The Destruction of Black Civilization in America: A historical view of why the rioting is currently taking place.

As I examine the rioting happening in America today, it made me examine African American history in the United States in an effort to figure out why we have reached a boiling point. Although I don't condone looting and the violence, I understand. I say that because there has never been a time in American history that Slaves, Negros, Colored, Blacks or African Americans have not had strife in their lives, often caused by someone else.

People often say that African Americans always want to blame someone else for their problems and that they bring their troubles upon themselves. Well, I beg to differ, and history proves this. What else do we know? Let me break it down for you. Once you read this, you will understand where the anger, distrust, and hopelessness come from.

While I don't have the cure, I surely know the symptoms and the cause of THIS pandemic in America.

Slavery

Most African Americans are descended from Africans who were brought directly from Africa to America and were forced into slavery. The process of being transported to the colonies and being on the slave ships was a horrific experience. On the ships, the slaves were separated from their families long before they boarded the vessel. Once aboard the ships, the captives were then segregated by gender. Under the deck, the slaves were cramped and did not have enough space to walk around freely. Male slaves were generally kept in the ship's hold, where they experienced the worst of crowding (and so it begins.) The captives stationed on the floor beneath low-lying bunks could barely move and spent much of the voyage pinned to the floorboards. Due to the lack of basic hygiene, malnourishment, and dehydration, diseases spread wildly, and death was common.

The women on the ships often endured rape by the crewmen. Women and children were often kept in rooms set apart from the main hold. This gave crewmen easy access to the women, which was often regarded as one of the perks of the trade system.

Slavery lasted for 400 years. 

Moving forward, even though they were slaves, many African Americans fought in the Revolutionary War and the Civil war for this country. Crispus Attucks, a free Black tradesman, was the first casualty of the Boston Massacre and of the ensuing American Revolutionary War. 5,000 Blacks, including Prince Hall, fought in the Continental Army, fighting side by side with White soldiers, but when George Washington took command in 1775, he barred any further recruitment of Blacks. Agrippa Hull fought in the American Revolution for over six years. He and the other African-American soldiers fought to improve their white neighbor's views of them and advance their own fight of freedom. It didn't work.

The antebellum period

As the United States grew, the institution of slavery became more entrenched in the southern states, while northern states began to abolish it. Pennsylvania was the first, in 1780 passing an act for gradual abolition.

The invention of the cotton gin in the 1790s allowed the cultivation of short-staple cotton; the industrial revolution generated a heavy demand for cotton, which caused an exponential demand for slave labor to develop new cotton plantations. There was a 70% increase in the number of slaves in the United States in only 20 years. Racial, economic, and political turmoil reached an all-time high regarding slavery up to the events of the Civil War.

By 1819 there were exactly 11 free and 11 slave states, which increased sectionalism. Fears of an imbalance in Congress led to the 1820 Missouri Compromise that required states to be admitted to the Union in pairs, one slave and one free. Due to the compromise of 1850, Washington, D.C would abolish the slave trade but not slavery itself.

Abolitionism

During the abolition period, over 1 million slaves were moved from the older seaboard slave states, with their declining economies to the rich cotton states of the southwest; many others were sold and moved locally.

The Black community

Blacks generally settled in cities creating the core of black community life. They established churches and fraternal orders. Many of these early efforts were weak and often failed, but they represented the initial steps in the evolution of black communities.

During the early Antebellum period, the creation of free black communities began to expand, laying out a foundation for African Americans' future. At first, only a few thousand African Americans had their freedom. As the years went by, the number of blacks being freed expanded tremendously, building to 233,000 by the 1820s. They sometimes sued to gain their freedom or purchased it. Some slave owners had freed their bonds people, and a few state legislatures abolished slavery.

