Summary
America’s ability to be a successful democracy is founded on slavery. The founding fathers, as historian Edmund S. Morgan writes, all either owned slaves or were willing or work with people who did. In the early 17th century, the first enslaved Africans brought to the United States did not face the racism that their descendants would, having much in common with white indentured servants. But over time, America began putting in place laws that restricted the freedom of Black people, and race became as big a divider as class—if not a bigger one.
Understanding the history of the US involves understanding just how reliant the economy was on slavery—both slave labor and slaves themselves, who, while slavery existed, were the largest financial asset of property in the whole American economy. The sale of enslaved people often caused the separation of families, as well. Slavery, with all its evils, was the foundation of the American economy.
The consequences of this enslavement for Black people were enormous. Many Americans were furious at the perception that their "rights," namely their rights to own slaves, were being taken away from them, and many white supremacist groups such as the KKK tried to reassert this power by terrorizing Black people, particularly through a hateful crime known as lynching, where Black people would be accused of false crimes and then hanged in the public square without trial, while whites looked on, often even taking photographs with the corpse.
Even new progressive pushes, like FDR’s New Deal, deliberately excluded African-Americans, and the building of a new American safety net had Black Americans falling through the cracks more often than not. From the GI Bill to Levittowns, Black people were consistently and persistently excluded from improvements seen by early 20th century America. The plunder of slavery had not ended, Coates writes, but had become “quiet, systemic, [and] submerged.”
Analysis
Continuing his argument from the last section, Coates explicitly states that America's success relies on slavery. The history of racism against African Americans in the United States starts with slavery, but what people might not expect was how much of the racism seen in America today is a direct result of efforts to control slaves and by extension, all Black people in the United States. Several historians theorize that after Bacon's Rebellion, the country decided that indentured servants were not as reliable as African slaves and turned to them for the bulk of their labor. To make this change as concrete as possible, they started instituting new laws that specifically limited the freedoms of Black people. The infamous Virginia Slave Codes, for instance, implemented laws that were explicitly racial, and became some of the first, although far from the last, laws to create a separation between races.
Although enslaved people were human, their status as property was an essential part of American history. The monetary value that was assigned to them had far-reaching consequences in the North and the South. It even went as far to determine the number of representatives in Congress states could send: the infamous three-fifths rule in the Constitutions refers to the fact that states with large slave populations petitioned for slaves to be counted as partial persons (despite slaves not having citizenship) so that they could have a higher population count and therefore, a larger number of representatives for their states.
Emancipation did not fix the problems created by slavery. Many people who did not view slavery as a problem in the first place felt entitled to their slaves and spun it as their rights being taken away from them. Much of the fighting over states' rights in American history has actually been centered around the question of the right to own slaves, and many Southerners believed that the federal government had infringed on their rights by demanding that they free slaves. This resentment was taken out on the Black populations in the South, who were terrorized by white supremacists who thought that the country should return to a country "for the white man." No instance of this terror is more familiar than lynching, a practice which would result in the deaths of thousands of African Americans over the course of seven to eight decades. The eagerness of white mobs to kill often innocent Black people and to commemorate the occasion is only one of the ways in which terrorizing Black people was an everyday part of white Southern life.
But the discrimination against Black people wasn't limited to the South or to the state level. None of the American economic improvements associated with the 30s, 40s, and 50s benefited Black Americans as much as they benefited whites. While the South was open about their racism, the North used more subtle techniques to keep Black Americans from accessing these improvements. They might not have openly said that they wanted to keep the country for white men, but racist housing policies sent that message loud and clear nevertheless.
