

This began the monumental shift of thinking and actions of the ruling elites - from national origin (British) to “white” as a privileged class, elevating “whiteness” on the social hierarchy.  This tactic dividing humans who shared more in common in their collective struggle for a better life for themselves and families.  The pace at which these divisions would be created quickly accelerated. 

1682 Virginia’s legislature (House of Burgesses) passed a law on citizenship and land ownership: explicitly limiting citizenship to “Europeans”, while “Negroes, Moors, Mollatoes, and Indians [are] slaves to all intents and purposes”

1691 Virginia legally forbids ‘British and other white men and women’ from marrying humans of African descent (court records show this overwhelmingly targeted white women, mostly indentured):

“Be it enacted…that…whatsoever English or other white man or woman being free, shall intermarry with a negro, mulatto or Indian man or woman bond or free shall within three months after such marriage be banished and removed from this dominion forever…

“Black Codes” (state laws) for Free and enslaved Black people enacted in all states, which restricted or prohibited:  voting, holding public office, testifying in courts, keeping & bearing arms, exercise of free speech, assembly (vagrancy & loitering laws, sunset provisions), commerce (where, what, how), vocation (jobs allowed to work), property ownership, housing, marriage, education, travel, immigration (i.e. in 1800s Indiana, Oregon allowed only short term visit, no residency, those who overstayed were punished by fines and lashings). 

         Some of these laws are still in existence, new ones are currently being created {i.e. voter disenfranchisement and crime legislation which target Black & LatinX people} many persist in the minds of people today.

1696 South Carolina slave code (taken from Barbados 1661 laws) – ‘Any person, carrying out a punishment of a slave, who in the process causes the death of the slave, shall NOT be charged with a crime.’

1698 South Carolina - Edward  Ball (Ernests cousin)  Elias Ball - one of the largest slaveholders in South Carolina (est. 3k) to work his lucrative rice plantation.  Charleston was entry point for 40% of US slaves.  It was a state with more slaves than white people, hence “negro country”.     1/3 of all slaves dead in 1 year,  2/3 of children dead by 16.

1705 Massachusetts – becomes the 3rd state to enact anti-miscegenation laws forbidding both marriage and intimate relations between Black/ Indigenous people and Whites (repealed in 1843).

1730 Mary Astell publishes - “Some Reflections Upon Marriage” Inspired by philosopher John Locke, she questioned the inequities women experienced.

1731 Anthony Benezet, a white Quaker, abolitionist, and educator, began a night school to teach slave and free Blacks.  He is credited with creating the first public school for African American children in 1773.

1735 Science:  Carl Linnaeus (Sweden b1707-d1778) - established the first system of taxonomy of all living things still in use today:  Kingdom, {Phylum added later}, Class, Order, {Family added later}, Genus, Species.  He was responsible for naming our species “ Homo Sapien” = “Wise Man” in 1758.

He locked in the racial hierarchy of humankind in “Systema Naturae”. He color-coded the races as White, Yellow, Red, and Black. He attached each race to one of the four regions of the world and described their characteristics. The Linnaeus taxonomy became the blueprint that nearly every race maker followed and that race makers still follow today. And, of course, these were not simply neutral categories, because races were never meant to be neutral categories. Racist power created them for a purpose.   His were based on physical characteristics and personal impressions.

   1. ‘Homo sapien europaeus’ at the top of the racial hierarchy, making up the most superior character traits. He thought they were fair, gentle, acute and inventive.  “Vigorous, muscular. Flowing blond hair. Blue eyes. Very smart, inventive. Covered by tight clothing. Ruled by law.”

   2. ‘Homo sapien asiaticus’: “Melancholy, stern. Black hair; dark eyes. Strict, haughty, greedy. Covered by loose garments. Ruled by opinion.”

   3. Homo sapien americanus a mixed set of attributes: “Ill-tempered, impassive. Thick straight black hair; wide nostrils; harsh face; beardless. Stubborn, contented, free. Paints himself with red lines. Ruled by custom.”

   4. At the bottom of the racial hierarchy, Linnaeus positioned homo sapien after (African): “Sluggish, lazy. Black kinky hair. Silky skin. Flat nose. Thick lips. Females with genital flap and elongated breasts. Crafty, slow, careless. Covered by grease. Ruled by caprice.”

PERSONAL:  By the time I entered middle school in the 1980s, I was taught there were 3 races of humans: Caucasoid, Mongoloid and Negroid.  The hierarchy was gone, but the impression it left was very much the same.  History matters today!

1738  A group of newly freed Black men and women founded the town Gracia Real De Santa Teresa De Mose, Florida. Just two miles away from St. Augustine, it's considered to be the first-ever free Black settlement in the U.S., but was abandoned following the Seven Years' War in 1763.

1739  Stono Slave Uprising in South Carolina– one of the most violent uprising by Black slaves in colonial America, 20 white colonizers killed.

1740  South Carolina Reacts to Stono Uprising with brutal new racist laws.  It was a 58 chapter law oppressing slaves called the “Negro Act”.  Once passed the state justified the laws “so that the slave may be kept in due subjugation and obedience”   One law stating: “No assembly of Negroes for the purpose of dancing or other meriment shall take place … If any Negroe singing aloud receive such a number of stripes {whipping}” another, making it illegal for enslaved Africans to move freely, assemble in groups, grow food, earn money or learn to read and write.

1758 Science:  Carl Linnaeus (Sweden b1707-d1778) - established the first system of taxonomy of all living things still in use today:  Kingdom, {Phylum added later}, Class, Order, {Family added later}, Genus, Species.  He was responsible for naming our species “ Homo Sapien” = “Wise Man” in 1758.

In the first edition of Systema Naturae (1735), Linnaeus subdivided the human species into four varieties: "Europæus albesc[ens]" (whitish European), "Americanus rubesc[ens]" (reddish American), "Asiaticus fuscus" (tawny Asian) and "Africanus nigr[iculus]" (blackish African).[187][188] In the tenth edition of Systema Naturae (1758) he further detailed phenotypical characteristics for each variety, based on the concept of the four temperaments from classical antiquity,[189][dubious – discuss] and changed the description of Asians' skin tone to "luridus" (yellow).[190]While Linnaeus believed that these varieties resulted from environmental differences between the four known continents,[191] the Linnean Society acknowledges that his categorization's focus on skin color and later inclusion of cultural and behavioral traits cemented colonial stereotypes and provided the foundations for scientific racism.[192]Additionally, Linnaeus created a wastebasket taxon "monstrosus" for "wild and monstrous humans, unknown groups, and more or less abnormal people".[193].

1765 London, England - A slave teen, Jonathan Strong was brought to a hospital pistol whipped by his master and thrown out into street.  A passerby took him to hospital and he was free.  However, 2 years later he was abducted and was to be shipped out into slave trade.  Granville Sharp, a lawyer, defended him asking the British court, that as a human (Strong) deserved legal protection under English law.  He WON.

1773 Literature:  Phillis Wheatley was the first African American to publish a book of poetry, “Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral”, in 1773. Born in Gambia and sold to the Wheatley family in Boston when she was 7 years old, Wheatley was emancipated shortly after her book was released.

1775 - Prince Hall creates the first Black Freemason Grand Lodge.  Growing into a national fraternal order with 62 chapters.  Unlike churches, these had auxiliary organizations for women, led by women!

1775 Science (pseudo):  Human taxonomy Scientist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (German b1752-d1840) published On the Natural Varieties of Mankind.  Using his research on the 85 skulls in the Gottingen University collection, he determined there were five varieties of humans.  The skull he found most beautiful was a woman’s skull from the Caucasus mountains.  He determined it to be representative of Europeans (white) people.   He coined the term “Caucasian” to describe white Europeans (1795) in his book.  His ranking of humans, based on skulls, skin color and ‘beauty’ were key factors.

1. Caucasian or white race - Europeans

2. Mongolian or yellow race including all East Asians and some Central Asians

3. Malayan or brown race – including Southeast Asia and Pacific Islanders

4. Ethiopian of black race – sub-Saharan Africans

5. American or red race – Indigenous peoples of the Americas.

      Blumenbach was not a monster, he campaigned against slavery, had a section of his personal library for Black authors (Phillis Wheatley a favorite of his).  He noted ‘Many Caucasian nations could not boast so fine a set of authors and scholars as black Africa has produced under the most depressing circumstances of prejudice and slavery.”  Blumenbach wrote a number of essays (unpopular) promoting non-white people’s capabilities in excelling in arts and science in reaction against racialists of his time.  He concluded that African’s were not inferior to the rest of mankind, “concerning healthy faculties of understanding, excellent natural talents and mental capacities.”

This pseudo-science was taught in most prestigious universities around the world from Oxford to Harvard.

         {See U.S. Supreme Court decision 1923 United States vs Bhagat Singh Thind involving “Caucasian”)

1775 Lord Dunmore -British commander in Virginia, granted freedom to any male slave who joined the British.  Thousands joined and given a badge “Liberty to slaves”.  In 1783, retreating from NY in defeat, they kept their word and took the former slaves to freedom.

1776 July 4 – United States Declaration of Independence – written by Thomas Jefferson to formally break from Great Britain.  The War of Independence would be fought until 1783 using state militias.

“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.”

                    Discuss: Thomas Jefferson -“Slavery is a poison which is getting at the heart of the American experiment”. Thomas Jefferson, yet he kept his slaves and the lavish lifestyle they afforded him despite being insolvent (over $100k in debt).  Sally Hemings relationship/rape!

1777 U.S. Government:  Articles of Confederation established by the Second Continental Congress to form the new government of the United States.  Due to its weak positioning of the Federal government, giving most power to states, it would be replaced by the US Constitution in 1788.

1777  Vermont abolishes slavery, but does not strongly enforce the act.  It was not formerly a state, it became 14th state in 1791.

1780  Pennsylvania - First state to begin gradual abolishment of slavery.  Children of slaves were to be free, their parents to remain as slaves for life.  Most northern U.S. states would pass similar laws to eliminate slavery.

1787 U.S. Constitutional Convention – The creation of the U.S. Constitution (Madison drafted based on all Founders inputs).  This is the most important document in the United States, this is true of the constitutions for all other countries.  It established the laws of the nation and define the new nation.  It is the oldest existing national charter in existence to this day. 

How this document is interpreted, primarily by the 9 Supreme Court justices, determines what can and cannot be in U.S. society:  From civil rights, citizenship, voting rights, marriage rights, property rights to the words we say.  It is used to define us as a society.

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence,[note 1] promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Article 1, section 2

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.

This was required by Southern Slave holders to allow them greater representation (power) in the House of Representatives.  The 3/5s compromise, increased their states population and thus number of Representatives.  The Senate was a set 2 Senators per state (which has granted undue influence of smaller populated states versus less populated.  Given the heightened powers granted to the Senate, this is a source of conflict and inequity.

