Page 25 - 1619 Project Curriculum

August 18, 2019

who had run away seeking refuge.

Like many others, the writer and

abolitionist Samuel Byron called

out the deceit, saying of the Con-
stitution, ‘‘The words are dark and

ambiguous; such as no plain man
of common sense would have

used, [and] are evidently chosen to
conceal from Europe, that in this

enlightened country, the practice

of slavery has its advocates among

men in the highest stations.’’
With independence, the found-

ing fathers could no longer blame

slavery on Britain. The sin became
this nation’s own, and so, too, the
need to cleanse it. The shameful par-

adox of continuing chattel slavery

in a nation founded on individual
freedom, scholars today assert, led
to a hardening of the racial caste

system. This ideology, reinforced
not just by laws but by racist sci-
ence and literature, maintained

that black people were subhuman,
the DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University, Dallas. Right: From Special Collections and Archives/Georgia State University Library.

a belief that allowed white Ameri-

cans to live with their betrayal. By
the early 1800s, according to the

legal historians Leland B. Ware,

Robert J. Cottrol and Raymond T.

Diamond, white Americans, wheth-
er they engaged in slavery or not,
‘‘had a considerable psychological
as well as economic investment in
the doctrine of black inferiority.’’

While liberty was the inalienable

right of the people who would be
considered white, enslavement and
subjugation became the natural sta-

tion of people who had any discern-

ible drop of ‘‘black’’ blood.

The Supreme Court enshrined
this thinking in the law in its 1857

Dred Scott decision, ruling that

black people, whether enslaved or

free, came from a ‘‘slave’’ race. This
made them inferior to white people
and, therefore, incompatible with
American democracy. Democracy

was for citizens, and the ‘‘Negro

race,’’ the court ruled, was ‘‘a sep- Isaac Woodard and his mother in South Carolina in 1946. In February that year, Woodard,

arate class of persons,’’ which the a decorated Army veteran, was severely beaten by the police, leaving him blind.
founders had ‘‘not regarded as a

portion of the people or citizens of be citizens, if they were a caste apart be an American citizen, President had been increasingly pressuring

the Government’’ and had ‘‘no rights from all other humans, then they did Abraham Lincoln called a group Lincoln to end slavery, must have

which a white man was bound to not require the rights bestowed by of five esteemed free black men to felt a sense of great anticipation

respect.’’ This belief, that black peo- the Constitution, and the ‘‘we’’ in the the White House for a meeting. It and pride.

ple were not merely enslaved but ‘‘We the People’’ was not a lie. was one of the few times that black The war was not going well for

were a slave race, became the root people had ever been invited to the Lincoln. Britain was contemplat-

mere five years

Left: From of the endemic racism that we still On Aug. 14, 1862, a person could White House as guests. The Civil ing whether to intervene on the

Confederacy’s behalf, and Lincoln,
after the nation’s highest courts
cannot purge from this nation to this
War had been raging for more than

declared that no black
a year, and black abolitionists, who

day. If black people could not ever

enough new white
unable to draw
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