On The Mark: Violence against Black Americans has deep roots through history

Why are African Americans so often the victims of police killings? A history of enslavement, violence-enforced exploitation and often killing labor, followed by decades of industrial exploitation and residential segregation are succinct explanations, though not enough. It’s difficult to face and accept that our country was built on enslavement and brutal field work, enforced with beatings, lynchings, imprisonment, and death. And that our nation’s economic prowess emerged from the work that enslaved Black men, women and children performed for centuries. Here’s a too-brief summary.

From the 16th century to the early decades of the 19th century, white Europeans invaded peaceful, familial African tribes, marching them enchained to the coast and transporting them in packed ships, sometimes manacled to the floor for the entire voyage. I saw a drawing of this at Ellis Island years ago and understood for the first time why African Americans are not “immigrants” like most other Americans. Dozens of books by historians describe the Middle Passage, as it was called. After the tobacco and wheat plantations of the east coast failed, slaveholders sold their slaves to cotton planters in the humid south. They were marched in chains for hundreds of miles. Many died enroute.

Slaves, according to American economic historians, built the American economy by providing the unpaid and often killing labor that produced cotton, enabling the textile mills of New England to hum with cloth and industrialize the north, fueling the transatlantic trade that brought prosperity to northern port cities. To keep the Black labor force enchained, the rich white southern planters created systems of armed force, including severe punishment, even death, for anyone who tried to run away to freedom.

We have made progress. The Civil War was a struggle over slavery. The North, already industrialized, had superior weapons, skilled-wage labor that could be mustered into the Union army and excellent transportation systems. The South was unable to mobilize its labor force — four million slaves — to fight for the right of slavery. But although slavery was abolished with the Northern victory, the agricultural lands that slaves had cultivated were not given to them.

Instead, freed slaves and their families became sharecroppers, planting and harvesting cotton, and, farther west, sugar cane, often on the same plantation lands where they’d been enslaved. To keep freed slaves on the land, Southern urban factory owners and shops refused to employ them. In city and country alike, poll taxes, residential and school segregation and practices such as lynching prevented Blacks from exercising their right to vote and relegated most to poor housing and segregated schools, buses, lunch counters.

As Blacks moved north in successive waves to fill factory jobs in the booming industrial cities of the north, they were crowded into the poorest inner-city neighborhoods by racist policies and real estate practices. The FHA manual for home loans instructed banks to not extend mortgages to anyone buying a house in a majority-Black neighborhood.

Real estate agents steered African American buyers away from white neighborhoods. This persists. In 1999, when I was home-shopping in Minneapolis, my real estate agent would not show me homes for sale in neighborhoods that were majority Black (he referred to them as “dark”). I fired him.

As a result of the decades-long and amazingly successful and mostly peaceful Civil Rights movement, lynching mostly disappeared in the South, schools were integrated, and poll taxes that made it difficult for Blacks to vote were abolished. But because our society remains residentially quite segregated, education and public services continue to be unevenly funded, especially in central cities. Discrimination in schooling, employment, and housing continues to consign many African Americans to poverty and dangerous living environments.

Throughout this long journey, police departments kept Blacks in their place through intimidation, reinforced by both legal and illegal discrimination and policy collaboration. Jailors routinely released falsely accused Black men to mobs demanding to lynch them without trials. This was the case with the 1920 Clayton, Jackson and McGhie lynchings in Duluth. Bull Connor, commissioner of public safety in Birmingham, Alabama, notoriously used police dogs and fire hoses against peaceful Civil Rights protestors in the early 1960s.

But protest and solidarity can change things. The post-war Civil Rights movement of the 1960s brought us closer together. The decades-long journey to integrate our armed forces has also helped to build bridges.

It’s heartening that so many people of all races and ethnicities are joining Black Americans in their demands for police reform following George Floyd’s murder. I remember a long bus ride in 2012 with a fellow Fulbright colleague, a young Italian American Los Angeles police officer. Working alongside London cops, he was amazed that they carry no firearms. I asked him if he thought that could be possible in Los Angeles. He said yes, maybe.

I’m hopeful that our cities and countries will aggressively adopt stricter gun control measures and design policing methods and police training to make our communities safe for all citizens. Rather than warrior training, police deserve better education and support for how to work with people in our communities.

Ann Markusen is an economist and professor emerita at University of Minnesota and Pine Knot News board member.