“Slave” & “Slavery” was consciously, deliberately avoided in the framing instead it used “such Persons”:

Article 1, section 9

The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a Tax or duty may be imposed on such Importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each Person.

This section indirectly sets the end of the slave trade, importing of slaves into the United States, on 1808 (at which time, then President Thomas Jefferson signed it into law, but not strictly enforced).

Article 2, section 1, Clause2

Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector.

This established the Elector College, still used today.  The President is indirectly elected by this means as a solution to the 3/5s representation afforded to slave holders and indentured servants. 

1788 United States:  1st Federal Election - General George Washington elected President.  The new democracy had a voter participation rate of 6% of the population - only white, property owning, men were allowed to vote.

1790  U.S. Congress:  - the 1st U.S. Congresses passes Naturalization & Immigration Act:

 “That any alien, being a free white person, may be admitted to become a citizen of the United States”. 

      This law determined who had rights and who did NOT.  Who could be eligible to vote and shape the direction for the country.  Who was to be protected by the Constitution and the legal system versus who was DENIED those protections.  Who could have access to the benefits afforded citizens by the U.S. Government.

    U.S. population in 1790 = 3.9m people/ 600k slaves/ ? indentured servants (white)

1791 U.S. Congress:  Dec 15. US Bill of Rights ratified (introduced in 1789) 1-10 Amendments

Rights guaranteed to the people. (Madison/Mason)

1791 Haitian Uprising - Slaves rebel against French and take control.  The U.S. did not acknowledge or support the new nation, but the U.S. south grew fearful of impacts.

1792  U.S. Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson claimed that the ‘doctrine of discovery’ was international law which was applicable to the new United States government as well.[26]  https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/doctrine_of_discovery

1792 Literature:  Mary Wollstonecraft publishes “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman”

1793 U.S. Congress:  Fugitive Slave Act - providing the return of enslaved people from one state in the US to another.  Abridging states’ rights.

1794 Eli Whitney gets patent on Cotton Gin

US exports of cotton:

1790 = 3,000 bales

1810 = 178,000 bales

1860 = 4 million bales

1796 Science (pseudo): Franz Joseph Gall (Germany b1758-d1828) develops “cranioscopy,” which is later renamed “phrenology” by his disciple Johann Spurzheim (Germany b1776-d1832).  Spurzheim would spread this pseudoscience around the world.  Phrenology studied human skulls to determine personality traits and character traits - intellectual, artistic and moral disposition.  It enhanced white supremacy thinking by glorifying Caucasian skulls over “lesser races”.  They argued that through education and interbreeding “lesser peoples” could improve. It also stereotyped women by mansplaining that they did not have the mental faculties for the arts and science, but they were predisposed for care of children and religion.  Adherents of this science determined women were not fit for citizenship or participation in politics.

1799 Science (pseudo): Charles White advances “empirical” evidence of polygenism - separate biological beginnings for each racial group. As well as a hierarchy with whites on top and blacks on bottom.  All based on skull size, depth of jaw, length of arm, angle of occipital lobe.  Declaring ‘each race was a separate species, divinely created with specific immutable traits.’

1803 U.S. Congress:  Louisiana Purchase from France ($15m), not from the Indigenous People, doubling the size of the United States.

1808 U.S. Government - Law banning the importation of slavery (as declared in the Constitution) signed by President Thomas Jefferson.  Enforcement was weak and the importation of slaves would last until Civil War.  Note:  At this time, Virginia’s #1 export was slaves to other states.

1810 – 1850: The Underground Railroad - an estimated 100,000 enslaved people escaped to the North via the Underground Railroad from 1810 to 1850.

1820 U.S. Congress:  Missouri Compromise - Allowed the admission of Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state, but prohibited slavery north of 36’30’ line in land obtained in the Louisiana Purchase (1803).

1820 - 1851 Science (pseudo): Samuel Morton (Quaker) followed White in studying skulls determining a hierarchy of intellectual abilities based on race.

1821 Religion:  Rise of Charles Grandison Finney - Lawyer who became Presbyterian revivalist after vision of Jesus, supporting the “Second Great Awakening” (start early 1800s) Leading to ‘Protestant Work Ethic’ - be a good Christian, work hard, save money, frugal, defer gratification, foregoing worldly pleasures, personal responsibility are virtues (Ben Franklin).  Feeding a virtuous life and the obsession with business.  Your salvation can be affected by your daily actions (in contradiction to Calvinist predestiny).  Anti-slavery and pro-women’s rights.

1823 U.S. Supreme Court: Johnson v McIntosh -  The ‘doctrine of discovery’ was expounded by the United States Supreme Court in a series of decisions, most notably Johnson v. McIntosh in 1823. In that case, Chief Justice John Marshallheld that under generally accepted principles of international law:

Discovery of lands previously unknown to Europeans gave the discovering nation title to that land against all other European nations, and this title could be perfected by possession.  The nation discovering that land had "the sole right of acquiring the soil from the natives, and establishing settlements upon it."

On discovery, the sovereignty of the indigenous peoples and their rights to sell their land were diminished, but their right of occupancy remained.  The discovering nation, having ultimate title to the land, had the right to sell the land of indigenous peoples, subject to the latter's right of occupancy.   This ultimate title of the discovering nation (in this case Britain) passed to the individual states after the Declaration of Independence, then to the United States in 1789.[27]

1827  New York:  slavery abolished, but NYC would continue to profit from slavery through financing, insuring and futures trading in its products.

1828 Science (pseudo): George Combe publishes The Constitution of Man Considered in Relation to External Objects, linking phrenology and racial comparison.

1829 Cincinnati Terrorism- Whites attack  Black residents causing +50% of Black population to flee the city.

1830s - 1850s. Colored Convention movement - local, statewide and national.  First gathering in Philadelphia 1830.  These were mostly political gatherings to discuss the fate and place of African Americans in the US, they sought justice beyond the emancipation of their enslaved countrymen: they also organized to discuss labor, health care, temperance, emigration, voting rights, the right to a trial by jury, and educational equality.

1830 U.S. Congress: “Indian Removal Act” - Forced Indigenous peoples west of the Mississippi (into Louisiana Purchase territory of the U.S.)

1831  Virginia:  Nat Turner led a slave revolt with more than 70 Black slaves in a “campaign of total annihilation” of white slave owners.  Killing approximately 60 slave owners, their wives and children. 

· Remembering the legacy of Nat Turner’s slave rebellion (WNYC)

1831  “The Liberator” first published by William Lloyd Garrison - Abolitionist, suffragist, social reformer and proponent of non-violence.

1832 U.S. Supreme Court:  Worcester vs Georgia - Chief Justice Marshall’s court sided with the Cherokee nation in blocking the removal of Cherokee people (from Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee) from their land.  President Andrew Jackson responded “John Marshall has made his ruling, now let him enforce it” his actual words to Brigadier General John Coffee were: “The decision of the supreme court has fell still born, and they find that it cannot coerce Georgia to yield to its mandate, which gave the green light to Georgia to occupy the Cherokee land, force new treaties upon them and in winter of 1838 forced them off their land in which 4k died on the “Trail of Tears.”

1832 Science (pseudo): Johann Gaspar Spurzheim invigorates the American phrenology movement with his series of lectures in Boston.

1833  British Empire formally ended slavery (returning to indentured servitude – primarily in India - until it was prohibited in 1917)

1833 U.S. Congress:   Federal law passed abolishing the imprisonment of debtors.

1835 U.S. Economy:  cotton made up 55% of all exports from the country.

1835 - 1858 Seminole Wars - most expensive US military campaign until Civil War.  Fought to kill Native Americans harboring runaway slaves.

1836, cotton (as agriculture product) was 5% of the $1.5 B US GDP, but roughly 50% of GDP directly or indirectly tied to cotton production and the 1m slaves (6% of pop) that toiled in labor camps. (incl. slave value, slave markets, land acquisition, tools/ clothing/ food, transportation/exportation, financiers and their credit/derivatives, insurance, factories (Lowell), policing, luxury goods purchased by enslavers (merchants)

1837 - James Piquene Smith - 1st African American doctor.

1837 Pennsylvania – Cheyney University becomes the first Black college (HBCU) in the United States.

1839 - Amistad -Slave revolt on the slave ship Amistad.  53 enslaved people from Sierra Leone and 2 whites (ship captain,1st Mate). US Navy found the ship and brought it to New Haven.  The US supreme court (1841) with John Quincy Adams defending them, decided 7-1 they had natural rights to freedom.

New Orleans:  heart of slave trade -1/2 mil slaves sold 1800-1850 - business worth $2billion to Southern economy.  The over production of cotton was destroying the land, pushing the industry and slavery westward, clashing with antislavery North and the Missouri Compromise.  Invention of Power Loom leads to industrial revolution mill towns in the north (Lowell, Ma.) to further profit from the abundant raw material.  Leading to further labor exploitation (immigrants, women, children).  Homemade clothing replaced by “ready-made” fashion industry.   The Industrial Revolution.

1842 U.S. Supreme Court:   Prigg vs Pennsylvania – was a United States Supreme Court case in which the court held that the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 precluded a Pennsylvania state law that prohibited Black people from being taken out of the free state of Pennsylvania into slavery. The Court overturned the conviction of slave catcher Edward Prigg for violating Pa. law. 

1844 Science (pseudo):   Scottish publisher Robert Chambers releases his Vestiges of the Natural History of Mankind, the most popular work of natural history prior to Darwin’s Origin of Species. Chambers argues that each race represents a different stage of human evolution with whites being the most evolved.

1845 New Orleans - First Black writers anthology published.  It was in French and it was about Love.

1846 Science (pseudo): Louis Agassiz scholar of Natural History emigrates to US from Switz. strong advocate of polygenism. Polygenism is a theory of human origins which posits the view that the human races are of different origins (polygenesis). This view is opposite to the idea of monogenism, which posits a single origin of humanity. Modern scientific views find little merit in any polygenic model due to an increased understanding of speciation in a human context, with the monogenic "Out of Africa" hypothesis and its variants being the most widely accepted models for human origins.[1] Polygenism has historically been heavily used in service of white supremacist ideas and practices, denying a common origin between European and non-European peoples.  Agassiz taught at Harvard, and most famous scientist in the US in 1850s.

1847 US invasion of Mexico (Polk) started by Texas slaver encroachment, ended with US military conquering Mexico City.  Discussions of annexing Mexico were dismissed by Senator Calhoun of S.C. (former VP) “ we have never dreamed of incorporating into our union any, but the Caucasian race more than half of the Mexicans are Indians, and the other is composed, chiefly of mixed tribes ….Ours, sir is the government of the white race”.  Instead demanded Gadsden & SoCal.