African Americans tried to take advantage of establishing homes and jobs in the cities. During the early 1800s, free blacks took several steps to establish fulfilling work lives in urban areas. The rise of industrialization, which depended on power-driven machinery more than human labor, might have afforded them employment, but many owners of textile mills refused to hire black workers. These owners considered whites to be more reliable and educable. This resulted in many blacks performing unskilled labor. Black men worked as stevedores, construction worker, and as cellar-, well- and grave-diggers. As for black women workers, they worked as servants for white families, working as washerwomen or domestic servants. Some women were also cooks, seamstresses, basket-makers, midwives, teachers, and nurses.  Blacks organized to help strengthen the Black community and continue the fight against slavery, but to no avail as often, these communities were destroyed.

The Dred Scott decision

Dred Scott was a slave whose master had taken him to live in the free state of Illinois. After his master's death, Dred Scott sued in court for his freedom based on his having lived in a free state for an extended period. The black community received an enormous shock (I don’t know why they were surprised) with the Supreme Court's "Dred Scott" decision in March 1857. It was decided that Blacks were not American citizens and could never be citizens; the court said in a decision roundly denounced by the Republican Party (yes, the republicans were on our side back then) as well as the abolitionists. Because slaves were property, not people, by this ruling, they could not sue in court.

The American Civil War, Emancipation

The Emancipation Proclamation was an executive order issued by President Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863. In a single stroke, it changed the legal status, as recognized by the U.S. government, of 3 million slaves in designated areas of the Confederacy from "slave" to "free." It had the practical effect that as soon as a slave escaped the control of the Confederate government, by running away or through advances of federal troops, the slave became legally and actually free. The owners were never compensated. Plantation owners, realizing that emancipation would destroy their economic system, sometimes moved their slaves as far as possible out of reach of the Union army. By June 1865, the Union Army controlled all of the Confederacy and liberated all of the designated slaves.

About 200,000 free blacks and former slaves served in the Union Army and Navy, thus providing a basis for a claim to full citizenship. The severe dislocations of war and Reconstruction had a severe negative impact on the black population, with a large amount of sickness and death. Yet, they were still not really free nor appreciated for their contribution to the war efforts.

Reconstruction

The Civil Rights Act of 1866 made blacks full U.S. citizens. In 1868, the 14th amendment granted full U.S. citizenship to African-Americans. The 15th amendment, ratified in 1870, extended the right to vote to black males. The Freedmen's Bureau was an important institution established to create social and economic order in southern states.

After the Union victory over the Confederacy, a brief period of southern black progress, called Reconstruction, followed. During the Reconstruction, the entire face of the South changed because the remaining states were readmitted into the Union. From 1865 to 1877, under the protection of Union troops, some strides were made toward equal rights for African-Americans. Southern black men began to vote and were elected to the United States Congress and local offices such as sheriff. The safety provided by the troops did not last long, though, and white southerners frequently terrorized black voters.

Jim Crow, disenfranchisement and challenges

The Jim Crow laws were state and local laws in the United States enacted between 1876 and 1965. They mandated de jure segregation in all public facilities, with a supposedly "separate but equal" status for black Americans. In reality, this led to treatment and accommodations that were usually inferior to those provided for white Americans, systematizing a number of economic, educational, and social disadvantages. In the face of years of mounting violence and intimidation directed at blacks as well as whites sympathetic to their cause, the U.S. government retreated from its pledge to guarantee constitutional protections to freedmen and women.

When Democrats (yes Democrats) took control of Tennessee in 1888, they passed laws making voter registration more complicated and ended the most competitive political state in the South. Voting by blacks in rural areas and small towns dropped sharply, as did voting by poor whites.

From 1890 to 1908, starting with Mississippi and ending with Georgia, ten of eleven Southern states adopted new constitutions or amendments that effectively disenfranchised most blacks. Using a combination of provisions such as poll taxes, residency requirements, and literacy tests, states dramatically decreased black voter registration and turnout, in some cases to zero.

Segregation became a standard legal process in the South; it was informal in Northern cities. Jim Crow limited black access to transportation, schools, restaurants, and other public facilities. Most southern blacks for decades continued to struggle in grinding poverty as agricultural, domestic, and menial laborers. Many became sharecroppers, sharing the crop with the white landowners.

