What's Going On

Here we are in the 21st Century and America is still dealing with the phenomenon known as “the color line. The term 'color line' was originally used as a reference to the racial segregation that existed in the United States after the abolition of slavery. An article by Frederick Douglass titled “The Color Line” was published in the North American Review in 1881.”

W. E. B. Du Bois (February 23, 1868 – August 27, 1963) - sociologist, historian, civil rights activist, author, writer and editor - quoted Douglass in his book, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), and proclaimed, “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.”

“Make America Great Again” (MAGA) is a campaign slogan popularized by Donald Trump in his 2016 presidential campaign. Ronald Reagan used a similar slogan, “Let's make America great again” in his 1980 presidential campaign.

It pains me to say but the 45th POTUS has succeeded with at least one of his campaign promises because he is on his way to making America great again... for white folks. 

The world is pretty much aware of the fact that the United States has never been 'great' for people of color; starting with the original, Native Americans, and continuing with the kidnapping, forced labor, torture, rape, murder, and overall inhumane treatment of Africans. 

During Reconstruction, the 12 years following the end of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, former slaves made meaningful political, social and economic gains. Black men voted and even held public office across the South. Biracial experiments in governance flourished. Black literacy surged, surpassing those of whites in some cities. Black schools, churches and social institutions thrived.

As the prominent historian Eric Foner writes in his masterwork on Reconstruction, “Black participation in Southern public life after 1867 was the most radical development of the Reconstruction years, a massive experiment in interracial democracy without precedent in the history of this or any other country that abolished slavery in the nineteenth century.”

Unfortunately, this boon in African American prosperity would be ephemeral. As W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, “the slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.”

By the early 1900s, most southern states barred black citizens not only from voting but also from serving in public office, on juries and in the judicial system. America's new racial caste system was not merely political and social, but thoroughly economic. Slavery made the South’s agriculture-based economy the most powerful force in the global cotton market.

The American Civil War temporarily derailed the mass profits of chattel slavery. However, white leaders found a loophole in the 13th Amendment, which supposedly ended slavery in 1865. Caucasian Americans would exploit the provision allowing “slavery” and “involuntary servitude” to continue as a “punishment for crime.”

On December 24, 1865, in Pulaski, TN, six Confederate veterans created the original Ku Klux Klan. This domestic terrorist group made life beyond miserable for all African Americans that resided in Southern states.

By the turn of the twentieth century, every state in the South had laws on the books that disenfranchised blacks and discriminated against them in virtually every aspect of life.

Although a plethora of African American individuals and families had and continues to have monumental financial success (dating back to Madam C. J. Walker), despite the odds against them, the American racial caste system has insured that people of color will remain in an inferior position (recommended reading: The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander).

Convict Leasing

With the help of profiteering industrialists, White America created a new way to build wealth via free labor on the backs of black Americans: the convict lease system.

Black men – and sometimes women and children – were arrested and convicted for crimes enumerated in the Black Codes, state laws criminalizing petty offenses and aimed at keeping freed people tied to their former owners’ plantations and farms. The most sinister crime was vagrancy – the “crime” of being unemployed – which brought a large fine that few blacks could afford to pay.

Black convicts were leased to private companies, typically industries profiteering from the region’s untapped natural resources. As many as 200,000 black Americans were forced into back-breaking labor in coal mines, turpentine factories and lumber camps. They lived in squalid conditions, chained, starved, beaten, flogged and sexually violated. They died by the thousands from injury, disease and torture.

The difference between antebellum slavery and convict leasing was that, in the latter, laborers were only the temporary property of their “masters.” This meant that after their fines had been paid off, they would potentially be set free. However, companies leasing convicts often absolved themselves of concerns about workers’ longevity. The convicts [victims] were viewed as disposable and frequently worked beyond human endurance.

Many Caucasian Americans today, do not know (nor do they care to know) the extent of the extreme emotional, spiritual, and physical abuse their ancestors - from the 15th to the 19th centuries - meted out to Africans.

To say that this was four centuries of hell on earth for kidnapped Africans would be a major understatement.

2019 of the 21st century, African Americans are considered free. Unfortunately, there is a cancer that has plagued black folks and will continue to do so. It's predicated on the fact that we adopted their belief system; a system designed to keep Africans subservient and looking forward to a hereafter. Endure, turn the other cheek, honor and revere the Caucasoid race, and Jesus will take care of you after you die!

References:

• International Socialist Review, "How the racial caste system got restored," review by Leela Yellesetty
• The Conversation, "Exploiting black labor after the abolition of slavery," by Kathy Roberts Forde and Bryan Bowman.