In his key text, “The Souls of Black Folk,” W.E.B. Du Bois began by saying, “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.”
Matthew Frye Jacobson expanded in his book “Whiteness of a Different Color,” to say that “to write about race in American culture is to exclude virtually nothing.”
Throughout American history, race has been the defining issue. It has been the perversion of a nation that was founded on the idea that “all men are created equal” and endowed with the unalienable rights of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Since our country’s inception, issues of race have sparked intense debates. During the writing of the Constitution, the necessity for a united nation overruled the desire of some founders to abolish slavery. The now infamous three-fifths compromise was the result of a settlement between northern and southern founders, which sacrificed African American enfranchisement to establish this nation.
Nearly a century after the writing of the Constitution, America fell into a Civil War. Race was its catalyst. The first reason given in the first secession letter of a Southern state, South Carolina, is, “[A]n increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery.”
Nearly every eligible Southerner enlisted and fought to maintain the institution that enslaved black people. The Civil War is the single bloodiest war in American history. Today, the same proportion of deaths would total six million Americans.
Following the Civil War, any attempts at Reconstruction were blocked by President Andrew Johnson. He stopped the “40 acres and a mule” program and reallocated the land that had been set aside for it back to the former land owners — Confederate slave owners. Only 12 years after the Civil War had ended, the last federal troops were withdrawn from the South, officially marking the end of Reconstruction.
Truly grasping the period following Reconstruction and up to the Civil Rights movement is necessary for understanding the continuing impact of race in American politics and culture.
Lynchings were not just random acts of violence or spurts of anger from whites. It was a strategic act used to inflict fear among the Black community, consequently leaving Black people disarmed and unable to resist the bigoted whims of white politicians.
For white southerners, on the other hand, lynchings were a joyous affair. Parents would bring their kids, and thousands would gather to watch someone burn to death, be hanged or beaten to death. A 1930 editorial from the Raleigh News and Observer remarked how “men joked loudly at the sight of the bleeding body … girls giggled as the flies fed on the blood that dripped from the Negro’s nose.”
W.E.B. Du Bois wrote about one lynching where the knuckles of the victim were displayed at a local store, and a piece of the victim’s heart and liver were given to the state governor. From 1882 to 1968, close to 5000 people were lynched, and 1952 was the sole year that a lynching was not recorded.
This systemic violence essentially disenfranchised Black voters in the South; to suppress the black vote, Black people were subject to intentionally confusing literacy tests and poll taxes.
White supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan would warn Black residents against voting and stand outside predominantly Black polling places, at times attacking those who came to vote. In 1964, only 6.7% of Black people eligible to vote in Mississippi, the state with the largest Black population, were registered to vote.
Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act began a slow march towards a more equal nation. But we are less removed from these events than we often like to think. Ruby Bridges, the first Black child to attend an all-white school following Brown v. Board of Education, is only 71 years old. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed only 55 years ago, a year before my dad was born.
The reverberations of these political moves also spurred the largest partisan realignment in American history. After passing the Civil Rights Act, President Lyndon B. Johnson correctly surmised to his special assistant that “I think we may have lost the south for your lifetime – and mine.”
Over the next several decades, racist southern democrats, who felt betrayed by the racially liberal policies of the Democratic party, jumped ship to the Republican party, where President Ronald Reagan was spearheading the adoption of racial conservatism.
One of the most successful political consultants, Lee Atwater, who led campaigns for Reagan and President George H.W. Bush, famously said, “you start out in 1954 by saying, “N*****, n*****, n*****, By 1968 you can’t say ‘n*****’ that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights … cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.”
“We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘N*****, n*****,” Atwater continues.
Today, racism continues to manifest itself in daily life. Despite desegregation efforts throughout the 1950s and 60s, more than 80% of metropolitan areas were more segregated in 2019 than 1990.
No matter the side of the political aisle you fall on, it is impossible to deny the importance of race from the beginning of the United States to the present. We are a country that has tried and failed countless times to make up for its racist past. Progress has been made, but we are still far from the finish line.
For young college students, it is our civic duty to always push for racial progress in pursuit of a more equitable country.
Ethan Walz can be reached at [email protected].