Racial terrorism

In 1865, the Ku Klux Klan, a secret criminal organization dedicated to destroying the Republican Party in the South, especially by terrorizing black leaders, was formed. Klansmen hid behind masks and robes to hide their identity while they carried out violence and property damage. The Klan used terrorism, especially murder and threats of murder, arson, and intimidation.

The Jim Crow era accompanied the cruelest wave of "racial" suppression that America has yet experienced. Between 1890 and 1940, millions of African Americans were disenfranchised, killed, and brutalized. According to newspaper records kept at the Tuskegee Institute, about 5,000 men, women, and children were murdered in documented extrajudicial mob violence —called "lynchings." The journalist Ida B. Wells estimated that lynchings not reported by the newspapers, plus similar executions under the veneer of "due process," may have amounted to about 20,000 killings. Of the tens of thousands of lynchers and onlookers during this period, it is reported that fewer than 50 whites were ever indicted for their crimes, and only four were sentenced. Hmmm, sounds very similar to today, doesn't it?

Civil rights

In response to these and other setbacks, in the summer of 1905, W. E. B. Du Bois and 28 other prominent African-American men met secretly at Niagara Falls, Ontario. There, they produced a manifesto calling for an end to racial discrimination, full civil liberties for African Americans, and recognition of human brotherhood. The organization they established came to be called the Niagara Movement. After the notorious Springfield, Illinois race riot of 1908, a group of concerned Whites joined with the leadership of the Niagara Movement and formed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) a year later, in 1909. Under the leadership of Du Bois, the NAACP mounted legal challenges to segregation and lobbied legislatures on behalf of black Americans.

World War I

The U.S. armed forces remained segregated during World War I. Still, many African Americans eagerly volunteered to join the Allied cause following America's entry into the war. More than two million African American men rushed to register for the draft. By the time of the armistice with Germany in November 1918, over 350,000 African Americans had served with the American Expeditionary Force on the Western Front.

Most African American units were relegated to support roles and did not see combat. Still, African Americans played a significant role in America's war effort. However, again their efforts were not appreciated. They were treated better overseas than here in America.

When they returned home, tensions were very high, with intense labor union strikes and inter-racial riots in major cities. The summer of 1919 was known as the Red Summer with outbreaks of racial violence, killing about 1,000 people across the nation, most of whom were black.

New Deal

The Great Depression hit black America hard. In 1930, it was reported that 4 out of 5 blacks lived in the South, the average life expectancy for blacks was 15 years less than whites, and the black infant mortality rate at 12% was double that of whites. A visiting British journalist wrote she "had traveled over most of Europe and part of Africa, but I have never seen such terrible sights as I saw yesterday among the sharecroppers of Arkansas."

World War II

The Afro-American newspaper The Pittsburgh Courier called for the "double victory" or "Double V campaign" campaign in a 1942 editorial, saying that all blacks should work for "victory over our enemies at home and victory over our enemies on the battlefield abroad." The newspaper argued that a victory of the Axis powers, especially Nazi Germany, would be a disaster for Afro-Americans while at the same time the war presented the opportunity "to persuade, embarrass, compel and shame our government and our nation...into a more enlightened attitude towards a tenth of its people". 

Over 1.9 million blacks served in uniform during World War II. They fought for this country even though they had to serve in segregated units.

Most of the Army's 231 training camps were located in the South, which was mostly rural and where land was cheaper. Blacks from outside of the South were sent to the training camps found life in the South almost unbearable. Tensions at army and navy training bases between black and white trainees resulted in several outbreaks of racial violence with black trainees sometimes being lynched.

Let’s not even talk about the dreadful tests performed on them like the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the African American Male, which was a clinical study conducted between 1932 and 1972 (40 years) by the United States Public Health Service. Oh, and don't forget about Henrietta Lacks, a black woman treated unsuccessfully for cervical cancer in 1951, from whose tumor doctors kept a sample of tissue. Her cells provided a breakthrough that would prove invaluable to medical research, but her family was kept in the dark even as they themselves became the subjects of scientific interest.

