"We are a people who, in the language of our Declaration of Independence, hold certain truths to be self-evident: namely, that all men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. It is our belief in the universality of these unalienable rights that leads us to our exceptional role on the world stage, that of a great champion of human dignity and human freedom."[1]
"America is the first power in history motivated by a desire to expand freedom rather than its own territory."[2]
"Our country has always been exceptional. It is freer, more individualistic, more democratic, and more open and dynamic than any other nation on earth. These qualities are the bequest of our Founding and of our cultural heritage. They have always marked America as special, with a unique role and mission in the world: as a model of ordered liberty and self-government and as an exemplar of freedom and a vindicator of it . . ."[3]
From the extensive public record on Exceptionalism it appears that, for many conservatives, merely pointing to the existence of those core values in our history is sufficient proof of America’s exceptional nature. It’s as if conservatives are convinced that good intentions are all that are required to achieve the condition labelled Exceptional. Simply stating that “all men are created equal . . . with certain unalienable rights . . .”, that America is the “great champion of human dignity and human freedom,” and the U.S. is “an exemplar of freedom” seems for many to mean that that was the case and no one with a patriotic bone in her/his body would think of questioning it.
But some Americans take a more critical view of our history and wonder if Exceptionalism is nothing but a beautiful myth with which we comfort ourselves to avoid what is a much harsher reality. To shed light on that challenge, in this essay I examine specific elements from American history that many may have never learned, have ignored or are indifferent to, or have discarded as irrelevant as to who we are. My direct focus is on white/non-white issues rather than on land-based conflicts between Native Americans and whites. Readers desiring additional information on how the U.S. treated Native Americans might consult my post of February 5, 2015, titled: American Exceptionalism: An Evaluation.
The critical question I begin with is straightforward: How did our country act, considering the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution declares as self-evident truths that all persons are created as equal under the law and are possessed of inalienable rights, including among others freedom of speech and assembly, personal security, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?
The first part of the answer to that question should be evident since even before we become an independent country black Africans were enslaved in every colony and, after the Revolution, in every newly formed state. In addition, according to the U.S. Naturalization Law of 1790, only white men of good standing could become U.S. citizens. That law as applied to blacks stood until passage of the Civil Rights Law of 1866 but was still in effect after that for Hispanics, Native Americans, and Asians until the mid-20th Century.
Thus, in historical reality, from our earliest founding as a country until the end of the Civil War, American core values of freedom, dignity, and equality were reserved for whites only, with non-whites treated as distinctly inferior and legally subordinate. But, what happened after the Civil War? Perhaps things changed dramatically for the better. A number of examples are presented below to illustrate that historical reality, starting with Reconstruction and working toward the present day.
Reconstruction Era, 1863-1877
Although the Civil War ended in 1865, Reconstruction almost immediately evolved into an extension of that war. It became a struggle between northern Radical Republicans and their allies who wanted to punish both Southern states for traitorous acts and Southern white supremacists committed to racial segregation as the foundation of their way of life.
President Andrew Johnson, a Southern War Democrat from Tennessee, was an open advocate of white supremacy and an opponent of extending civil and human rights to newly freed blacks. Johnson’s Reconstruction policies granted amnesty to former Southern rebel soldiers and permitted only white men to vote or to participate in the framing of the new state governments. He appointed provisional governors from the white Southern power elite and outlined steps for the creation of new state governments that would allow the election of representatives to the U.S. Congress. Johnson strongly supported state sovereignty and the right of each state to decide how to treat blacks.
It is critical to view Johnson’s conduct in context of the times. For example, by 1865 only a few New England states had granted Black American men the right to vote and, between 1865 and 1868, Connecticut, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin voters rejected proposals to enfranchise Black American men.[4]
Many Radical Republicans became outraged that the recently defeated but unrepentant Southern rebels would be returning their former Confederate leaders to national political power, that none of the Southern state conventions had granted freedmen the right to vote, and that every Southern state had immediately passed legislation (Black Codes) that tightly restricted the freedoms of former slaves. That anger seemed more than justified when Benjamin F. Perry, South Carolina’s provisional governor, declared at that State’s constitutional convention: “. . . this is a white man’s government.”
