Learn from history. Don’t sanitize it

The current administration in Washington DC is intent on sanitizing our nation’s history, including exhibits at the Smithsonian Institution. And at every level of government, across the country, there are requests to ban books that tell our history the way it actually happened.

Recognizing the mistakes of the past 500 years and learning from those experiences is an act of love of country and deep patriotism. Denying unpleasant episodes in our history is foolish and counter productive.

Let’s dig into that history beginning with slavery, and we’ll stick with the facts. About 450,000 Africans arrived in North America during the slave trade, having survived the dreaded Middle Passage. The first African slaves arrived on the White Lion in 1619. The trip was wretched. Men, women, and children were kept naked and packed closely together in the slave ships. Many died on the trip.

Human chattel slavery, as it was known, meant that slaves were property that could be bought, sold, or given away. Abundant evidence shows that life as a slave was often a terrifying and demeaning existence. Most enslaved women had to endure their children being forcibly taken from them. Half of all enslaved infants died in the first year of their lives. Slaves were not allowed to learn to read or write. By the 1870s the illiteracy rate for African Americans was still nearly 80%.

Slavery was imbedded in the U.S. Constitution. One clause required that slaves be counted as three/fifths of a person for determining Congressional representation and another, known as the fugitive slave clause, required escaped slaves be returned to their owners. At one time, the majority of members of Congress owned slaves as did 10 of the first 12 U.S. Presidents, and by the 1860 census there were four million slaves, mostly in the South.

Slavery lasted for 246 years until the 13th Amendment to Constitution, which abolished slavery, was ratified on December 6, 1865. Ten generations of African Americans lived their lives as slaves. There were 41.6 million African Americans in the U.S. when the 2020 census was taken, and most descended from the 450,000 African slaves.

The Reconstruction Acts of 1867, which followed the end of the Civil War, spelled out the terms by which the Confederate states could be readmitted to the Union. The new state governments, established by a coalition of freedmen, white Southerners, and Northern transplants, were short-lived. Reconstruction effectively ended in the South when federal troops were withdrawn from the last Southern state in 1877.

W.E.B. DuBois said: “The slave went free; stood for a brief moment in the Sun; then moved back again toward slavery.” Racial animosity metastasized; white backlash to black people’s gains was immediate and vicious.

Following Reconstruction came the Black Codes and the Jim Crow laws, passed by state and local governments throughout the South from 1865 until the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Jim Crow is a pejorative term for African American. Jim Crow laws institutionalized economic, educational, political, and social disadvantages for African Americans and effectively established second class citizenship for them.

Jim Crow laws mandated separation of races in schools, trains and buses, theaters, churches, hotels, hospitals, barber and beauty shops, rest rooms and water fountains, funeral homes, restaurants, parks, and building entrances. Marriage and cohabitation between black and whites people were strictly forbidden in most Southern states. Black and white people were even prohibited from playing card games in their own homes.

Jim Crow laws were upheld in 1896 by the Supreme Court in the Plessy v. Ferguson decision which approved the “separate but equal” doctrine for facilities for African Americans.

But Jim Crow laws made life untenable in the South for many African Americans, and led to the Great Migration. Lynchings, in particular, motivated many to move. More than 4,700 lynchings have been documented. The Great Migration was the movement of six million African Americans out of the South and to the cities of the Northeast, Midwest, and West between 1910 and 1970. Population statistics show that prior to 1910, 90% of the African American population lived in the Southern states. By 1970, nearly 50% lived in the North and West. Moreover, the African American population had become very urbanized with more than 80% living in cities.

Unfortunately, the migrants found crowded conditions, sometimes dangerous working conditions, and new forms of de facto segregation in their new cities. Women, in particular, had difficulty finding work.

Ten generations living under slavery. Five generations living under Jim Crow laws. Three generations since the civil rights movement gained momentum in the 1960s.

Only by understanding that history is it possible to understand why:

Median household income for black families is much lower than white families and accumulated wealth is even lower as is home ownership.

Unemployment rates are higher for black Americans than white Americans.

The percentage of black students who earn college degrees is much lower than white students.

Black Americans are incarcerated at five times the rate of white Americans.

The list goes on. Accurate history informs. Altering history to accommodate a particular point of view deceives.

Ralph Plagman is a retired educator, having worked as a teacher and administrator in Cedar Rapids Schools for nearly 50 years.