Speaking of this, let me digress for a moment. African Americans have undergone a sort of Medical Apartheid.  Starting with the earliest encounters between black Americans and Western medical researchers and the racist pseudoscience that resulted, both slaves and freedmen were used in hospitals for experiments conducted without their knowledge, a tradition that continues today within some black populations. African Americans have historically been prey to grave-robbing as well as unauthorized autopsies and dissections. Moving into the twentieth century, the pseudoscience of eugenics and social Darwinism has been used to justify experimental exploitation and shoddy medical treatment of African Americans, as there was a view that we were biologically inferior, oversexed, and unfit for adult responsibilities. Now back to our history lesson.

Though the Army was reluctant to send black units into combat, famous segregated units, such as the Tuskegee Airmen and the U.S. 761st Tank Battalion, proved their value over and over again in battle.

The distinguished service of these units was a factor in President Harry S. Truman's order to end discrimination in the Armed Forces in July 1948, with the promulgation of Executive Order 9981. This led in turn to the integration of the Air Force and the other services by the early 1950s.

Now here is where things got interesting. I Bet, most of you, did not know that the Republican party USED to be the heralded party for African Americans. Yep, they were on our side then. However, politically, blacks left the Republican Party and joined the Democratic New Deal Coalition of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom they widely admired. 

Hollywood

"Stormy Weather" (1943) (starring Lena Horne, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson and Cab Calloway's Band), along with Cabin in the Sky (1943) (starring Ethel Waters, Eddie "Rochester" Anderson, Lena Horne and Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong), and other musicals of the 1940s opened new roles for Blacks in Hollywood. They broke through old stereotypes and far surpassed the limited, poorly paid roles available in race films produced for all-black audiences. However, even today, African American actors still struggle in Hollywood.

Civil Rights Movement

A lot happened during this period. I won't try to explain it all. The Supreme Court handed down a landmark decision in the case of Brown v. Board of Education (1954) of Topeka. This decision applied to public facilities, especially public schools. Reforms occurred slowly and only after concerted activism by African Americans. The ruling also brought new momentum to the Civil Rights Movement. Boycotts against segregated public transportation systems sprang up in the South, the most notable of which was the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

Perhaps the high point of the Civil Rights Movement was the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which brought more than 250,000 marchers to the grounds of the Lincoln Memorial and the National Mall in Washington, D.C., to speak out for an end to southern racial violence and police brutality, equal opportunity in employment, equal access in education and public accommodations.

Dr. King gave his historic "I Have a Dream" speech.

This march, the 1963 Birmingham Children's Crusade, and other events were credited with putting pressure on President John F. Kennedy, and then Lyndon B. Johnson, that culminated in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that banned discrimination in public accommodations, employment, and labor unions.

President Johnson signs the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964.

In 1965 the Selma Voting Rights Movement, it's Selma to Montgomery marches, and the tragic murders of two activists associated with the march inspired President Lyndon B. Johnson to call for the full Voting Rights Act of 1965, which struck down barriers to black enfranchisement.

In 1966 the Chicago Open Housing Movement, followed by the passage of the 1968 Fair Housing Act, was a capstone to more than a decade of significant legislation during the civil rights movement.

By this time, African Americans who questioned the effectiveness of nonviolent protest had gained a greater voice. More militant black leaders, such as Malcolm X of the Nation of Islam and Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panther Party, called for blacks to defend themselves, using violence, if necessary.

From the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, the Black Power movement urged African Americans to look to Africa for inspiration and emphasized black solidarity, rather than integration.

While the civil rights period did lead to some relief for African Americans, it wasn't much, and it was not easy. And yes, discrimination still prevailed.