With President Johnson's support, Southerners focused on strengthening white supremacy to ensure that blacks were held in a debt peonage and socio-political vise that was slavery in every aspect but name. That system was enforced by threats and violence by armed white vigilantes that included home burning, rape, public whipping/beating, genital mutilation, lynching, and countless acts of physical violence that terrorized black communities in every Southern and Border State and that were encouraged and sanctioned by state and local governments.
After the 1866 election, angry Radical Republicans in Congress wrested control of Reconstruction from President Johnson, who had rejected the idea that blacks had the same rights of property and person as whites, passing the Reconstruction Acts of 1867 that divided the former Confederate states into five military districts, with the exception of Tennessee, which had already been re-admitted to the Union. To be re-admitted into the Union, each state was required to accept the 13th and 14th Amendments to the Constitution, which granted citizenship and political rights to Black Americans.
Under Reconstruction’s military occupation and the oversight of the Freedmen’s Bureau, Black Americans received the right to vote, own property, and to hold political offices that had formerly been restricted to white Southern Democrats, a situation that was abhorred and opposed at every turn throughout the South. President Johnson vetoed all the Radical Republican initiatives but those vetoes were overridden in the Senate. In 1868, the Radical Republicans impeached President Johnson but the Senate failed to convict him by a single vote. Although the impeachment effort failed, Johnson’s power to influence the direction of Reconstruction was greatly compromised.
As early as the late-1860s, Southern and Border State Democrats had initiated the process of regaining political power by suppressing black voting through systematic acts of fraud, intimidation, and violence carried out by ruthless white sheriffs, local judges and election officials, and armed extralegal, all-white paramilitary groups variously known as the Ku Klux Klan, White Brotherhood, Redeemers, Sabre and Rifle Clubs, Knights of the White Camellia, White League, White Liners, and Red Shirts. By the early- to mid-1870s, organized white intimidation and violence against blacks was the norm in every Southern and Border State.
The stakes in controlling the political infrastructure of the South were extraordinarily high. In effect, passage of the 13th Amendment increased representation from Southern states in the U.S. House of Representatives because it made the infamous three-fifths slavery Compromise in the Constitution meaningless since those who had been slaves would thereafter be counted as whole persons in apportioning seats in the House. If Congress seated unrepentant Southerners, political power would immediately swing to the Democrats. To expect Republicans who had just won the Civil War to surrender national power to a region that had been defeated on the battlefield and to a population they viewed as traitors was totally unrealistic. With Reconstruction and passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, Radical Republicans in Congress had focused all their efforts on changing the balance of power in the South and on effecting a political revolution that they thought necessary to ensure Black Americans would be able to achieve the full freedoms guaranteed in our Constitution.
Radical Republicans not only failed to secure Constitutionally-guaranteed freedoms for blacks through the Reconstruction effort but also inadvertently insured that the political order in the South that would control the lives of four to five million Black Americans for nearly a century would be based on white bigotry and supremacy. Many factors helped ensure Reconstruction’s failure, among them national economic problems like the Panic of 1873, the rise of a national conservative consensus, a general feeling that Reconstruction had failed to achieve worthwhile goals, the national resurgence of the Democratic Party, and a growing national climate that accepted bigotry and racism as normal. As painful memories of the Civil War faded, most Northerners lost interest in maintaining what turned out to be a difficult and prolonged struggle to ensure Black Americans would be granted the freedoms, dignity, and equality guaranteed by the Constitution. The insurmountable problem was that the South that emerged after Reconstruction was remarkably like the pre-war South in terms of its foundation on white bigotry and supremacy, with the exception that overt slavery of blacks was replaced by a system of debt peonage and social controls enforced through intimidation and violence sanctioned by every level of government and by every element of Southern white society.