1848 Seneca Falls Convention - “Declaration of Sentiments” Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, etc. (Frederick Douglas was invited observer)

1849 Boston MA.:  Sarah Roberts vs City of Boston.  A case brought by parents of 5-year-old Sarah, to allow her entry into their neighborhood white school.  They sued after the Boston Primary School Committee refused to submit to the petitioners’ demands, using racist language to confirm the need for separate schooling of White and Black schoolchildren. They argued that Black schoolchildren’s “peculiar physical, mental, and moral structure, requires an educational treatment, different, in some respects, from that of white children.”

Robert Summer, first Black lawyer in MA., and Charles Sumner (abolitionist) argued “ The separation of the schools, so far from being for the benefit of both races, is an injury to both. It tends to create a feeling of degradation in the blacks, and of prejudice and uncharitableness in the whites.”

The court ruled in school districts favor, but 5 years later the city of Boston voted to desegregate public schools.

1850 U.S. Congress:  Fugitive Slave Law - allows south to hunt escaped slaves in the north, as well as by decree take free northern Blacks

1850s Virginia - Mary Peak secretly (illegally) teaches Black slave children to read and write.  In Georgia, Suzy King Taylor doing the same.  And many more.  After Civil War, their efforts would take off - legally.  From single room schools, to HBCUs, to literary societies, informal social clubs to Black theaters and Black societies launching an idealism/ optimism in Black achievement.

1850 Mississippi:  More millionaires per capita in Natchez MI then anywhere in world.

3/4 of global cotton produced in south (white gold), domination resulting from invention of Cotton Gin - Eli Whitney 1794, which allowed output to skyrocket (50x more productive than human hands).  The invention boosted the south reliance on slavery.  (In 1830, South controlled 1/2 of global production.) 

1850 – 1960 France:  Began second phase of colonialism “Mission Civilisatrice” (The Civilizing Mission).  'Civilizing' the populations of Africa through spreading language and religion, were used as justifications for many of the practices that came with the French colonial project. In 1884, the leading proponent of colonialism, Jules Ferry, declared; "The higher races have a right over the lower races, they have a duty to civilize the inferior races."

1850  Lucy Stanton graduated from Oberlin College with a literary degree, becoming the first Black woman in America to earn a four-year college degree.

1851 Washington D.C. – University of D.C. becomes the second Black college (HBCU) in the United States.

1852 Literature:   ‘Uncle Toms Cabin’ by Harriet Beecher Stowe, most read book since Bible.  Advocating the abolition of slavery.  It created quite a bit of sympathy for Abolitionist and blowback from slaveholders & white supremacists.  When Lincoln met her during the Civil War, he is reported to have told her, ‘so you are the little lady that started this war’.   Her main character, Uncle Tom, was based on the true story of Josiah Henson (1789-1883) as published in his 1848 autobiography.  His life story is extraordinary and worthy of pursuing.

1852 Science (pseudo): American physician James W. Redfield writes Comparative Physiognomy, which equates each type of people with a specific animal.

1853 Science (pseudo): French thinker Arthur Comte Gobineau publishes ‘An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Race’, arguing for the primacy of the Aryan race.

1853 Literature:  William Wells Brown publishes “Clotel” (or The President’s Daughter).  The first novel published by an African American.  It was written by abolitionist and lecturer William Wells Brown.

1854 U.S. Congress:  Kansas Nebraska Act - upends the Missouri Compromise (1820) which outlawed slavery north of 36’30’ line (except Missouri) with the status of slavery instead decided based on "popular sovereignty" - the citizens of each territory, rather than the U.S. Congress, would determine whether slavery would be allowed, reopening the expansion of slavery.

1854 Pennsylvania – Lincoln University becomes the third Black college (HBCU) in the United States.

1854 Science (pseudo): Josiah Nott & George Gliddon (slave owners) published “Types of Mankind”- advancing theological racism, postulating Creation of Adam / Eve were white, God placed other lowly races in separate provinces.

1856 Ohio – Wilberforce University becomes the fourth Black college (HBCU) in the United States.

1857 U.S. Supreme Court:  Dred Scott vs Sandford - Dred Scott arguing for his freedom since his ‘master’, a surgeon, took him from Missouri (slave state) to Wisconsin (free state).  The decision by C.J. Taney that negroes were “beings of an inferior order”, “unfit to associate with the white race” and “so far inferior that they had no rights with which the white man was to respect”.  Using “Originalism” = interpreting the meaning from Framers of Constitution perspective, they were never meant to be citizens.  As such, Dred Scott had no right to bring the case for his freedom.  One of the worst decisions ever made by Supreme Court

1859 John Brown (radical, abolitionist, crusader) & his sons lead raid to free all slaves thru rebellion by taking over US armory at Harpers Ferry.  He expected slaves to join, but none joined.  Robert E Lee leads US forces to retake.

1859 Literature:  Harriet E. Wilson publishes “Our Nig”.  The first African American to publish a novel in the U.S..  She did so by leaving the byline anonymous.

1859 Science: Charles Darwin releases the first edition of On the Origin of Species. 

 “At the height of slavery the combined value of all enslaved people was greater than that of all the banks, the railroads and all the factories of the United States of America.  The enslaved workforce was where the wealth of the nation resided.”   Source: 1619 Project

“At the time of the Civil War, the value of enslaved people held as property was worth more than the nations railroads and factories combined”.   Source:  Baptist, The Half has Never Been Told pg.254

1860 - Yearly Cotton Production reached 2.3 billion pounds (in 1790 it was 1.5 million) making up 60% of all US exports.   Value of enslaved people worth $3.5 billion (in 2018 currency).  Number of enslaved people est. 4 million

1860 - Last Trans-Atlantic Slave ship to enter the U.S. -  The schooner Clotilda (often misspelled Clotilde) was the last known U.S. slave ship to bring captives from Africa to the United States, arriving at Mobile Bay, in autumn of 1859[1] or July 9, 1860, with 110 African men, women, and children.[4] commemorated in Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon.  It was deliberately sunk upstream in Mississippi to hide the evidence.

1860 Abraham Lincoln elected President.   When voters agreed with Lincoln and elected him to the presidency in 1860, southerners tried to create their own nation based on human inequality. As Georgia Senator Alexander Stephens, soon to be the vice president of the Confederacy, explained in March 1861: “Our new government is founded…upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”  Months before Lincoln’s inauguration, South Carolina seceded from union (all slave states follow after):

"Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union".

•  the Northern states were failing to return fugitive slaves, in violation of their obligations under Article Four of the Constitution.

•  the Northern states tolerated abolitionists and insurrectionists (such as John Brown) who incited slaves in the South to rebel.

•  misguided political and religious beliefs in the North made future sectional unity impossible.

•  some states were elevating persons "incapable of becoming citizens" {i.e. free Blacks} and using their votes to support anti-slavery policies.

•  the Republican Party was planning to wage a war against slavery upon taking office in March 1861.”

   The Declaration asserted that the Northern states had combined in league to subvert the original scope of the Constitution -- namely that: they were entitled to own slaves.

State of Mississippi followed with its secession statement: “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery – the greatest material interest of the world”

Louisiana’s secession statement: “The people of the slave holding states are bound together by the same necessity and determination to preserve African slavery.”

Texas’s secession statement: “That the servitude of the African race, as existing in these states, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free”

Alabama’s secession statement: “The election of Mr. Lincoln cannot be regarded otherwise… than a solemn declaration on the part of a great majority of the northern people of hostility to the south, her property, and her institutions”

Georgia’s secession statement: “They have endeavored to weaken our security, to disturb our domestic peace and tranquility, and persistently refused to comply with their express constitutional obligations to us in reference to that property” [slaves]

1861 New York:  Mayor Fernando Wood (Dem.) a longtime proponent of the south and slavery, opposed to Abraham Lincoln (& later the 13th Amendment) proposed to the NYC Council that it should declare itself an independent city-state in order to continue its profitable cotton trade with the Confederate States. 

1861-65 United States Civil War

At the time of the Civil War, the value of enslaved people held as property was worth more than the nation’s railroads and factories combined.   {source: Baptist, The Half has Never Been Told pg254}

1862 U.S. Congress: Homestead Act - Greatest public land give away in human history- 10% of USA given away in parcels of 25 acres for Just a $10 filing fee.  This was the first of 5 acts: followed by 1867 Act (this act explicitly included Black people), 1873 Act, 1904 Act & 1916 Act.   1/4 was granted to single women and formerly enslaved.   Despite discriminatory practices it was the main reason by 1900 that 1/4 of Black Americans owned land.

1862 U.S. Military:   Gen. Ulysses Grant enacted “General Orders No. 11” expelling all Jews from their homes in Tennessee.  He insisted he had to ‘control Jewish peddlers’. President Lincoln quickly rescinded orders, but some Jewish people were removed from their homes.

1862 President/ U.S. Congress:  “Compensated Emancipation Act” A commission established to compensate slave owners for the slaves freed in D.C., paying up to $300 ($7k in 2018 value).  After 9 months, 900 slave owners paid $1 million for “lost property.”

1863 New York:  New York City Draft Riot - The largest civil and most racially charged urban disturbance in American history.  White working-class men discontent with the US Congress draft to fight in the Civil War, fearful of Black men taking over their jobs and angered by the wealthy elite who could pay $300 fee ($6,300 in 2020) to avoid the war, attacked Black people across Manhattan - killing an est. 120 Black citizens and injuring 2,000, destroying: Black homes, orphanages, churches, public buildings.  A result of this violence, many Black Manhattan residents moved to Brooklyn.

1863  Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation

President Lincoln introduced his administration to the country as one which would faithfully catch, hold and return runaway slaves to their masters. He avowed his determination to protect and defend the slaveholder’s right to plunder the black laborer of his hard earnings. Europe was assured by Mr. Seward that no slave should gain his freedom by this war. Both the President and the Secretary of State would evolve their thinking.

Our generals, at the beginning of the war, were horribly proslavery. They took to slave catching and slave killing like ducks to water. They are now very generally and very earnestly in favor of putting an end to slavery. Some, like Hunter and Butler, because they hated slavery on its own account, and others, because slavery is in arms against the government.

Our chief danger lies in the absence of all moral feeling in the utterances of our rulers. In his letter to Mr. Greeley the President told the country virtually that the abolition or non-abolition of slavery was a matter of indifference to him. He would save the Union with slavery or without slavery. In his last Message he shows the same moral indifference, by saying as he does say that he had hoped that the rebellion could be put down without the abolition of slavery.  

I end where I began—no war but an Abolition war; no peace but an Abolition peace; liberty for all, chains for none; the black man a soldier in war, a laborer in peace; a voter at the South as well as at the North; America his permanent home, and all Americans his fellow countrymen. Such, fellow citizens, is my idea of the mission of the war. If accomplished, our glory as a nation will be complete, our peace will flow like a river, and our foundation will be the everlasting rocks.