The first African-American President of the United States, Barack Obama

Even though African Americans have politically and economically made substantial strides in the post-civil rights era, there is still much strife and much discontent. It took until 1989 for Douglas Wilder to become the first African-American elected governor in U.S. history. In 1992 Carol Moseley-Braun of Illinois became the first black woman elected to the U.S. Senate. There were 8,936 black officeholders in the United States in 2000, showing a net increase of 7,467 since 1970. In 2001 there were 484 black mayors.

However, economic progress for blacks' reaching the extremes of wealth has been slow. According to Forbes's richest lists, Oprah Winfrey was the wealthiest African American of the 20th century and has been the world's only black billionaire in 2004, 2005, and 2006. Not only was Winfrey the world's only black billionaire, but she was the only black on the Forbes 400 list nearly every year since 1995. BET founder Bob Johnson briefly joined her on the list from 2001 to 2003 before his ex-wife acquired part of his fortune; although he returned to the list in 2006, he did not make it in 2007. Tyler Perry had joined that list with Winfrey. African Americans currently comprise approximately 0.25% of America's economic elite and comprise 13% of the U.S. population.

The dramatic political breakthrough came in the 2008 election, with the election of Barack Obama, the son of a black Kenyan father and a white American mother. He won overwhelming support from African-American voters in the Democratic primaries. MOST African Americans continued to support Obama throughout his tenure. During this tenure, Obama was often stifled as President, probably in some respects due to his race, although I cannot prove that.

Surveys of 11th and 12th-grade students and adults demonstrated that American schools have given students an awareness of some famous figures in black history, but they rarely know the entire story. WELL, HERE IT IS.

You see, ever since stepping foot in America, there has been a breakdown of African American people. The DESTRUCTION OF BLACK CIVILIZATION in America. We have NEVER had it easy here, our so-called home, for which we have fought, suffered, and died.  After the Civil Rights Movement gains of the 1950s–1970s, due to government neglect, unfavorable social policies, high poverty rates, changes implemented in the criminal justice system and laws, and a breakdown in traditional family units, African-American communities have been suffering from extremely high incarceration rates. African Americans have the highest imprisonment rate of any major ethnic group in the world. The southern states, which historically had been involved in slavery and post-Reconstruction oppression, now produce the highest rates of incarceration and death penalty application.

Black history attempted to reverse centuries of ignorance. The study of African-American history has often been a political and scholarly struggle to change assumptions. However, no matter how hard we try, YES, there is someone always trying to hold us done. 

And NOW, we have to deal with the almost daily killings of African Americans, as well as they disrespect we suffer from others. I remember once being on an elevator with a fellow special agent friend of mine. We were both in suit and tie and as we entered a caucasin women already in the elevator clutched her purse and and step back. All we could do was smile and shake our heads.

Although I spent over 30 years in the service of my country, serving in the Navy, Air Force, Army, Coast Guard Auxiliary, as a federal agent and as a current public servant I am still afraid of the police. Even though I carried a gun and badge for many years, I was afraid every time I was stopped by the police. And YES, I was stopped. Because I "looked" like someone they were looking for, or I was driving in the wrong neighborhood and a myriad of other reasons. And LUCKILY I had a badge in my pocket.

So you see, I understand why African Americans are angry and TRYING to fight back. I hope that now that you understand our plight, so do you.

I leave you with a poem from one of my favorite poets. I learned this as a child, and it has NEVER left me.

Mother to Son

BY LANGSTON HUGHES

Well, son, I'll tell you:

Life for me ain't been no crystal stair.

It's had tacks in it,

And splinters,

And boards torn up,

And places with no carpet on the floor—

Bare.

But all the time

I' se been a-climbin' on,

And reachin' landin's,

And turnin' corners,

And sometimes goin' in the dark

Where there ain't been no light.

So boy, don't you turn back.

Don't you set down on the steps

' Cause you finds it's kinder hard.

Don't you fall now—

For I' se still goin', honey,

I' se still climbin',

And life for me ain't been no crystal stair.