By the mid-1870s, most moderate Republicans as well as Northern Democrats had begun classifying Southern blacks as simply another special interest group that they thought had to start standing on its own feet, despite slaves having been systematically denied freedom and education for more than 250 years and being totally unprepared to face hostile Southern legislatures and violent white Southerner bigots without the continuing support of the federal government. But by the late-1870s, all three branches of the federal government had effectively turned their backs on enforcement of the Constitutionally guaranteed rights of Black Americans and left them to their fate at the hands of Southern white supremacists.
Reconstruction ended as a result of President Grant’s withdrawal of federal troops from Florida and the infamous and under-the-table Compromise of 1877 that resulted in the fraudulent election of Rutherford B. Hayes as President. By that time, Southern Democrats had used intimidation and violence by armed white mobs and extralegal militia to seize control of all Southern and Border State legislatures. In 1890, Mississippi adopted a new constitution that disenfranchised nearly all black citizens through literacy tests, poll taxes, multiple ballot box laws, white-only primaries, grandfather clauses, and residency requirements, cutting black voter enrollment from approximately 147,000 to around 8,600.[5] When those discriminatory provisions survived legal challenges to a U.S. Supreme Court that was blind, deaf, and dumb to civil rights violations against Black Americans, nine of the other Southern states adopted similar constitutions, disenfranchising the far greater majority of their Black American residents. Other specific examples include: Louisiana adopted a new constitution in 1898, dropping the number of black voters from 130,000 to 5,000;, Alabama re-wrote its constitution in 1901 to establish white supremacy as the rule of law and reduced the number of eligible black voters from more than 180,000 to 3,000; and in Virginia, the number of black voters dropped from 147,000 to 21,000.
The Southern disfranchisement movement was so comprehensive that black people could not vote, serve on juries, or hold political offices, activities that were restricted to registered white voters. As a result, Black Americans were systematically excluded from any role in the socio-political system other than that of a lower caste.
Here’s another twist on denying black vote in the South. Since after the 1870s only Democrats were elected in general elections, in Southern States the most critical election was the primary. But because official state voter registration forms intentionally did not ask a voter’s party affiliation, county and local registrars were the only officials who determined party membership. Because no Southern Black Americans were acknowledged as members of the Democratic Party, they could not vote in primary elections even though they were formally registered voters. Those tactics and systemic white violence against black voters ensured the near total absence of blacks at the polls until the late-1960s.
But white-only primaries, poll taxes, and literacy tests were not the only obstacles to black suffrage. Black land owners and workers throughout the South were told that they would lose their jobs or be denied access to credit if they attempted to vote. In many cases, when a black farmer’s white neighbors found out he intended to vote, local merchants refused to extend credit, weigh his field crops, or deliver materials to his farm. Suppression of black vote was well-organized and systemic through the South and was specifically intended to oppress the black population and sharply curtail their rights.
As has been noted by numerous observers, the Confederacy may have lost the Civil War on the battlefield but the South won the struggle to maintain their white supremacist way of life and to continue oppressing blacks through intimidation and violence. The result was a century-long war of savagery and terror against black citizens carried out by armed Southern whites supported by local and state governments. An as illustration, Mississippi Governor James Vardaman famously stated that "If it is necessary every Negro in the state will be lynched; it will be done to maintain white supremacy."[6] Many if not all Southern conservatives believed that black suffrage during Reconstruction had been an enormous political blunder because blacks were inherently inferior, unqualified, and unprepared to assume the responsibilities of citizenship and, thus, the near total segregation of blacks from whites was a necessary precondition to eventual citizenship.
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Simply stating that Black Americans were denied the fundamental rights of freedom and human dignity guaranteed by the Constitution to all citizens does not reveal the specific nature of the inequities and violence committed by bigoted whites and hostile Southern state and local governments against Black Americans. Therefore, several examples are provided below to illustrate the reality of the term “lack of human freedom and dignity” in Southern States for Black Americans. These few examples, extending from the end of the Reconstruction Era to the mid-1960s, are but the tip of an enormous iceberg of racial intimidation and violence directed against Black Americans that characterized Southern and Border States.