Frederick Douglas 1864 “The Mission of the War” at the Woman’s Loyal League

1864 Science (pseudo): Herbert Spencer coins the phrase “survival of the fittest” in developing his theories of social Darwinism.  Scientific Racism

June 19, 1865 – Juneteenth – The last slaves in the south (Texas) were informed by Union soldiers of their freedom from slavery due to the Emancipation Proclamation.

1865 U.S. Congress:  13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution - abolished slavery & Indentured servitude.

1865 U.S. Government:  In an act of reparations, General Sherman ordered “40 acres & a mule” land grants to the emancipated slaves (at least to 100k former enslaved men = 4m acres of land).  This land was to come from the coastal areas of Georgia and South Carolina.  Parcels were awarded, but then soon revoked.  President Johnson rescinded the deal.

1865 Atlanta, GA. – Clark Atlanta University becomes the first Black college (HBCU) in the South, 5th in the United States.

1865 Science (pseudo): French anthropologist Paul Broca develops his “table chromatique” for classifying skin color.

1866 Nashville, TN. – Fisk University [“Freed Colored School”] established as a Black college (HBCU).

1866 Science (pseudo): Physician John Downs defines “Mongolian idiocy” which he argues is a regression to the “Oriental stage” of human development.

1866  Ku Klux Klan (KKK) formed in Tennessee, spreads quickly across the US southern states and into northern US states & territories.

1867 U.S. Congress:   “Reconstruction Acts” (4 Acts) - passed by Congress to readmit the rebel states.  All 4 vetoed by President Johnson, but Congress overrode his vetoes.  They placed the South under Federal Government military, required them to ratify the 13th & 14th Amendments and required to rewrite their state constitutions.  These opened a 10-year window of time for Black American Men to participation in the U.S. political system: 2,000 of whom would be elected to political offices: 2 elected to the U.S. Senate, 14 elected to U.S. House of Representatives.  They were allowed to vote (not free of violence from white supremacists).   The Black Politicians of Reconstruction | The History You Didn't Learn - YouTube

1867 Washington D.C. – Howard University established as a Black college (HBCU).

1867 Atlanta, GA. – Morehouse College established as a Black college (HBCU).

1868 Memphis - white massacre of 46 Black people, 91 houses, 4 churches and 12 schools were burned to the ground.

1868 Virginia – Hampton Institute (University) established as a Black college (HBCU).

1868  U.S. Congress:  14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution -

Section 1.

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

1869 U.S. Executive Branch:  Transcontinental Railroad completed (ordered by Lincoln).  Sacramento to Omaha 2k miles thru Sierra Nevadas.  Union Pacific Railroad Company from the East, Central Pacific Railroad Company from the West.  Cost $2b in modern $s, they were paid in LAND, they would gain land equal in size to Texas!  1,500 Chinese killed in the process (explosions/landslides). 

1869 African Methodist Episcopal Church (A.M.E.) founded by Rev. Richard Allen in Nashville TN.  the first independent Protestant denomination to be founded by Black people. It evolved from long standing Black churches that had tired of discrimination from the white controlled Episcopal organization.

1869 Science (pseudo): Francis Galton publishes Hereditary Genius, outlining his theories on human breeding.  He was a proponent of social Darwinism, eugenics and scientific racism (cousin of Charles Darwin).  (Knighted in 1903 by King Edward VII of England) 

1870 U.S. Congress:  15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution – granting all male citizens of the U.S. the right to vote regardless of “race, color or previous conditions of servitude”

1870 U.S. Congress:   Naturalization Act (first update since 1790), granting citizenship to "aliens of African nativity and to persons of African descent" while also maintaining exclusion of the process to naturalized Chinese Americans and other groups

1870 U.S. Congress:   Joseph Hayne Rainey (1832- America’s first elected Black congressman representing South Carolina in the House of Representatives.  He successfully served in the role for 10 years.  He was responsible for establishing the Republican party in South Carolina in 1866.  He was elected in 1868 as a state senator.  He was born into slavery, but his father (working as a barber) earned enough money to buy his families freedom in 1840

1870 U.S. Congress:   Jefferson Franklin Long (1836-1901) 2nd elected Black American to U.S. House of Representatives for Georgia.  Born into slavery, gaining his freedom from the Emancipation Proclamation.  A Self-educated entrepreneur.  His election was a long shot in white majority Georgia, but he prevailed.  His attempts to get Black voters to the polls was meant by white mob violence and claims of voter fraud by white Georgians.

1870 U.S. Congress:   Hiram Rhodes Revels (1827-1901) elected the first Black Senator for Mississippi.  Born in North Carolina to free Black parents and ancestors free since before the American Revolution.  He was a great orator for the equality of Blacks.  He was the first Black American to serve in Congress (sworn in months before Rep. Rainey)

1871  Los Angeles:  Chinese Massacre - 20 Chinese people killed

1871 U.S. Congress:   anti-miscegenation Amendments were proposed in United States Congress in 1871, then again in 1912, 1913 and 1928- clearly all failed.

1872  U.S. Supreme Court:   Bradwell vs State of Illinois. Myra Bradwell decides to become a lawyer but state bar would not allow it.  She argued the 14th Amendment should give her equal access.  The Justices determined “women” are not covered by it, because they are naturally different: “the natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex, unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life.  The paramount destiny and mission of women are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother, this is the law of the creator.”

1873 Louisiana: The Colfax Massacre  - white mob killed approximately 200 Black militia protecting a courthouse from white democrats (the party of white supremacy) angry about losing election to republicans.

1873 U.S. Congress:   Comstock Act (Laws) - made it illegal to send “obscene, lewd or lascivious,” “immoral,” or “indecent” publications through the mail. The law also made it a misdemeanor for anyone to sell, give away, or possess an obscene book, pamphlet, picture, drawing, or advertisement.  Direct impact on abortions. Draconian penalties.  1st law of its kind in the “western” world.

1873 U.S. Supreme Court: Slaughterhouse decision - narrowed the freedoms of the 14th Amendment by giving states the determination for basic protections of rights (privileges/immunities).  Federal government can’t interfere in “state’s rights”.  The 14th Amendment was explicitly created to give the Federal government exactly those powers over states that failed to protect the privileges and immunities granted to all citizens (at least male citizens). 

1874 Locusts Swarms as big as Colorado wipe out 1/2 of crops in Midwest.  Leading to half of Nebraska population moving back East in 1892. They are rendered extinct by end of century due to their breeding ground being converted to farmland at the base of the Sierra Nevadas.

1875  “Mississippi Plan” - white supremacist Democrats trying to retake power after 10 years of reconstruction and recognizing the time was right (1973 Great Depression raging, Grant administration under numerous scandals, retreat of federal troops, waning northern commitment) leveraged violence, fear and intimidation at polling places across state to deter black voters and get Republicans out of office.

1876 U.S. Supreme Court:  United States vs Cruikshank - court ruled 14 Amendment (& 1870 Enforcement Act aka Ku Klux Klan Act) did not protect individual citizens from violence committed by “private citizens.”  This decision gave legal protection for private citizens and businesses to discriminate.

1876 Science (pseudo): Italian psychiatrist Cesare Lombroso releases Criminal Man, which outlines his theory of criminal anthropology.

1877 Science (pseudo): Richard Dugdale publishes The Jukes, which links crime and heredity.

1877 U.S. Congress:   End of Reconstruction.  The Hayes-Tilden Compromise, due to a contested election between the two Presidential candidates, the Democrats agreed to concede if infrastructure bill created for south and Fed troops leave the south, thus Ending Reconstruction - replaced by white reconciliation and start of Jim Crow Segregation.

1879  “The Great Exodus” – post-reconstruction migration of Black people from the U.S. south across the U.S.  One of the largest migrations in history.  They were escaping the increasing hostility and dangers of white supremacy.

1880s Europe - Labor unions demanded and received: national healthcare, social security, pensions, worker compensation, welfare- socialism.  These were not and still are not available in the US because of racism.  Unions in America were for whites (AFL), they did not see blacks as workers, just black.  White workers were privileged under the social hierarchy- “better than”. When the US started them with the New Deal they excluded black people, still true today in trying to provide healthcare to all - it was rejected by calling it Obamacare.

1880 to 1920 - More than 100 Black owned banks were chartered.

1881  Atlanta Washer Women’s strike - 1st successful strike in the USA led by Black women.

1881 Atlanta – Spelman College established the first Black Women’s college (HBCU) in the United States.

1881 Alabama – Tuskegee Institute (University) established as a Black college (HBCU).  Founded by Booker T. Washington “to train students in skills, morals and religious life”

1882 U.S. Congress:  Chinese Exclusion Act - barred ALL Chinese from entering the US and from citizenship.  Furthering violence & discrimination against Chinese people.  Chinese organized and challenged the laws, losing most cases.  More anti-Chinese laws followed this and remained until 1943.

1883 Science (pseudo): Francis Galton coins the term ‘eugenics’.  He was a proponent of social Darwinism, eugenics and scientific racism (cousin of Charles Darwin).  (Knighted in 1903 by King Edward VII) 

1887 U.S. Congress:  Dawes Act - Federal policy (devised by Henry Dawes) of individual private allotments of tribal lands in the West.  Dawes believed Native Americans missed one ingredient – Greed, so created a law installing individual ownership of land – allotments.  It was with the implicit understanding that individual ownership would open Native land for the taking by whites. It was repealed in 1934.

1889 U.S. Supreme Court: Chae Chan Ping v United States - a US citizen (of Chinese ancestry) returning from Hong Kong was denied re-entry into the US as a result of newer anti-Chinese law (Scott Act of 1888).  He was left in prison the entire time.  14th Amendment equal protection was denied to him, the excuse by the Supreme Court - “national security”.  The decision deemed Chinese as “other” not “people.”

1889 Literature: Andrew Carnegie pens “The Gospel of Wealth,” justifying the extreme wealth of the robber

1890 U.S. Congress:   John Mercer Langston becomes the first African American from Virginia to be elected to public office, specifically to the U.S. Congress House of Representatives.  He is also notable for becoming the first African-American lawyer in the state of Ohio. He went on to serve as the dean of the law department and vice president of Howard University.

in 1890s -183 lynchings per year, 1 every 2 days

1890-1950 more than 4,000 lynchings of Americans of African descent.  It was the tool of terrorism to prevent Black people from realizing the equality protected under the 14th Amendment

Ida B. Wells (1862-1931), an investigative journalist, documented the terrorism.

1890 Massacre at Wounded Knee: last of the independent Sioux Tribe rounded up by US Marshalls and murdered at Wounded Knee.

1893: The World’s Columbian Exposition opens in Chicago with country pavilions organized according to scientific theories of race.

