“Slavery was 150 years ago, get over it”
Ok, sure. Then let’s talk about all of the things that have happened to African-Americans since then.
-Weeks after the 13th Amendment was ratified, the Ku Klux Klan formed in the south to spread white supremacy, & terrorize, beat & lynch black people.
-For the following years, black people had no way to build wealth due to slave owners not teaching them any other skills, or even English. Majority of America was still racist too, so very few people were hiring them, leading to a large amount of ex-slaves having no other choice but to continue to work under the former masters just for a place to live.
-In 1896, 125 years ago, Plessy v. Ferguson upheld Jim Crowe laws & made it legal to segregate black people into their own neighborhoods & facilities, all of which were in less desirable areas, with less economic opportunities & in worse condition than what white people were given to use.
-In 1919, 102 years ago, “The Red Summer” happened, which was when literal armies of KKK & White Supremacists went on a murder spree killing hundreds of black people all across the nation for months. Many of which were black WWI veterans who tried to defend themselves in fights that turned into entire gun battles. For them, the war didn’t end when they got home. It had just begun.
-In 1921, 100 years ago, over 1000 white people. (some even armed by government officials) went into Tulsa, the largest, richest & most successful city African Americans had, which was named “Black Wall Street”, & massacred everyone in sight, including women & children, & burned the entire city down, including literal thousands of homes. All of this due to a sensationalized headline blaming a black guy for raping a white women on an elevator even though evidence of it doesn’t exist & the “victim” herself didn’t even want to prosecute him. Black people went from living in a thriving downtown they had built themselves, to living in rubble, & tents. No white men were charged with crimes.
-In 1923, 98 years ago, yet again due to unfounded rumors of rape by a black man another black city “Rosewood” in Florida gets pillaged by Klansman & bigots who indiscriminately terrorized, killed, lynched & destroyed everything in sight. While smaller than Tulsa, it may be the most popular example of this due to interviews & a movie. There are more cases of black cities, towns & districts being completely destroyed during this era, but sadly the stories are almost all the same. A black man is accused of doing something, then hundreds to thousands of white people destroy their neighborhoods, businesses etc. & beat or kill its residents.
-In 1944, 77 years ago, the G.I. Bill was signed into law by President Franklin Roosevelt in order to help financially boost veterans of WWII returning coming home by giving them discounts on homes, education & helping them get jobs. However, racist southern lawmakers didn’t want black veterans to begin pushing to end segregation by growing their wealth & gaining public support & respect due to their service, so a Mississippi congressman John Rankin pushed for the bill to be administered by states rather than federally, & by successfully doing so, states with segregation were legally able to refuse black veteran’s attempts to get aid, ultimately leaving 1.2 MILLION black World War II veterans from receiving their well deserved benefits, which further grew the gap between black & white Americans.
-In 1946, 75 years ago, racism & violence towards black WWII veterans became so pervasive that civil rights groups had to form to try & pass a federal “anti-lynching law” that failed to pass because southern politicians voted against it. This means that halfway in between slavery & modern day, we couldn’t even pass laws against lynching because of how deeply racist this country still was.
-In 1955, 66 years ago, a young 14 year old boy was blamed for whistling at a white women, & was chased down by grown men & beaten to death so hard that his corpse was literally unrecognizable. His mother had an open casket funeral to show the brutality that was done to him. His name, was Emmett Till. None of the men were charged, & the women admitted that she had lied, after being found decades later living a normal life, free from justice.
-In 1957, 64 years ago, after the passing of Brown vs the Board of Education, segregation of schooling was declared unconstitutional. The 1st southern state that was ordered to start the desegregation process was Arkansas, due to its relative progressiveness relative to other southern states. Yet still, the conservative governor refused to comply & on the first day of the school year he sent the National Guard to stop the 9 African American children known as the “Little Rock Nine” from entering the school, but they ultimately also stopped the angry mob which included Klansmen from hurting the kids. For days the Little Rock Nine was being harassed, threatened, attacked & blocked from going into school all while news crews from all around the country recorded the situation causing huge outrage in the north. This cost President Eisenhower to send the US Air Force to protect the kids from the angry mob & to counter the governor’s national guard. But, even with the kids being able to get inside the school, they were still harassed, bullied & attacked by fellow classmates once they stopped being escorted. This caused desegregation of the south to be postponed for years, but overtime the desegregation of schools drastically helped in the effort of cohabitation between black & white Americans.