Colfax Massacre, Louisiana, 1873
The Colfax Massacre on Easter Sunday, April 13, 1873, occurred during a confrontation between Louisiana Democrats in the White League, an armed extralegal militia organized to ensure white supremacy, and white and black Republicans in the nearly all-black and lightly armed official Louisiana State Militia. Between 100 and 150 blacks were killed, half had been murdered after they surrendered, had been disarmed, and held captive by the White League for several hours. Three whites were found guilty of the murders but were released when the legally clueless U.S. Supreme Court declared that their convictions had been unconstitutional because the Enforcement Act of 1870 (which was based on the Bill of Rights and 14th Amendment) applied only to actions committed by states and did not apply to individual actions or private conspiracies. That infamous and morally bankrupt decision—United States v. Cruikshank 92 U.S. 542 (1875)—left Black Americans throughout Southern and Border States at the mercy of bigoted state and local governments dominated by white Democrats determined to enforce white supremacy via violence and deny the constitutional rights of Black Americans.
Vicksburg Massacre, Mississippi, 1874
In 1874, armed, extralegal white militias in Vicksburg, Mississippi, worked to suppress black voting and succeeded in defeating all Republican city officials in the August election. By December, the emboldened white Democrats forced the black sheriff to flee to the state capital. Blacks who rallied to Vicksburg to aid the sheriff also had to flee in the face of superior white forces, as armed whites flooded the city. Over the next few days, armed white gangs murdered up to 300 Black Americans in the city and its surroundings. No one was indicted or prosecuted for those crimes.
Ellenton Massacre, South Carolina, 1876
In a brutal and relentless drive to regain political and social power in the South, conservative white Democrats used intimidation and violence to prevent Black Americans from voting. Prior to the election of 1876, armed conflicts took place in Ellenton and nearby areas of South Carolina. White supremacy supporters formed rifle clubs and other paramilitary groups that were established to prevent black Republicans from organizing, voting, and all other political activities.
The Ellenton Massacre occurred from September 15 to 21, 1876. Tensions over elections had been building for weeks and residents of the area had appealed to the governor to curtail the actions of numerous Democratic rifle clubs, which were mobs of extralegal, armed white vigilantes organized to control the election by suppressing the black vote through threats and violence. Although many details of the Race Riot are uncertain, at least in part due to whites who had participated in the violence concealing or destroying evidence, several facts stand out. On September 20, 1876, Simon Coker, a black State representative, was forcibly removed from the rail car on which he was traveling and shot to death by members of a white mob. It was estimated that one white man and between 100 to 150 blacks were murdered in the Ellenton Massacre. No one was indicted or prosecuted for those crimes.
Thibodaux Massacre, Louisiana, 1887
The Thibodaux Massacre is a tale of a bitter agricultural labor dispute leavened with racism, bigotry, and ruthless violence by armed white mobs. The plight of black sugarcane workers in 1887 was one of back-breaking labor and inadequate pay. Most field hands were paid approximately $13 a month in script issued by the plantation that was redeemable only at a plantation store, whose prices were arbitrarily set by the landowner and had little or no relation to market prices. Overcharged workers usually wound up in debt to the landowner. By Louisiana law, if an agricultural worker owed money to a landowner he could not leave the land or employment on the land until the debt was paid in full. That and similar laws throughout the South essentially reduced agricultural laborers, including tenant farmers and share croppers, to a type of serfdom known as debt peonage.
After a three-week sugarcane strike organized by the Knights of Labor union against plantations in southern Louisiana that demanded elimination of scrip, an increase in daily wages, and payment every two weeks, the Louisiana Sugar Producers Association rejected the demands and had the strikers evicted from the plantations by armed white militias. Violence erupted when two white militiamen were fired upon at a checkpoint where they were trying to prevent blacks from moving about the city of Thibodaux freely.
The incident enraged the white population of Thibodaux and unleashed mobs of armed white vigilantes that indiscriminately attacked the black population of Thibodaux in what can only be described as a racial massacre. Between 35 to 300 blacks were killed in the ensuing violence, including defenseless women and children, almost all of whom were unarmed. All of the dead were Black Americans. No one was charged with any offense.