1893-1898 - The Dawes Commission on Native Americans.  A federal commission appointed by President Grover Cleveland in 1893 to negotiate with the Five Civilized Tribes (Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Seminoles) in Indian Territory123. Its purpose was to convince the tribes to cede tribal title of Indian lands and adopt the policy of dividing tribal lands into individual allotments, as the Dawes Act of 1887 had done for other tribes23. The commission was named for its first chairman Henry L. Dawes, who died in 1903 and was replaced by Tams Bixby24. The commission had no success in persuading the tribal leaders to accept the allotment policy until 1898, when the Curtis Act forced the issue4. The commission's work was regarded by some as a human tragedy, as it broke down tribal governments and took control of Native American land, without benefiting the tribes5

1896 U.S. Supreme Court: Plessy v Ferguson – The case involved Louisiana law which allowed separating white and Black people on railcars.  The Supreme Court decision upheld the state law. Federally recognizing states “separate but equal” laws.  A law of the land that would last until its partial overturn in 1954.

1896 Impacts of Plessy and Jim Crow:  130,344 Black registered voters, reduced to 5,320 registered Black voters by 1898.

1896 George Carver (1864-1943) began his illustrious career as an agricultural scientist at Tuskegee University. He was responsible for creating over 500 new products made from peanuts and sweet potatoes, including cooking oils, paint, and soap.  The most prominent Black scientist of the early 20th century.

1898 Wilmington, NC: “Wilmington Massacre” Only successful “coup” in US history.  White supremacists murdered and deposed the Reconstruction city government of Wilmington, which was an integrated government and city.  Some 800 white citizens led by former confederate colonel Alfred Waddell met at the county courthouse and produced the “White Declaration of Independence” which stated: “We, the undersigned citizens… do hereby declare that we will no longer be ruled, and will never again be ruled by men of African origin.”  The next day 2,000 armed white supremacists returned and started the massacre - an estimated 100-300 Black residents murdered, Black owned businesses destroyed and est. 2,000 Black residents & leaders run out of town by the white supremacist mob.  In 1900, the North Carolina legislature effectively stripped African Americans of the vote through the grandfather clause and ushered in the worst of the Jim Crow laws.

1899 Rudyard Kipling “White Mans Burden” - popularizing the ‘white savior complex’

1900 National Negro Business League founded. (Booker T, following the lead of smaller org started by DuBois in 1899).  It would become the pre-eminent force in Black entrepreneurship).

1900 U.S. Congress:  Hawaiian Organic Act - the U.S. prohibited further use of indentures in the territory and voided all such existing contracts, thus ending the practice (Hawaii last to do so)

1901 US Lynching: 105 Black People lynched [More than 4,000 racial, terrorized lynchings between 1877-1950]

1902 St.Louis, MO. - Poro Company Founded by Annie Turnbo Malone (chemist).  Her successful cosmetics, hair care and beauty business would make her the first Black female millionaire.  In 1917, she opened Poro College, the first educational institution dedicated to Black cosmetology.  Sara Breedlove aka Madame CJ Walker worked for Malone and would go on to creates her own successful cosmetic company.  Malone was also a philanthropist, donating much of her riches to universities, orphanages, and other community-based institutions like the NAACP.

1902 US Lynching: 85 Black People lynched [More than 4,000 racial, terrorized lynchings between 1877-1950]

1902 US Congress: The Chinese Exclusion Act is made permanent.

1903 Maggie Lena Walker’s Richmond, Virginia-based St. Lukes Penny Savings Bank is granted a U.S. charter.  She is the first woman of any race to charter a bank in the United States.  Walker served as President.  It was primarily funded by Black women, run by women.  She required Black men to have wives co-sign on loans, because she recognized central economic role they played in family. By 1924, the bank had branches in several areas in Virginia and counted nearly 50,000 members. Unlike many other financial institutions, Penny Savings Bank survived the Great Depression and is still in operation in Richmond today.  Walker held many civic and business leadership positions in her life.

1903 U.S. Culture: Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “In Dahomey” launched on Broadway (NYC).  The first all-Black Broadway musical.

1903 US Lynching: 84 Black People lynched [More than 4,000 racial, terrorized lynchings between 1877-1950]

1904 US Lynching: 76 Black People lynched [More than 4,000 racial, terrorized lynchings between 1877-1950]

1904 Science (pseudo): Curator of physical anthropology at the Smithsonian Institute Ales Hrdlicka publishes Broca’s “table chromatique” in the U.S.

1905 Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45, was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court holding that a New York State statute that prescribed maximum working hours for bakers violated the bakers' right to freedom of contract under the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.[1] The decision has been effectively overturned.[2][3][4]

A five-justice majority of the Supreme Court held that the law violated the Due Process Clause, stating that the law constituted an "unreasonable, unnecessary and arbitrary interference with the right and liberty of the individual to contract". Four dissenting justices rejected that view, and the dissent of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., in particular, became one of the most famous opinions in U.S. history.[5]

Lochner is one of the most controversial decisions in the Supreme Court's history and gave the name to what is known as the Lochnerera. During that time, the Supreme Court issued several decisions invalidating federal and state statutes that sought to regulate working conditions during the Progressive Era and the Great Depression. The period ended with West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish (1937), in which the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of minimum wage legislation enacted by Washington State.[6]

1905 US Lynching: 57 Black People lynched [More than 4,000 racial, terrorized lynchings between 1877-1950]

1905 Science (pseudo): The German Society for Racial Hygiene is founded.

1905 Science (pseudo):  Alfred Binet invents the IQ test for measuring intelligence.

1906 Denver, CO. Madame C.J. Walker Company formed by Madam C.J. Walker (aka Sarah Breedlove (1867-1919)).  Prior to creating the company she worked for Poro Company.  She became a multi-millionaire in the cosmetic industry.  In 1908 she opened a beauty school and factory in Pittsburgh. She was a major philanthropist. At the time of her death she had 40,000 employees working for her.

1906 US Lynching: 62 Black People lynched [More than 4,000 racial, terrorized lynchings between 1877-1950]

1907 US Lynching: 58 Black People lynched [More than 4,000 racial, terrorized lynchings between 1877-1950]

1907 Science (pseudo): The Eugenics Education Society is founded in Britain.  Eugenics is a set of beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population, historically by excluding people and groups judged to be inferior (Black, Indigenous, People of Color, People with disabilities and the poor) or promoting those judged to be superior (White & non poor). Eugenics was increasingly discredited as unscientific and racially biased during the 20th century, especially after the adoption of its doctrines by the Nazis in order to justify their treatment of Jews, disabled people, and other minority groups. In recent years, the term has seen a revival in bioethical discussions on the usage of new technologies such as CRISPR and genetic screening, with a heated debate on whether these technologies should be called eugenics or not.

1907 Science (pseudo): The first American compulsory sterilization law (Eugenics) goes into effect in 1907 in Indiana with dozens of states following suit.

1908 US Lynching: 89 Black People lynched [More than 4,000 racial, terrorized lynchings between 1877-1950]

1908 - US Dept of Justice “Report on Peonage” published exposing the brutal southern tactic of using debts of Black “sharecroppers” to force them into a quasi- slavery, including brutality.  This along with many other injustices would lead to Great Migration (in 1909 - 90% of Blacks lived in south by 1945 7m Blacks migrated).  The north was seen and called “The promised land” because it offered greater opportunity and liberty from jim crow.  This expectation was not quite the reality.

1908 Springfield, IL - A white woman falsely accuses a black man of serious assault, it was her husband that did it.  Leading to angry white mobs killing and destroying black homes.

1908 Sports:  John Taylor became the first African American to win gold in the Olympics after winning the 4 x 400-meter relay.

1909 US Lynching: 69 Black People lynched [More than 4,000 racial, terrorized lynchings between 1877-1950]

1909 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) formed by W.E.B. Du Bois, Mary White Ovington, Moorfield Storey and Ida B. Wells.  A civil rights organization dedicated “to ensure the political, educational, social and economic equality of rights of all persons and to eliminate race-based discrimination”. The Crisis magazine published by W.E.B. Du Bois.  Leaders would Include Thurgood Marshall and Roy Wilkins.

1910 US Lynching: 67 Black People lynched [More than 4,000 racial, terrorized lynchings between 1877-1950]

1910  Atlanta riots

1911 Science: Franz Boas publishes The Mind of Primitive Man arguing for the role of environmental factors in the apparent differences between races.  In opposition to the popular ideology of scientific racism.

1912 Science (pseudo): The First International Conference of Eugenics is held in London, presided over by Charles Darwin’s son Leonard.

1913-21 President Wilson federalizes racial discrimination in all branches of government.

1914 – 1918 World War I

1915 U.S. Culture:  Hollywood movie release “The Birth of a Nation” - (Lost Cause ideology) A rewriting of southern history, giving white supremacy a resurgence.  President Wilson proudly screened the movie in The White House.  The movie represented the Ku Klux Klan as heroes saving society from the racist trope of black male sexual aggression (white actor in blackface). 

1916 Science (pseudo): Madison Grant publishes ‘The Passing of the Great Race’, splitting Europe into three racial groups: Nordics, Alpines, and Mediterranean.

1917 U.S. Congress: The Immigration Act of 1917 includes the Asiatic Barred Zone, which excludes nearly all immigrants from Asia.

1917 St. Louis Massacre:  whites killed 40-250 Black citizens; 6,000 left homeless.  Whites were fueled by false rumors of Black voter fraud, and false accusations of crimes and claims of Blacks strikebreaking white jobs. 

1919 “Red Summer” a wave of White terror on black communities swept across 3 dozen cities in the US

1919 Arkansas:  200 sharecroppers trying to unionize were lynched in Elaine Arkansas.  The worst in US history (Walter White with NAACP uncovered it and exposed it)

1919 Palmer Raids - reactionary first “Red Scare” raids on people’s political beliefs (socialist/communists) would run through 20s

1920 U.S. Congress:  19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution - Women gain right to vote in the United States.  The moment the U.S. became a “democracy”?   At least, a white democracy.

1920 Annie Turnbo Malone becomes the United States first Black female millionaires based on the success of her Poro cosmetics and hair-care business, which was headquartered first in St. Louis and then Chicago.

1920: Lothrop Stoddard writes The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy.  (Anti-racism)

1921 U.S. Congress: The Emergency Quota Act is signed into law, heavily restricting immigration from Eastern & Southern Europe.

