Rochelle Riley - The Burden: African Americans and the Enduring Impact of Slavery

2018 by Rochelle Riley. Published by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission. Manufactured in the United States of America.

ISBN 978-0-8143-4514-6 (jacketed cloth);

ISBN 978-0-8143-4515-3 (ebook)

Library of Congress Cataloging Number: 2017952072

Published with support from the Arthur L. Johnson Fund for African American Studies.

Wayne State University Press

Leonard N. Simons Building

4809 Woodward Avenue

Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309

Visit us online at wsupress.wayne.edu

To all those who came before... the great-grandparents, grandparents, parents, and families, who, like mine, raised excellence from oppression

CONTENTS

Nikole Hannah-Jones

Rochelle Riley

ALelia Bundles

Bent J. Wilson

Charlene A. Carruthers

Aku Kadogo

Patrice Gaines

Tim Reid

Leonard Pitts Jr.

Kevin B. Blackistone

Betty DeRamus

Tamara Winfrey-Harris

Vann R. Newkirk II

Julianne Malveaux

Mark Auslander

Paula Williams Madison

Aisha Hinds

DeWayne Wickham

Tonya M. Matthews

TKeyah Crystal Keymh

Michael Simanga

Torrance G. Latham

Herb Boyd

Michelle Singletary

Carolyn Edgar

FOREWORD

Nikole Hannah-Jones

One can learn about a nation as much by what it remembers as by what it forgets.

The ruling class carefully constructs a narrative that becomes the national memory, a glorification of a people and a land. And in America, the heart of that narrative has always been our exceptionalism, our birthright as a nation born of the quest for freedom, a nation that has existed as a beacon for oppressed, liberty-seeking people everywhere.

And then theres us. The dark race that casts the dark shadow on this magnificent narrative.

How do we deal with the fact that our nations greatness was built, quite literally, on the backs of the enslaved? That our decision to deprive an entire race of people of the fundamental rights laid out so clearly in the Declaration of Independence predates the founding of our country by nearly 160 years? That after Thomas Jefferson penned this Declaration, it would take 192 years for, legally at least, the beatific assertion All men are created equal to include those whose ancestors were stolen from the African continent?

How do we rectify these contradictions?

By rendering them to obscurity.

We pretend that slavery and the belief systems that sustained it were a mutation rather than our nature. That it was an unprofitable and paternalistic system of labor practiced by a small number of backward Southerners, not the economic engine that propelled this nation into one of the most prosperous the world has ever seen.

Slavery is embedded in the very DNA of this great and conflicted country. It took the deadliest war in American history to force its demise, and then we simply replaced this system with another form of racial apartheid. This new system forced generations of black Americans, like my grandparents and my father, born on a sharecropping farm in Greenwood, Miss., into a form of quasi-slavery that the Supreme Court condoned when it wrote in 1857 that the black man had no rights that the white man need respect.

Entire frameworks were constructed to enforce this system of racial caste that allowed my ancestors to be stripped of their rights, their labor, their families, their bodies, themselves. Black people were barred from moving to some states, from remaining in certain towns after the sun went down, from living on certain streets, from buying homes in white communities, from attending school with white children, from swimming with their white neighbors, from checking out books at the libraries that their tax dollars helped pay for, from parking in whites-only parking spaces, from working jobs reserved for white people. Nothing, and I mean nothing, was untouched by the racial caste system that justified slavery.

I was born in 1976, just eight years after the violent throes of riots that inflamed more than one hundred U.S. cities following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Had I been born just a few years before, I would have taken my first breaths as a citizen of a country where it was legal to deny me housing for no other reason than I was descended from the enslaved.

Yet we learn almost nothing about this. Slavery is presented as an aberration in a still-striving nation, the years of Jim Crow that followed often summed up in our school history texts as an unfortunate blip that quickly ended after some black college students got ketchup and mustard dumped on their heads at a Southern lunch counter.

We choose to forget that slavery was a national scourgethat Northern states also allowed slavery, that the entire nation profited from it. Congress, after passing the 13th Amendment, realized that it was not enough to outlaw the institution of slavery, and so it passed civil rights laws in the 1860s to eliminate the badges of slavery as well. A hundred years later, in ruling against a white community that prohibited black residents from moving in, the Supreme Court ruled that the 13th Amendment had clothed Congress with power to pass all laws necessary and proper for abolishing all badges and incidents of slavery in the United States, and that it empowered Congress to eradicate the last vestiges and incidents of a society half slave and half free.

The badge of slavery wasnt our skin. It was the conditions created to demean, degrade, exploit, and control those with our skin. We have never rid ourselves of those badges, not in the 1860s, not in the 1960s, not now. We remain a nation of full citizens and part citizens. And our original sin remains the thing for which wethe people the sin was visited uponcan never be forgiven: our very presence here reminds this great nation of all that we are not.

And now, despite the fact that black Americans remain at the bottom of every indicator of well-being in this countryfrom wealth, to poverty, to health, to infant mortality, to graduation rates, to incarcerationwe want to pretend that this current reality has nothing to do with the racial caste system that was legally enforced for most of the time the United States of America has existed.

The election of Barack Obama was the exception, the election of Donald Trump the correction. And this uncomfortable truth drives the urgency for this book. We must face this history, our heritage, if we do not want to be lassoed to the past.

James Baldwin said, Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

This book, with its unflinching truths and its damning prose, forces us to face the enduring legacy of slavery, and to face it now. This book will not fix what needs to be fixed, but it is a necessary step forward, a demand that the journey begin.

INTRODUCTION

Rochelle Riley

I will not shut up about slavery.

It is not a distant memory that African Americans should get over, relegate to dust, like the millions of Africans who did not survive it.

It is not something that began and ended like a beating or a trial.

It was instituted and embraced to build a country. Then it evolved, and hundreds of years later remains ingrained in the way we live, whether we are those watching from an uncomfortable, sometimes guilty perch or listing on the edge of despair and irrelevance every day.