After learning about the Chinese and the Japanese from Thomas Sowell in Ethnic America, it's time for the Blacks.
The Blacks
Black Americans are unique in that the vast majority came to America against their will, as slaves, and two centuries of slavery served to separate them from their ancestral culture, making them "a cultural and biological product of the New World rather than Africa." And their history is complicated by emancipation followed by Jim Crow and involved several massive internal migrations. Thus "many blacks are only in their second generation in the urban world... about where the Irish were a century ago."
However all blacks are not alike. Although most American Negroes were freed by the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, there were already about half a million "free persons of color" that were emancipated earlier. And there are immigrants from the West Indies.
It was the Arabs that began the massive trade in African slaves after their conquest of northern Africa in the eighth centuries. Some of these slaves were introduced into Spain and Portugal, so that when the Spanish started to colonize the New World they brought along African slaves to do the heavy work. In the mid 17th century 10,000 slaves a year were shipped across the Atlantic, reaching a peak of 60,000 a year in the eighteenth century, totaling more than 10 million over the centuries. About 400,000 were shipped to the American colonies, beginning in 1619, when Africans landed in Virginia were made into indentured servants and subsequently freed. Slavery appeared as "a perpetual condition" in Virginia in 1661.
Preventing escape is a central requirement of a slave system and this was achieved by making the slaves ignorant and dependent. It was easy to escape, but not easy to escape the white patrols. The dependency imperative created cultures of "foot-dragging, work-evading patterns that were to remain as a cultural legacy" long after the end of slavery.
But the slaves developed a unique, self-reinforcing culture. "Racial solidarity was basic and betrayal to whites unforgivable." Thus a violation of solidarity meant pariah status and "personal devastation." The most important relationship was the family. Slave marriages -- without legal standing -- "usually lasted for decades, if not for a lifetime." And slaves maintained their surnames, secretly, down the generations. Although slave owners could separate slave couples, they avoided it, because "the remaining partner might try to escape." However, owners were uncertain about slave marriages. They wanted to avoid fights over women, yet regarded slave families as inappropriate to slave status.
Slave labor is most suitable for "crops requiring routine, mass-production labor" easily monitored by overseers. With the invention of the cotton gin, this meant expansion of slave labor in the Deep South with its suitable soil and climate, and an associated forced migration of slaves from the Upper South to the Deep South.
Opposition to slavery took many forms, ranging from the desire to avoid the problems of living in a society with a "racially distinct people held in bondage" to rabid defense of slavery and notions that the slaves were inferior "and lacked the feelings that would cause them suffering" from their bondage. And what would happen if the slaves were freed?
Division between North and South heightened after the Revolution. Northern states avoided the problem by announcing a future ban on slavery, which sent all the slaves to the South. Meanwhile the South doubled down on its support of slavery, with "black codes" and censorship. Opponents of slavery migrated out of the South.
During the Civil War, relations between black and white were ambiguous. Some slaves escaped to fight for the North; one slave carried his wounded master off the battlefield and then escaped to join the Union Army. Whites were also ambivalent, praising and damning blacks.
And after the War, white resentment of blacks was widespread. Yet both whites and blacks had their lives utterly disrupted.
The position of newly freed blacks was made precarious by the undependable protection of the Union Army and the rampant terrorism of white mobs and vigilantes.
And that only got worse after the end of Reconstruction.
After the War, most blacks continued as agricultural laborers and a large minority worked as domestic servants. A major problem was lack of experience in budgeting or managing day-to-day life. Thus blacks worked in ways that were hardly different from slavery. Only as they acquired the skills and culture and education of free men did they begin to rise: from slaves to share-croppers to tenant farmers. And when there was competition for labor, incomes grew.
Politically, black participation was held back by Jim Crow laws, segregation, and lynching.