1921 Science (pseudo): The Second International Congress of Eugenics is held at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

1921 June Tulsa, Oklahoma Massacre - White supremacist terrorist assault on the successful “Black Wall Street” in Tulsa murdering approximately 150 - 300 Black lives [although 4,000 residents have never been accounted for], injuring over 800, destroying the businesses and over 1,200 private homes, permanently devastating the community.   Those murdered were taken by white people and the remains are yet to be discovered.  Homes were looted by white people who stole money, cars, furniture, clothes, etc.  88 people were indicted, the overwhelming majority indicted were Black, of those the most prominent Black business leaders were charged with incitement of riot.  Not a single white person was prosecuted for a single crime, despite law enforcement awareness and conscious decision to not engage.    Those left homeless were placed in internment camps, with support from Red Cross. 

The Black community in Tulsa built a vibrant, thriving, economically successful neighborhood.  Filled with 600 Black owned businesses: 21 restaurants, 30 groceries, 2 movie theaters, banks, newspapers, hotels, law offices, hospitals, schools, libraries, 21 churches and 6 private planes.  The white community grew increasingly jealous and in an act of white rage devastated lives and property. 

An essential historical moment for every citizen in the U.S. and world to know, not just the event but the aftermath, which continues to be uncovered to this day.  It is a history of Black achievement and the devastation of white supremacy and racism in the U.S. (past and present).  

"Tulsa 1921: An American Tragedy" - YouTube   

Black Wall Street's Greenwood Tragedy Didn't End in 1921 - YouTube    

The Overlooked Stories of America's Black Wall Streets | The History You Didn't Learn | TIME - YouTube .

1923 Florida - Rosewood Massacre - the predominately Black town of Rosewood was attacked by white mob and burned to the ground.  9 Black people murdered.  The town was abandoned.

1923 U.S. Supreme Court: United States vs Bhagat Singh Thind was denied citizenship because he failed to meet the “common sense” definition of white = “Caucasian”.  He argued that he was of Caucasian descent as an Indian (Brahmin caste as well).  Proving his lineage of descent from the Caucus region.  The court could not deny the facts, so shifted from facts to arbitrary racist reasoning of “common sense”.

1923 (1953) U.S. Supreme Court: Moore v Dempsey (decided in 1953!)- “mob” dominated trial violating the 14th Amendment.  The case resulted from the sham and corrupt trial led entirely by white people in Arkansas (which involved torture to extract false statements from Blacks) to blame Blacks for the white led massacre in Phillips County Arkansas – the worst lynching in U.S. history.   Sharecroppers organizing for labor rights.

1923 Science (pseudo): Carl Bringham publishes A Study of American Intelligence, which uses the IQ testing done by Robert Yerkes to support differences in intelligence between races.

1924 U.S. Congress: The Immigration Act of 1924 becomes law imposing a quota system that favored Northern & Western Europe and excluding immigration from all of Asia.

1924 U.S. Congress:  Snyder Act - national recognition of the citizen rights of Indigenous People.

1924 Virginia - The Racial Purity Act written by the Virginia Eugenics Board. “An act to preserve racial integrity”

“4. No marriage license shall be granted until the clerk or deputy clerk has reasonable assurance that the statements as to color of both man and woman are correct.

If there is reasonable cause to disbelieve that applicants are of pure white race, when that fact is stated, the clerk or deputy clerk shall withhold the granting of the license until satisfactory proof is produced that both applicants are "white persons" as provided for in this act.

The clerk or deputy clerk shall use the same care to assure himself that both applicants are colored, when that fact is claimed.

5. It shall hereafter be unlawful for any white person in this State to marry any save a white person, or a person with no other admixture of blood than white and American Indian. For the purpose of this act, the term "white person" shall apply only to the person who has no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian; but persons who have one-sixteenth or less of the blood of the American Indian and have no other non-Caucasic blood shall be deemed to be white persons. All laws heretofore passed and now in effect regarding the intermarriage of white and colored persons shall apply to marriages prohibited by this act.”

1924 U.S. Congress:  Immigration Act - preventing non-whites from entering the U.S. by creating “national origins quotas”.  US Border patrol created.  However, economic need for laborers (low wage, hard work) made these more of a lever than an enforced law.

1925 - 50k KKK members march in D.C.  The rise of KKK in 1920s going after Blacks, Jews, Catholics, & immigrants (Mexicans) broadened the movement in the north w/ membership between 3-5m in US.  It switched from Democrats to the despised party of Lincoln.

1925  Scopes Trial (Monkey trial) - a TN teacher arrested for teaching evolution. Lawyer Darrow made a buffoon of Prosecutor Bryant for his literal interpretation of bible.  Tested a Tennessee law, the Butler Act, which forbade the teaching of any theory of evolution in any state-funded educational establishment.

1927 Sacco & Vanzetti trial/ execution - sham trial of Anarchist Italians

1927 U.S. Supreme Court:  upholds compulsory sterilization in Buck v. Bell.  Carrie Buck had tubes tied (sterilized) by state order Virginia.  Supreme Court decides reproduction is a women’s soul function, thus the state has a right to control it.  Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes stated, “It is better for all of the world if instead of waiting to execute  degenerate offspring for crime, or let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.”

1927 Science- Archeology:  Folsom, New Mexico, A human made projectile (spear) found in the remains of a bison that had gone extinct in the Pleistocene (11,700 years ago).  Pushing back the date of Indigenous humans’ arrival in the Western Hemisphere.

1929 Science- Archeology:  Clovis, New Mexico, Another human made projectile (spear) found in the remains of killed animals.  It was technologically unique in the world given its “flute” shape.  Others like it were found across N.A. and dated to 13,400 years ago.  This gave rise to the theoretical model called “Clovis First”, it was upended by a genetic study of human remains found in Monte Verde, Chile which pushed human arrival to 22,000 - 30,000 years ago.

1929 - Great Depression - major causes 1. Mass production requires mass consumption, this was not aligned 2. Maldistribution of wealth - 40-60% of population lived below poverty. 2.  Unsound corporate structure w/ 200 companies (out of 400k biz) dominating 54% of commerce 3. Unsound banking system with many unregulated!  4.unprecedented speculation in stock market due to lack of stable investments (high interest rate investments using margin stock purchases). driven by notion “stock market can only go up” = hubris/ irrational. 5. installment lending was widespread.

Stocks crashed, wealth disappeared, bank runs drained banks.  Intl lending constricted.  Gov

US Economic Depressions - 1819, 1837, 57, 73, 93 & 1929

1929-1936 U.S. Congress:  Mexican Repatriation - forced US citizens (60%) out of the US.  It was a scapegoat measure for the economic hardships the Depression created for white people.

1930 - 200 corporations owned 50% of all US corporate wealth (business consolidation - Woolworths, A&P, BofA.   US Steel, Standard Oil, Ford, Dupont, American Sugar, GE, Sears, US Rubber, GM, Intl Harvester, Western Electric, P&G, Singer, American Tobacco well established behemoths.

1931 Scottsboro, AL. - “The Scottsboro 9” - 9 Black boys riding trains (hoboing) in Alabama get arrested on the train and falsely charged with raping 2 white female passengers.  Prosecutors seek the death penalty,  Simultaneously Black sharecroppers are fighting for unionization with help from communist party.  The communist party uses its legal defense funds to defend the boys.  KKK uses extreme violence against efforts, brutally killing the leading Black union organizer Ralph Gray.  “Resistance was a necessity”.  The injustice of the initial trial, led the Supreme Court to require a retrial (Powell vs Alabama 1932).  It would lead to a series of retrials, as well as the victims admitting the fabricated the rape story.  Regardless 5 of the boys were convicted to 75 years to death.  It is a case study in judicial injustice.

1932 Science (pseudo): The Third International Eugenics Conference is held at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Eugenics Records Office Director Charles B. Davenport presides.

1932 Science: The Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences is released with many of the anthropology articles written by Boasians, not Grantians.  Shifting the tide away from scientific racism.

1935  The Carnegie Institution of Washington orders an external scientific review of the ERO, and finds its records “unsatisfactory for the scientific study of human genetics.”

1930s U.S. Government:   New Deal legislation.  It was $100B transfer (6x size of Marshall Plan), which deliberately tried to exclude Black people, by white representatives from Jim Crow south, where 65% of Black people still resided.

- Social Security (pay started 1939) excluded domestic/agriculture workers, which were disproportionally occupations available to Black people.

- GI Bill: deliberately excluded Black people

1930s U.S. Government: “Redlining” created by Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) - A government sponsored corporation arising in 1933 from the New Deal Act, which literally mapped locations as Best, Desirable, Declining, Hazardous.  Based on race/class population.  Resulting in who should or should not receive mortgages, terms of loan.  Its discriminatory practice was adopted by banking and retail impacting ability to get credit, business loans and location of retail locations.  The results are still seen today, but even greater impact on inter-generational wealth inequality.  (1968 Fair Housing Act was first federal attempt to outlaw practice, marginal impact).

1933 Nazi Germany: The Third Reich enacts the first German compulsory sterilization law.

1934 Nazi Germany:   June 5, initial meeting of Nazi Germany’s leading lawyers, chaired by Hitler’s Minister of Justice, to write the legal system for the Nazi regime (Nuremberg Laws).  The meeting began by reviewing the racist laws and white supremacy established in the United States.  Of particular interest was the power wielded by the 1 party southern states.  The US citizenship laws (exclusionary), blood laws (racial purity)/ anti-miscegenation laws (only laws existing in the world) and flag laws (swastika) were leveraged. 

American Eugenics movement, including forced sterilization of “defectives”, was widely studied by Nazis.  They also admired our legal system, which was and continues to be under political control (unlike modern systems around the world in which legal professionals manage it).

https://billmoyers.com/story/hitler-america-nazi-race-law/

1935  Federal Govt seizes the property of the National Women’s Party HQ to build the current Supreme Court building.

1936 Sports:  Olympics held in Berlin, Germany (Nazi) – Jesse Owens would win a historic 4 gold medals and shame the Aryan white supremacy ideology.  He would return to the US to face the racist indignities at home, including 0 recognition of his accomplishments by the White House or other major sporting organization.  He was unable to gain any meaningful work and settled for janitor at Ohio State University (his alma mater, where he broke 4 world records in the span of 45 minutes!  Now recognized as “The greatest 45 minutes in sports history”.  His first formal recognition of his accomplishments would not come until 1970 (induction into Alabama’s Sports Hall of Fame).

1936 Literature: “Negro Motorist Green Book” was a comprehensive guide for Black travelers about locations across America—and eventually overseas—that were either Black-owned or didn't engage in segregationist practices. The guide was printed for 30 years. It stopped publication in 1966, two years after the Civil Rights Act was passed.

1937 Literature:  Zora Neale Hurston publishes “Their Eyes Were Watching God”.  She was a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance along with Jessie Redmon Fauset, Langston Hughes & Claude McKay

1939 – 1945 World War II

1939 U.S. Culture: Hollywood movie release- “Gone with the Wind” – a romanticized, glorification of antebellum south (the “lost cause” narrative).  Making white supremacy, patriarchy, slavery and succession pretty. 