-In 1968, 53 years ago, Redlining was made illegal. Redlining was the act of cities drawing borders between parts of town & always putting communities with “a high presence of black & brown people” in “red lines” to signify that they would receive far less funding & that their properties would be valued at far less than other surrounding areas, many of which banned black people from living there in order to stop their area from becoming redlined. Given that home value & inheritance is where most Americans get at least half of their net worth from, these explicitly racist policies were incredibly detrimental to black people, & especially black business owners, further pushing the wealth gap between black & white people. Problem is, after making it illegal, there was no way to enforce redlining policies ending, so it wasn’t until the late 70s 44 years ago that extra laws were passed to mitigate these discriminations. However, still to this day most redlined communities are still financially segregated due to the difficulties of moving up the economic ladder in places with little wealth to begin with.
-From 1974–1976, 47 to 45 years ago, school buses began desegregating, which was so outrageous to many people, notoriously in the Boston area, that these buses needed to be escorted by police due to threats on the buses & the black children inside of them. Not only that, but 25% of kids in Boston were withdrawn from public schools in order to avoid them having to be in the same buses as kids of other races. In fact, riots & fights broke out constantly due to these policy changes angering so many bigoted Americans. Decoy buses posing as school buses were destroyed during riots while the black kids had to be secretly driven out in other buses to avoid detection & violence, or even death.
-In 1981, 40 years ago the last documented lynching by KKK members took place in Mobile Alabama against a 19 year old black man Michael Donald, who was beaten & hanged from a tree. Michael was selected at random by the Klan members who were looking for any black person to kill after the shooting of a white police man earlier in the year.
-All throughout the 80s 41–31 years ago, the C.I.A. teamed up with Nicaraguan drug traffickers to sell crack into the U.S. in order to fund Nicaraguan contra’s campaign against the communist government there. This was documented & proven by a journalist who mysteriously committed suicide with two gunshot wounds to the back of the head. Think this is just a conspiracy theory? A decade later the C.I.A. acknowledged that C.I.A. officials engaged with Cocaine traffickers. Now what does this have to do with black people? Well the overwhelming majority of crack dealt through the C.I.A. went into impoverished, mostly minority neighborhoods, which single handily created the infamous crack epidemic which ravaged many black communities, especially South Central L.A. in the 90s. Something we’ll talk about later.
-In 1985, 36 years ago, the Philadelphia Police got into an armed standoff with a black anarcho-primitivist group/family named MOVE, after warrants came out for their arrest due to neighbors supposedly complaining about their nomadic life style including trash & their extremist political ideologies. After a long back & forth the PPD decided to drop a bomb on the entire complex, destroying & burning over 60 other innocent people’s houses due to their lack of concern for everyone else. It was over an hour & a half into the fire before the Philly Fire Department were told to start combating the blaze, even though all MOVE members were long dead by this point…including 5 children. Call me crazy, but if this had happened in a middle class white suburb, I have a feeling that dropping bombs & letting flames engulf the entire neighborhood wouldn’t have even been considered as a viable approach.
-All throughout the 90s 31–21 years ago, the crack epidemic ravaged black neighborhoods, due to how cheap it is & easy it is to distribute. With this came huge surges in gang violence & murders as different gangs wanted to control the supply. With this increased gang violence & drug abuse, the U.S. government decided to crack down harshly with intense overpolicing policies, including things like “stop & frisk” where you can stop anyone & check them for illegal paraphernalia, leading to super high arrest rates, even for completely non-violent drug offenses, including mild drugs like marijuana. High numbers of (mostly male) arrests, means high numbers of fatherless children. High numbers of fatherless children means high numbers of super impoverished single parent households. This leads to a growing & never ending cycling of kids without role models growing up dirt poor in crime ridden neighborhoods going into crime themselves as that’s all they’ve ever known.
-In 1991, 30 years ago, Rodney King led a police pursuit to avoid a DUI & when his car was finally pulled over, 5 police officers began brutally beating him, most of which used batons & some tased him & continued to beat him even after being on the ground. They stopped after being ordered to stop. But once he got back onto his knees, they attacked him with batons once again, hitting his joints & obviously causing severe injuries by the end of it. They also assaulted the passengers too, all of which were unarmed. The ensuing unrest, & not-guilty verdicts of all officers involved, led to the infamous LA riots, fed by outrage & hopelessness.
-Today in present times, African-American communities still receive less government funding than white communities, 23 billion dollars less in education alone. They are still suffering the consequences of over policing policies that have continued to devastate black communities & continue the cycle of poverty & crime. Black Americans are still more likely to receive longer sentences than white people for equal crimes, & are more likely to be arrested for mild crimes when compared to white people. And lastly, as we have seen first hand in the 2010s to today, police brutality against the African-American community has not went away, & won’t for the foreseeable future. So when people like to pretend that the moment slavery ended, everybody got along, everything became equal, & racism wasn’t a problem, they’re wrong, & this article should inarguably prove once & for all that this notion of “slavery was 150 years ago, get over it” is completely historically inaccurate, & needs to stop being said or else change will never come.