Artwork by Adam Pendleton
August 18, 2019
The 1619 Project
Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true.
My dad always flew an American
flag in our front yard. The blue paint on our two-story house was
perennially chipping; the fence, or the rail by the stairs, or the front
door, existed in a perpetual state of disrepair, but that flag always
flew pristine. Our corner lot, which had been redlined by the federal
government, was along the river that divided the black side from the
white side of our Iowa town. At the edge of our lawn, high on an
aluminum pole, soared the flag, which my dad would replace as soon as it
showed the slightest tatter.
My dad was born into a family of sharecroppers
on a white plantation in Greenwood, Miss., where black people bent over
cotton from can’t-see-in-the-morning to can’t-see-at-night, just as
their enslaved ancestors had done not long before. The Mississippi of my
dad’s youth was an apartheid state that subjugated its near-majority
black population through breathtaking acts of violence. White residents
in Mississippi lynched more black people than those in any other state
in the country, and the white people in my dad’s home county lynched
more black residents than those in any other county in Mississippi,
often for such “crimes” as entering a room occupied by white women,
bumping into a white girl or trying to start a sharecroppers union. My
dad’s mother, like all the black people in Greenwood, could not vote,
use the public library or find work other than toiling in the cotton
fields or toiling in white people’s houses. So in the 1940s, she packed
up her few belongings and her three small children and joined the flood
of black Southerners fleeing North. She got off the Illinois Central
Railroad in Waterloo, Iowa, only to have her hopes of the mythical
Promised Land shattered when she learned that Jim Crow did not end at
the Mason-Dixon line.
Grandmama, as we called her, found a house in a
segregated black neighborhood on the city’s east side and then found
the work that was considered black women’s work no matter where black
women lived — cleaning white people’s houses. Dad, too, struggled to
find promise in this land. In 1962, at age 17, he signed up for the
Army. Like many young men, he joined in hopes of escaping poverty. But
he went into the military for another reason as well, a reason common to
black men: Dad hoped that if he served his country, his country might
finally treat him as an American.
The Army did not end up being his way out. He was
passed over for opportunities, his ambition stunted. He would be
discharged under murky circumstances and then labor in a series of
service jobs for the rest of his life. Like all the black men and women
in my family, he believed in hard work, but like all the black men and
women in my family, no matter how hard he worked, he never got ahead.
So when I was young, that flag outside our home
never made sense to me. How could this black man, having seen firsthand
the way his country abused black Americans, how it refused to treat us
as full citizens, proudly fly its banner? I didn’t understand his
patriotism. It deeply embarrassed me.
I had been taught, in school, through cultural
osmosis, that the flag wasn’t really ours, that our history as a people
began with enslavement and that we had contributed little to this great
nation. It seemed that the closest thing black Americans could have to
cultural pride was to be found in our vague connection to Africa, a
place we had never been. That my dad felt so much honor in being an
American felt like a marker of his degradation, his acceptance of our
subordination.
Like most young people, I thought I understood
so much, when in fact I understood so little. My father knew exactly
what he was doing when he raised that flag. He knew that our people’s
contributions to building the richest and most powerful nation in the
world were indelible, that the United States simply would not exist
without us.
In August 1619, just 12 years after the English
settled Jamestown, Va., one year before the Puritans landed at Plymouth
Rock and some 157 years before the English colonists even decided they
wanted to form their own country, the Jamestown colonists bought 20 to
30 enslaved Africans from English pirates. The pirates had stolen them
from a Portuguese slave ship that had forcibly taken them from what is
now the country of Angola. Those men and women who came ashore on that
August day were the beginning of American slavery. They were among the
12.5 million Africans who would be kidnapped from their homes and
brought in chains across the Atlantic Ocean in the largest forced
migration in human history until the Second World War. Almost two
million did not survive the grueling journey, known as the Middle
Passage.
Before the abolishment of the international
slave trade, 400,000 enslaved Africans would be sold into America. Those
individuals and their descendants transformed the lands to which they’d
been brought into some of the most successful colonies in the British
Empire. Through backbreaking labor, they cleared the land across the
Southeast. They taught the colonists to grow rice. They grew and picked
the cotton that at the height of slavery was the nation’s most valuable
commodity, accounting for half of all American exports and 66 percent of
the world’s supply. They built the plantations of George Washington,
Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, sprawling properties that today
attract thousands of visitors from across the globe captivated by the
history of the world’s greatest democracy. They laid the foundations of
the White House and the Capitol, even placing with their unfree hands
the Statue of Freedom atop the Capitol dome. They lugged the heavy
wooden tracks of the railroads that crisscrossed the South and that
helped take the cotton they picked to the Northern textile mills,
fueling the Industrial Revolution. They built vast fortunes for white
people North and South — at one time, the second-richest man in the
nation was a Rhode Island “slave trader.” Profits from black people’s
stolen labor helped the young nation pay off its war debts and financed
some of our most prestigious universities. It was the relentless buying,
selling, insuring and financing of their bodies and the products of
their labor that made Wall Street a thriving banking, insurance and trading sector and New York City the financial capital of the world.
But it would be historically inaccurate to
reduce the contributions of black people to the vast material wealth
created by our bondage. Black Americans have also been, and continue to
be, foundational to the idea of American freedom. More than any other
group in this country’s history, we have served, generation after
generation, in an overlooked but vital role: It is we who have been the
perfecters of this democracy.
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