1939 Science (pseudo): The Eugenics Record Office shuts down.

1940 U.S. Culture: Hollywood-   Hattie McDaniel became the first Black person to win an Oscar for her supporting role in ‘Gone with the Wind’.

1940 Literature:  Mary Church Terrell publishes autobiography “A Colored Woman in a White World”.  Born in 1863 (free), graduated from Oberlin College.  A leading suffragist and civil rights activist, worked as a journalist for Washington Post, Washington Evening Star and Chicago Defender.

1943 U.S. Congress:  Chinese Exclusion is repealed and a quota is given of 105 immigrants per year.

1944 U.S. Congress:  GI Bill - passed by Federal Govt, with States responsible for its dispersal. 1947  Mississippi: of the 3,287 mortgages for homes, farms and businesses guaranteed by the GI Bill only 2 went to black people, in NY/NJ of the 67,000 loans, only 100 went to non-white people.

30 years later the wealth of white families was $100,000, Black family’s wealth was $12,000.

1946 Science- Archeology:  Radiometric dating method developed.  Radiometric dating calculates an age in years for geologic materials by measuring the presence of a short-life radioactive element, e.g., carbon-14, or a long-life radioactive element plus its decay product, e.g., potassium-14/argon-40.

1948 Sports:  Alice Coachman became the first Black woman in the world to win an Olympic gold medal while competing in the high jump.

1950 United Nations:  UNESCO's early antiracist statement "The Race Question" (1950): "The biological fact of race and the myth of 'race' should be distinguished. For all practical social purposes’ 'race' is not so much a biological phenomenon as a social myth. The myth of 'race' has created an enormous amount of human and social damage. In recent years, it has taken a heavy toll in human lives, and caused untold suffering."

1952 U.S. Congress:   The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 prohibits racial and gender discrimination in naturalization

1952 Literature:  Ralph Ellison publishes “Invisible Man” 

1954 U.S. Government:  Operation Wetback - a new racist wave against Mexicans working in the U.S., forcing them back to Mexico.  Created by Harlan Carter (a U.S. border agent who becomes head of the NRA, later convicted of murderer of a U.S. citizen of Mexican descent)

1954 U.S. Supreme Court:  Brown vs Board of Education – S.C. determined “Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal”.  Overturning Plessy v Ferguson decision of 1896.

1954 Civil Rights Movement reignited by the Brown v Board decision

1957 “Little Rock 9” – The first 9 Black children to integrate an all-white high school in Little Rock, Arkansas.  Confronting white racial animus, from school students/ parents, the community, up to the Governor, it would take the U.S. National Guard to escort the students into the school.

1957-1963 Birmingham, AL (George Wallace was governor) was the most segregated town in the US.  With an open door policy to white supremacist vigilante groups (ie KKK) to operate without police/ govt interference.  During this period there were 50 cross burnings, 17 bombings of Black homes, churches, businesses.  Lynchings?

1959 U.S. Culture: Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in The Sun” performed on Broadway (NYC).  She was the first female African American playwright to have her script performed on Broadway.  The movie released 2 years later.

1961 US Executive Branch - Affirmative Action Executive Order #10925 (not a law!)  President Kennedy signed the first (since amended) order stating federal government contractors must hire/treat employees “without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin”

1964 U.S. Congress:  Civil Rights Act (law) - outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin.

• When Roosevelt went on to establish five national parks and 150 national forests, these spaces seemed designed for white men who were “roughing it” in order to find deeper meaning in nature. And indeed, over the following decades, the national parks explicitly excluded people of color: Until 1964, many national parks in the United States did not admit people of color, while others were segregated.

The legacy of this racism endures. As recently as 2018, only 2% of national park visitors were Black. “For centuries people who looked like me were not welcome in outdoor spaces, whether by law or because it was coded through Jim Crow,” says Danielle Williams

1964 U.S. Culture:  Sidney Poitier became the first Black man to win an Oscar for his leading role in Lilies of the Field.

1965 U.S. Congress - Lyndon Johnson signs the “Law Enforcement Assistance Act” - 1 week before he sends the voting rights act to Congress.  It enhanced the federal government’s role in local policing, prisons and courts for the first time in US history.  It was the key piece of legislation accelerating the mass incarceration state.

1965 U.S. Congress:   Voting Rights Act – Federal prohibition of racial discrimination in state voting laws or actions.

1965 U.S. Executive Branch - Affirmative Action amended- Johnson  “federal contractors cannot discriminate on basis of race, religion & national origin”

1965 U.S. Congress: The Hart-Celler Act repeals the immigration quota system and establishes a new system based on skills and family relation.

1965 Griswold vs Conn.  Planned Parenthood opens in Conn to challenge its anti-contraceptive laws.  She gets arrested.  challenges “the right to privacy” in the home.  wins - govt has no right in the bedroom

1967 U.S. Supreme Court:  After years of remarkable work as an attorney, Thurgood Marshall became the first African American to serve in the U.S. Supreme Court. Officially nominated by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1967, he served as a justice until 1991.

1967 U.S. Supreme Court: Loving vs Virginia - outlawing marriage discrimination between white and non-white (held in 18 states)

1968 to Today – “The Southern Strategy” – An internal Republican Party strategy to leverage racism and white racial tensions (grievances) to increase white membership and votes, specifically from the Democrat controlled South.  It has been often attributed to Richard Nixon as the source of it.  The tactic would turn the Party of Lincoln, into the party of the Confederacy. 

1968 U.S. Executive Branch – The Kerner Commission Report – “The National Commission on Civil Disorders” established by President Johnson.  The bipartisan findings from it stated “Our Nation is moving toward two societies, one Black, one white – separate and unequal.”  The causes for the civil unrest in the 60s was determined to be ‘lack of economic opportunity, failed social service programs, police brutality, racism and the white oriented media.”  (Listen: Code Switch Podcast ““)

1968 Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr & Bobby Kennedy, ending the 20th century Civil Rights Movement.

1968 U.S. Congress:  First elected Black woman to US Congress – Shirley Chisholm Representative from New York.

1972 National Black Political Convention in Gary, Indiana.  A convergence of Black political, economic, intellectual and social leaders to chart a united path forward for Black Americans.  

1973 DSM2 removed “Homosexuality” from list of psychiatric disorders replacing it with “sexual orientation disturbance”.  wtf? it was not until 1987 the word/choice was completely removed from manual.  World Health Organization took until 1992 (ICD-10) but kept “ego-dystonic sexual orientation” for those not in doubt but “wishes it were different”

1973 U.S. Supreme Court:  Roe vs Wade.  Abortion becomes legal in the United States.  Giving back women’s right to bodily autonomy (overturning Buck vs Bell).

1973 U.S. Supreme Court:  Frontiero vs Richardson - RBG argues a male spouse of a servicewoman was denied housing allowance check from military that was given to female spouses.  She won. Brennan’s decision is a must read!

1974 Equal Credit Opportunity Act, or ECOA.  The law made it illegal for creditors to discriminate against applicants on the basis of sex or marital status and paved the way for American women to build their own financial lives.

1975 U.S. Supreme Court: US vs Brignoni-Ponce – The Supreme Court codified the permission under the equal protection clause of 14th amendment, for the police to use race as a factor in making decisions about which motorists to stop and search = racial profiling is law of the land.

1975 Sports:  Arthur Ashe wins the World Men’s Tennis Championship (Rotterdam).  The first African American to do so.  As well as Wimbledon, The US Open and #1 world ranking.

1976 U.S. Culture: Alex Haley’s “Roots: The Saga of an American Family” mini-series on prime-time television.  Approximately 1 in 3 U.S. households watches it.

1976 Reagan campaign introduced “Welfare Queen” a racist dog whistle stemming from the private and public fraud of Linda Taylor

1980 U.S. Culture:  Black Entertainment Television (BET) cable television company founded by Robert L. Johnson.

1986 U.S. Supreme Court: Bowers vs Hardwick  - Denies homosexual right of protection under 14th Am -right to privacy in bedroom (sodomy) leaving LGBTQ without equal protection

1991 Rodney King brutally beaten by white police officers in LA, sparking outrage and riots.

1992 U.S. Congress:  First Black woman elected to the US Senate – Senator Carol Moseley Braun of Illinois.

1994 U.S. Government: President Clinton’s “Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act” signed into law.  The largest crime bill in US history: resulting in the largest increase in federal and state incarceration in US history.  Its focus was on street crimes, with no attention to white collar crimes.  It included a “3 Strike” provision.  This has disproportionally impacted Black Americans and other minority communities.

“3 Strikes Laws” begin to be passed in states (28 currently have them) – these draconian laws mandated a life sentence for anyone committing a severe violent felony and having 2 prior convictions.  These have disproportionally impacted Black Americans and other minority communities. (Black Men 6% of US, made up 50% of incarcerated)

1994-95 OJ Simpson Trial

1994 Literature:  Richard J. Hernstein and Charles Murray release The Bell Curve which argues for racial difference in IQ.

1996 U.S. Supreme Court:  Farmer v. Brennan, 511 U.S. 825 (1994), was a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that a prison official's "deliberate indifference" to a substantial risk of serious harm to an inmate violates the cruel and unusual punishment clause of the Eighth Amendment. Farmer built on two previous Supreme Court decisions addressing prison conditions, Estelle v. Gamble and Wilson v. Seiter.[1] The decision marked the first time the Supreme Court directly addressed sexual assault in prisons.   Dee Farmer was a transgender woman assaulted in prison (convicted of credit card fraud in 1986).

1998 Science:  The American Anthropological Association issues a statement on race, concluding that contemporary science makes clear that human populations are not “unambiguous, clearly demarcated, biologically distinct groups.”   A little late?

2000 Science:  Genome Project – releases complete mapping of human DNA started in 1990 (actually 100% finalized 2018).

2003 U.S. Supreme Court:  Lawrence v Texas - decides LGBTQ overrides Bowers decision providing equal protection of due process

2003 North Carolina:  finally repeals its compulsory sterilization law.

2004 Hurricane Katrina (New Orleans) – exposing US double standards, dog whistles and neglect of Black communities.  A stark example of how far this country has to go on racial equality.

2005 U.S. Supreme Court:  Castle Rock vs Gonzalez - Scalia providing majority opinion that 14th Amendment guaranteeing Due Process, did not apply to upholding the restraining order against husband by police department for domestic violence.  The case was brought to the court due to the murder of her 3 children by the husband, who was not served the restraining order. 

2008  Barack Obama elected President - receiving 43% of white votes, the lowest % of any Democratic candidate in history.  It would go down to 39% in 2012.

2012 Murder of Trayvon Martin, after the acquittal of his murderer in 2013, spurned the Black Lives Matter movement by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors & Opal Tometi to highlight racism, discrimination and inequality experienced by Black people.