Ocoee Massacre, Florida, 1920
On November 3, 1920, which was Election Day in central Florida, a deadly race riot began in the previously unremarkable, small semi-rural community of Ocoee and quickly spread to nearby Orlando, Apopka, and Winter Garden. The reason was that several Black Americans who had been legally registered to vote in Florida and had paid their poll tax had shown up at the polls to vote. They were physically assaulted and turned away by armed white men. An armed white mob went to the homes of the two black men who had attempted to vote and shots were fired; the situation quickly escalated out of control. The resulting mob violence spread to surrounding cities and nearly 500 blacks living in the Ocoee area were forced to flee for their lives. Before order was restored, nearly all the black-owned homes in Ocoee had been destroyed. The FBI later estimated that from 30 to 60 black men, women, and children had been murdered by mobs of white terrorists. No one was arrested or tried for the attacks. No Black Americans would vote in all of Orange County, Florida, for nearly 20 years after the massacre. Blacks did not re-inhabit the Ocoee area in any numbers until 1981, 61 years after the riot.
Tulsa Race Riot, Oklahoma, 1921
The Tulsa race riot was a large-scale, racially motivated conflict that occurred from May 31 to June 1, 1921, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a city that legally enforced racial segregation and disenfranchised Black Americans. After a black man had been accused of assaulting a young white woman and arrested, armed mobs of whites and blacks exchanged gunfire. A mob of approximately 2,000 armed whites then attacked the prosperous black Tulsa neighborhood of Greenwood, burned it to the ground, and murdered numerous black residents. During that assault, more than 800 blacks who had been attacked by white mobs had to be admitted to local white hospitals because the two black-only hospitals had been destroyed by white mobs. Local police and Oklahoma National Guard troops arrested and detained more than 6,000 black residents simply because of their race. No whites were arrested. An estimated 10,000 black residents were homeless and 35 blocks with 1,256 residences were reduced to rubble by fires set by armed whites. Estimates of black fatalities varied from 55 to 300, with estimates by modern historians at the highest end of that range. The black man originally arrested for assault was released when the young woman refused to press charges. No charges were filed against individual white rioters.
Rosewood Massacre, Florida, 1923
Rosewood was a small, stable, self-sufficient black community in west-central Florida near Cedar Key on the Gulf Coast. It had a thriving all-black population of about 150 until New Year’s Day, 1923, when a white woman in the nearby predominantly white town of Sumner accused a black man of beating her. Those accusations and the news that a black convict had escaped from a local chain gang combined to create the critical mass that erupted in an explosion of bigotry and violent racism. Hundreds of enraged whites formed an armed mob led by the County Sheriff and marched into Rosewood, ostensibly in search of the escaped convict. When they shot and lynched a black male Rosewood resident, other male members of the black community resisted.
Over the next several days more than 30 black Rosewood residents were murdered by an armed mob of at least 300 white men. Those who escaped the violence fled the area. Almost all of what was left of Rosewood was destroyed by fire for no reason other than racial hatred. An all-white grand jury investigation resulted in no indictments and the massacre was quickly forgotten by everyone except the survivors. After the massacre it was determined that the beating that had started the mob violence had been administered by the woman’s white lover. She had lied so that her husband wouldn’t learn of her affair. The Rosewood properties previously owned by black residents were later sold by the County for back taxes.
It wasn’t until 1983 that the incident became public when St. Petersburg Times investigative reporter Gary Moore wrote about the massacre. His article was followed by a segment on CBS-TV’s news magazine 60 Minutes, a documentary on The Discovery Channel, and by a Hollywood movie directed by John Singleton and featured Jon Voight, Ving Rhames, and Don Cheadle. The next twelve years was filled with political haggling and legal wrangling as a restitution claim for Rosewood survivors was introduced in the Florida Legislature. A Special Master appointed by the Speaker of the House ruled that the State had a “moral obligation” to compensate survivors for the loss of property, violation of their constitutional rights, and mental anguish. On May 4, 1994, Governor Lawton Chiles signed a $2.1 million compensation bill that gave nine survivors $150,000 each and established a state university scholarship fund for Rosewood families and their descendants.
