What did African Americans do to deserve centuries of hatred and oppression?
Our newly freed ancestors triggered America’s hatred of Black people. Their refusal to remain slaves in fact despite their having been emancipated legally is what drew the ire of White Supremacists. Although many founders owned slaves, including George Washington, or tolerated slavery by their fellows, they were not classical racists. Classical Racists perpetrate deliberate and continuous psychological, economic, sociological, physical actions, e.g., lynchings, to directly harm the despised people.
The founders defined equality and freedom and provided specific instructions to future leaders on the actions required to finish the development of American Democracy, which moderated their crime of hypocrisy. The problems cited were The Electoral College, Maniacal Political Partisanship, and the vestiges of Slavery.
“The God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God? Commerce between master and slave is despotism. Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people (slaves) are to be free.” – Thomas Jefferson
Slave owners would not have allowed unruly white mobs to lynch their slaves any more than they would have allowed them to come onto their plantations and kill their livestock and destroy their farming equipment.
WHAT SUB-SAHARAN AFRICANS DID FOR AMERICA:
ENRICHED AMERICA WITH OUR LABOR: Slavery was the largest single financial asset in the entire U.S. economy, worth more than all manufacturing and railroads, combined. It sprouted more millionaires per capita in the Mississippi River valley than anywhere in the nation. America’s southern states became the economic engine of the burgeoning nation. The profits quickly propelled the US into a dominant economic, military and cultural power in the world. In 1860, the nearly 4 million slaves were worth some $3.5 billion, $127 Billion today.
ENABLED THE UNITED STATES TO WIN VICTORY IN THE CIVIL WAR: My ancestors sided with the president of the united states, who sought to emancipate us, Abraham Lincoln, rather than with the president of the Confederate nation, Jefferson Davis, who declared a war to keep us enslaved. More than 130,000 of our ancestors fought in the Civil War on the side of the United States, and victory, according to Lincoln, was achieved as a consequence. Nearly 40,000 Black soldiers died during the conflict.
Lincoln: “If we abandon all the posts now possessed by Black Soldiers, which would surrender these advantages to the enemy, we would be compelled to abandon the war in three weeks, leading to Confederate Victory.”
Instead of expressing gratitude for our having helped save America from national poverty in the international arena and authoritarianism domestically, White Male Supremacists developed action-oriented Classical Racism. Early on, White Male Supremacists defined Black emancipation to be unpatriotic, sacrilegious, even treason, and acted on that definition. Between 1863 and 1952, the year I was 12, for example, some 6,500 Blacks were victims of racial terroristic killings, e.g., lynchings; nearly 2,000 were lynched during so-called “Reconstruction.”
White Male Supremacy potentially links all white men irrespective of educational, economic, and other demographic conditions.
“If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” (Lyndon Johnson)
Two philosophical Patron Saints of White Supremacists were Roger B. Taney, Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court; and Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate Nation.
“The negro has no rights that a white man is bound to respect.” (Taney, Dred Scott Decision)
“We recognize the negro as God and God’s Book and God’s Laws tell us to recognize him – our inferior, fitted expressly for servitude. You cannot transform negroes into anything one-tenth as useful or as good as what slavery enables them to be.” – Jefferson Davis
Despite brutal oppression and persecution, descendants of slaves evolved a defining culture after 1875, that generated monumental progress, unique in American history, in just three generations.
Until November 4, 2008, Obama’s election, as with the members at the Last Supper, Presidents had been “white faced.” Following on Obama’s election, American history’s most decadent, loathsome, evil, virulent form of White Supremacy ensued, which encompassed racism, misogyny, heteropatriarchy, masculinism, weaponized sacerdotalism, and treason, and led to Trump’s election and unprecedented attacks on Democratic Principles.
Nevertheless, a small a group of citizens can evict America’s ruling White Supremacists. If the 13 million Blacks who failed to vote in 2024 do vote in fall 2026 and fall 2028, once again, we can help save America and ourselves from Fascism. Remember: because of the Electoral College, Trump won in 2016 by a mere 112,000 votes — 0.03% of the US population.