Under slavery, education for blacks was forbidden, and this was tightened after the Nat Turner insurrection of 1831 in Virginia. But after the War blacks, children and adults, flocked to education when they could find it. Various agencies, from the Freedman's Bureau to missionary associations, tried to help. And blacks went from nearly zero to 75 percent literacy in the fifty years after emancipation. But public education was slow to open up to blacks, and the new black colleges taught pre-college material for many years.
Black leadership was divided between former slaves like Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington that pushed for raising up the masses and free-born W.E.B. Du Bois who advocated for the "talented tenth."
Migration of blacks towards the North began before the Civil War; thus antebellum "free persons of color" were more urbanizes than whites. Meanwhile black slaves were being moved southwestwards. Migration to the cities after the War began modestly, but ramped up in the 1880s and thereafter, with 0.75 million leaving the South in the 1920s. Reasons for the exodus included worsening race relations, the boll weevil, and demand for labor in World War I. By the end of the 19th century blacks were integrating fairly well into northern cities, sometimes earning more than Irish and Italian immigrants, and residential segregation into black ghettos was not a thing.
But acceptance of blacks in northern cities went down in the early 20th century.
The masses of unacculturated, ill-educated, rural southern Negroes who flooded into the northern cities were bitterly resented by blacks and whites alike.
And so barriers were raised against all blacks and some northern cities passed residential segregation laws.
Migration paused in the Great Depression of the 1930s but resumed in the 1940s. Over 4 million blacks migrated from the South between 1940 and 1970, a major population migration. It was a "mass uprooting from a rural southern way of life," the sort that takes generations to adjust to. Normal social pathology appeared -- violence, alchoholism, crime, delinquency -- and whites and the black middle class moved away from the new migrants, if they could. Most of the migrants were male, unmarried and unskilled. As late as 1925 72 percent of black males in New York were either unskilled laborers or service workers; the bulk of black women were domestic servants. But black family life typically featured two-parent households, with 80 percent headed by the father. "The unwed teenage mother emerged in a later era."
Literacy improved, but slowly. In 1900, about half of the black population was illiterate; by 1920 it was down to less than a quarter. In 1930 blacks averaged six years of schooling compared to ten for whites. As late as 1930 only 14 percent of black children in the South reached high school. But a few high-quality black high schools delivered a cohort that in later years were graduating from Ivy League colleges. And the new black masses in the cities developed a new cultural style, and their music developed into modern jazz.
The slow rise created a new black middle class that "displaced or merged with the old [black] elite in many northern cities." And some blacks made substantial fortunes.
Blacks from the West Indies started immigrating in the early 20th century. About 1 percent of the black population, they are overrepresented as professionals and public figures, and have not intermarried much with native US blacks. Although West Indian black slaves were treated worse than US slaves they grew and prepared their own food and sold surplus food in markets, giving them experience in running their lives and in buying and selling. They were emancipated in 1838 but were given a period of preparation for freedom, unlike the overnight emancipation in the US. Many West Indian blacks have risen to leadership positions in the black community.
President Truman made "civil rights" a major part of his platform in 1948, splitting his party and losing the South. But he started a process, with court decisions striking down discriminatory laws and practices. But black improvements in incomes, occupations, and education have not eliminated "gaps" as other groups have also improved their lot. Still, in the 1960s black income and college enrollment rose faster than white. The number of blacks in elective politics soared, quadrupling in state legislatures in the South. Overall black progress appears less than expected because half of American Negroes live in the South where incomes and living costs are lower.
Blacks have experienced retrogression in the proportion of one-parent families; the proportion of blacks on welfare has increased, and the proportion of blacks in work has declined absolutely and proportionately to whites. Government has attempted to advance blacks with "'affirmative action' or racial quota hiring" but economists believe these efforts have "little or no effect." These policies have "engendered strong resentment among whites in general."
Prominent blacks are disproportionately descended from black elite families and West Indians: Thurgood Marshall, Andrew Young, Roy Innes, Shirley Chisholm.
Blacks have progressed from a "position of utter destitution... to a place alongside other groups emerging the in the great struggles of life. None have to to come from so far back to join their fellow Americans."
Next: Latin Americans
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