Page 28 - 1619 Project Curriculum

The 1619 Project

and held white and ‘‘colored’’ days And black veterans like Woodard, Mississippi said on the Senate Hundreds of black veterans were

at the country fair, and white busi- especially those with the audacity floor during World War I, black beaten, maimed, shot and lynched.

nesses regularly denied black peo- to wear their uniform, had since servicemen returning to the South We like to call those who lived

the Greatest

ple service, placing ‘‘Whites Only’’ the Civil War been the target of a would ‘‘inevitably lead to disaster.’’ during World War II

signs in their windows. States like particular violence. This intensified Giving a black man ‘‘military airs’’ Generation, but that allows us to

California joined Southern states in during the two world wars because and sending him to defend the flag ignore the fact that many of this

barring black people from marry- white people understood that once would bring him ‘‘to the conclu- generation fought for democracy

ing white people, while local school black men had gone abroad and sion that his political rights must abroad while brutally suppressing

boards in Illinois and New Jersey experienced life outside the suff o- be respected.’’ democracy for millions of Ameri-

mandated segregated schools for cating racial oppression of Amer- Many white Americans saw black can citizens. During the height of

America’s
black and white children. ica, they were unlikely to quietly men in the uniforms of racial terror in this country, black

This caste system was maintained return to their subjugation at home. armed services not as patriotic but Americans were not merely killed

through wanton racial terrorism. As Senator James K. Vardaman of as exhibiting a dangerous pride. but castrated, burned alive and
Chained Migration:
How Slavery Made Its
Way West
By Tiya Miles
Slavery leapt out of the East uncharted space designated the American South wanted constitutions, individual enslav-

and into the interior lands of as Indian Territory (including to extend cotton agriculture ers held onto their property-in-

the Old Southwest in the 1820s present-day Oklahoma and Kan- and increase the numbers of people until the Civil War.

and 1830s. Cotton began to soar sas). ‘‘Removal,’’ as the historian white arrivals. ‘‘It was slavery Enslaved men who had served

as the most lucrative product in Claudio Saunt argues in a that seemed to represent the in the Union Army were among the
forth-

the global marketplace just as coming book on the topic, was far soft underbelly of the Texas first wave of African- Americans

the slaveholding societies of too quiet a word to capture the unrest,’’ the historian Steven to move west of their own free

the Southeast and Mid- Atlantic violation of this mass ‘‘expulsion’’ Hahn asserts in ‘‘A Nation With- will. They served as soldiers, and
were reaching limits in soil fertili- of 80,000 people. out Borders.’’ Armed conflict together with wives and children

ty. To land speculators, planters, As new lands in the Old South- between American- identified they formed pocket communi-

ambitious settlers and Northern west were pried open, white enslavers and a Mexican state ties in Montana, Colorado, New

investors, the fertile lands to the enslavers back east realized that outlawed slavery in 1829 Mexico and Texas. It is a painful
west now looked irresistible. that their most profitable export was among the causes of the paradox that the work of black

The Native American nations was no longer tobacco or rice. A Mexican- American War, which soldiers centered on what the

that possessed the bulk of those complex interstate slave trade won for the United States much historian Quintard Taylor has
lands stood in the way of this became an industry of its own. of the Southwest and California. called ‘‘settler protection’’ in his

imagined progress. President This extractive system, together Texas became the West’s classic 1998 study of African-

Andrew Jackson, an enslaver with enslavers moving west with cotton slavery stronghold, with Americans in the West, ‘‘In Search

from Tennessee famous for brutal human property, resulted in the enslaved black people making of the Racial Frontier.’’ Even while

‘‘Indian’’ fighting in Georgia and relocation of approximately one up 30 percent of the state’s bearing slavery’s scars, black

Florida, swooped in on the side million enslaved black people to population in 1860. ‘‘Indian Ter- men found themselves carrying

of fellow enslavers, championing a new region. The entrenched ritory’’ also held a large popu- out orders to secure white res-

the Indian Removal Act of 1830. practice of buying, selling, lation of enslaved black people. idents of Western towns, track

When Congress passed the bill owning, renting and mortgag- Mormons, too, kept scores of down ‘‘outlaws’’ (many of whom

by a breathtakingly slim margin, ing humans stretched into the enslaved laborers in Utah. The were people of color), police the
Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, American West along with the small number of black people federally imposed boundaries

Chickasaws and Seminoles in the white settler- colonial popula- who arrived in California, New of Indian reservations and quell

South as well as Potawatomis, tion that now occupied former Mexico and Oregon before mid- labor strikes. ‘‘This small group

Wyandots, Odawas, Delawares, indigenous lands. century usually came as proper- of black men,’’ Taylor observes,

Shawnees and Senecas in the Slaveholding settlers who ty. Even as most Western states ‘‘paid a dear price in their bid to

Midwest were relocated to an had pushed into Texas from banned slavery in their new earn the respect of the nation.’’

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