2013 U.S. Supreme Court:   Shelby County vs Holder - Roberts determines key parts of 1964 Civil Rights Act are unconstitutional, because times have changed.   Allowing a wave of voter suppression tactics by states (voter IDs, reducing hours, ballot box access).  J

2013 U.S. Supreme Court:  US v Windsor - was a fight against Clintons “Defense of Marriage Act” which prevented her spouse from being granted estate tax protection. Court determined it was unconstitutional under 14th Amendment equal protection.   Win for equality.

2013 DSM-5 drops “Gender Identity Disorder” (Transexual) replacing it with “Gender Dysphoria” the distress caused by conflict, rather than a disorder.

2013 Alabama:  Officially passes the 13th Amendment…  148 years after the fact.

2014  New York Times journalist Nicholas Wade argues for race-based science in A Troublesome Inheritance.

2014 Unarmed Black Americans killed by police:  Dontre Hamilton, Eric Garner, John Crawford III, Michael Brown, Ezell Ford, Akai Gurley, Tamir Rice, Jerame Reid

2015-2010 US Law Enforcement: The 10 largest Police Departments in the US paid $1.02 BILLION in tax payers’ dollars for “Police Misconduct” = shootings, beatings, wrongful imprisonment.  In 2015, only 1 officer from these top 10 police departments was indicted (uncertain if convicted).  Given this staggeringly large $ value, the chances of police officers engaging in criminal actions must be much higher.

      Between 2005-15 a total of 54 officers were indicted for crimes in the entire United States (it is unknown how many were convicted of the charges, but due to Police Unions, Supreme Court decisions [Graham vs Carter,], biased investigations of these incidents and the general bias favoring police brutality for “protecting society”, grant near unlimited immunity for Police Officers, the number is very low).

2015 U.S. Supreme Court:  Obergefell v Hodges - Challenges states laws against gay marriage.  “Does 14th Amendment override states laws?  The Supreme Court decided, YES, the 14th Amendment protections affords equality under the law and dignity to LGBTQ.  Win for equality.

2015 Unarmed Black Americans killed by police:  Charley Leundeu Keunang, Tony Robinson, Anthony Hill, Eric Harris, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, William Chapman, Jonathan Sanders, Samuel DuBose, Tanesha Anderson, Jamar Clark 

2016 Unarmed Black Americans killed by police:  Paul O'Neal, Terence Crutcher, Alfred Olango

2017 Unarmed Black Americans killed by police:  Jordan Edwards

2018 Unarmed Black Americans killed by police:  Stephon Clark, Botham Jean

2020 Unarmed Black Americans killed by police:  Manuel Ellis, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Andre Hill.  Police killed 229 Black Americans in 2020.

2020 US Census -  #2 “Race” in the USA =50m people identified as “Some Other Race”

2022 US Congress:   The Senate unanimously approved a bill to make lynching a federal hate crime – punishable by up to 30 years in prison. The Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act was approved by the House and signed by President Biden. It took more than 100 years and 200 failed attempts to outlaw lynching since the first anti-lynching legislation was introduced in 1900 by Rep. George Henry White.

2023 Catholic Church/ Pope:   Pope Francis rescinds the “Doctrine of Discovery”, 500 years after the fact, and takes zero accountability for the genocide, theft of land and extensive harm caused.  

2023 US Supreme Court – “Students for Fair Admissions vs Harvard” - The Supreme Court contends that the admissions policies of Harvard and the University of North Carolina violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, with Justice Clarence Thomas stating the policies "fly in the face of our colorblind Constitution and our nation's equality ideal."

LOWLIGHTS with Contemporary Implications

Unexamined Essentials for White People:

Homestead Acts & Dawes Act

Black Wall Street (start, massacre, post, up to present day)

War on Crime / War on Drugs (Nixon to Clinton)

SUPREME COURT – Current Judicial Theory

“Originalism” / “Textualism“ -

“Non-Delegation Doctrine”

Justices Neil Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito began their decision opposing the mandate by saying, “The central question we face today is: Who decides?” Can a federal agency charged with workplace safety mandate vaccines, or should the work of combating coronavirus belong to state and local governments and Congress?

The right-wing justices came down firmly against the federal government, using two doctrines that, if fully deployed, will destroy the modern U.S. system.

In his opinion, Gorsuch explicitly raised the concept of the “nondelegation doctrine” and the related concept of the “major questions doctrine.” The nondelegation doctrine relies on our government’s separation of powers. It says that, as its own branch of government, Congress cannot delegate regulatory authority to the executive branch, where agencies like OSHA live.

But, since Congress has, in fact, been delegating authority to the executive branch since the administration of President George Washington, those who want to reduce federal authority sometimes rely instead on the more limited major questions doctrine, which says that although Congress can delegate minor authority to administrative agencies, it cannot delegate major questions (although just how to define a major question is unclear).

Essential History to Understand in its totality:
Slave Trade - 1444 Henry the Navigator Portugal
Doctrine of Discovery 1452, 1455, 1492
Age of Exploitation
Indigenous history, Rights & “treaties”
Slavery in the US
1662 Va. Laws on race - “negroes” – a 1st in history
1681 Md.  Anti-Miscegenation law - “white”
Black Codes - throughout US history
1735 Carl Linnaeus - father of scientific racism
1791 US Naturalization law - “white people” (codified before the Bill of Rights)
Dred Scott v Sandford
Sojourner Truth
Fredrick Douglas

The real Uncle Tom, not Beecher Stowes misrepresentation
Homestead Acts & Dawes Act

14th Amendment

Reconstruction
Social Darwinism
Jim Crow - Plessy v Ferguson
Eugenics
1921 Black Wall Street (start, massacre, post cover up until present day)
How US practices directly informed the Nazis & Apartheid S.Africa
Redlining - FHA
COINTELPRO
    Puerto Rican independence
    AIM - Leonard Peltier
    Chicano liberation - Ricardo Falcon
James Baldwin
MLK - civil rights movement, SNCC
Malcolm X
    Black Panthers (Church Report -235 targets)
    Bobby Hutton in Oakland
    Fred Hampton & Clark 1969 assassination by FBI
    Carter & Huggins assassinated at UCLA
    Geronimo Pratt falsely imprisoned for 27yr
Student anti- war movement
Southern Strategy - Nixon
The Kerner Report (US Govt) 1968
War on Crime / War on Drugs (Nixon to Clinton)
Lynching to Rodney King to Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner to Breonna Taylor/ George Floyd to Tyre Nichols to……
Microsofts “Tay”, “Coded Bias” 2021, AI?
‘The Great Replacement’ Theory
Implicit Bias  (vast studies)

The Extensive Nature of White Supremacy & Racism

At the height of colonialism, 84% of the globe was controlled by European states, establishing colonies and spreading their influence across every inhabited continent.  Technological advancements in health, production of goods, and war machines also increased. Colonization soon took effect as a need for foreign markets along with cultural and nationalistic factors. With colonization came Orientalism and the growing ideology that White civilization was superior, and were given the burden to civilize the primitive ways of inferior nations through expansion and control.

Only 10 countries were not colonized by white imperialism (Japan, Korea, Thailand)

Responsible for the formation of the nation-states existing today.

International standards primarily determined by whites

English becoming the international language (replacing French), English as the 2nd language on signs/ maps/ products around the globe.

Hollywood movies, mass media, print media, corporate advertising, are projected worldwide: advancing white narratives, values and beauty standards.

American ambitions enshrined in the Declaration of Independence of freedom & democracy, as well as the “American Dream”, inspire many around the world.  But a different lived reality.

Current Statistics

Since 1774 to today: 12,000 people have served in US Congress, only 3% have been women or People of Color.  Of that 3%, 1/3 are currently serving today.  (source:  )

White countries hold 4 of the 5 vetoes in the U.N. Security Council

86% of the wealth in the US is controlled by white people (men)

White people (men) make up 96% of Fortune 500 CEOs

US has military bases in 80 of the 197 countries in the world.

Crimes involving a Black suspect and a white victim make up only 10% of all crimes - but they account for 42% of what is reported on television  [Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, obtained from the Sentencing Project]

Whites make up 69% of arrests in the US [Dept of Justice] but constitute 28% of crime reports on TV news.  [Heather McGhee’s The Sum of Us]

“Criminal Forfeiture” vs “Civil Forfeiture” - this is insane, inanimate objects (used initially in maritime piracy, returned in 1980s drug war) perverse profit incentive =$40B [TED - The Injustice of Policing for Profit]

“For every 9 people who have been executed in the US, 1 person on death row has been proven innocent and released, a shocking rate of error.”  [Just Mercy, 2020].

EXERCISES:

Please entertain me in an exercise:  please close your eyes…….

Imagine a society in which white supremacy is not embedded in our institutions:

Legal system -the prison system, the Government (at all levels), education, neighborhoods, our churches, synagogues, mosques, how jobs, assets & resources are distributed neighborhoods and inside of individuals.

White Supremacy is institutionally embedded in the United States as a matter of foundational law.

Hold onto this vision of what can be, what is possible…. Use this vision as a guide for our actions today, tomorrow and into the future.  A future we want to live in, an inclusive and equitable world.   Most of all, use it as a source of hope.  Humans have socially constructed, created, these systems of inequality.  We can create a better world.   (source: Jacqueline Battalora)

ABRIDGED SOURCES, RESOURCES:

READ:

Deep Diversity: a compassionate, scientific approach to Achieving Racial Justice  by Shakil Choudhury, 2021
The Science of Racism by Keon West
Stamped: From The Beginning - Dr. Ibram Kendi

The 1619 Project – Nikole Hannah-Jones

The New Jim Crow – Michelle Alexander

Birth of a White Nation – Jacqueline Battalora:  https://www.youtube.com/watch

Robin D.G. Kelley

LISTEN:

Podcast “Scene on Radio” from John Biewen – Season 2: “Seeing White”

Podcast “Throughlines” from NPR

Podcast “Code Switch” – from NPR

            WATCH:

“Who We are: A Chronicle of Racism in America” (2021) – Directed by Emily & Sarah Kunstler, Produced, written and narrated by Jeffrey Robinson

“Stamped From the Beginning” (2023)
“Exterminate All the Brutes” (2021)
“Amend: The Fight for America” (2021)
“Race: the Power of Illusion” (2014) 3hrs
“1619 Project” (2023)
“Tulsa: The Fire & Forgotten” (2021)

https://www.kanopy.com/video/11392346
“The Riot Report” (2024)
https://pbs.org/video/the-riot-report-cuh1ik
“The School That Tried to End Racism” (2020)
  “Follow the money”   John Biewen - The Lie That Invented Racism:

https://youtu.be/oIZDtqWX6Fk

Making Black America (2022) 4 Episodes (55 min. each)written and hosted by Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Wikipedia