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Assuming that many if not most Americans may be more sensitive to violence to individuals than by violence to a more anonymous collective, I have listed below a small sample of individuals who were murdered by Southern white racists/bigots.Harry T. and Henrietta Moore: founders of the Brevard County chapter of the NAACP and civil rights pioneers. Harry was President of Florida's NAACP and was the statewide leader in opposing lynching—at that time Florida had one of the highest rates of black lynching in the U.S. On December 25, 1951, the night of the Moores’ 25th wedding anniversary, a bomb placed under the bedroom in their house exploded, killing both. Harry Moore was the first NAACP official murdered in the civil rights struggle and is justly revered as a martyr. No one was arrested or prosecuted for the murders.
George Lee: civil rights activist, minister, businessman, vice president of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership, and head of the Belzoni, Mississippi, branch of the NAACP was heavily involved in black voter registration drives. He was shot to death in northwestern Mississippi on May 7, 1955, by an unidentified white assailant. No charges were brought in the murder.
Lamar Smith: civil rights activist, farmer, and WWI veteran was shot to death at 10:00 AM on August 13, 1955, by a white man on the crowded courthouse lawn in Brookhaven, Mississippi, after urging blacks to vote. Although the killer was known to dozens of witnesses, no one was arrested or tried for the crime.
Emmett Till: a 14 year-old Black American from Chicago who was vacationing with relatives in Mississippi, was savagely beaten, mutilated almost beyond recognition, and shot to death by two white men on August 28, 1955, after reportedly flirting with a white woman at a local grocery store in Money, Mississippi. The two men were tried but found not guilty by an all-white jury. Till’s almost unimaginably brutal murder and the subsequent acquittal of the two white men charged with his death by an all-white jury attracted widespread media attention and outrage in the U.S. and throughout the world. The killing occurred in a context of increasing black challenges in the South after World War II to white supremacy. As one of Till’s killers, John William (J.W.) Milam, reflected later:
"I like niggers—in their place—I know how to work ‘em. But I just decided it was time a few people got put on notice. As long as I live and can do anything about it, niggers are gonna stay in their place. Niggers ain’t gonna vote where I live. If they did, they’d control the government."[7]
Herbert Lee: civil rights activist shot and killed on September 25, 1961, in Liberty, Mississippi, by E.H. Hurst, a white member of the Mississippi State Legislature for participating in the voter registration campaign. Hurst was never changed with the murder as all the witnesses were coerced into testifying Lee had threatened Hurst. After one black witness, Louis Allen, told the FBI that he had been forced to lie to the coroner’s jury, he was murdered. No one was charged or prosecuted for his death.
Medgar Evers: a black U.S. military veteran of WWII and civil rights activist involved in working to desegregate the University of Mississippi was assassinated on June 12, 1963, in Jackson, Mississippi. Evidence, including fingerprints on the murder weapon, pointed to Byron De La Beckwith, a founding member of the White Citizens' Council. Although De La Beckwith was tried twice, both all-white juries were deadlocked, in part due to his being supported by numerous politically prominent Mississippians, including then-Governor Ross Barnett. De La Beckwith was finally convicted of murder in a third trial on February 5, 1994, and died in prison.
Addie Mae Collins (age 14), Denise McNair (age 11), Carole Robertson (age 14), and Cynthia Wesley (age 14): Bombing victims who died on Sunday, September 15, 1963, at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, when four members of the Ku Klux Klan planted dynamite beneath the front steps of the church. Although by 1965 the FBI had information concerning the identity of the bombers, no state or federal charges were brought until 1977, when Alabama Attorney General William Baxley reopened the investigation. Klan leader Robert E. Chambliss was convicted of murder despite the FBI’s refusal to release evidence necessary for the prosecution. Two other former Klan members, Thomas Blanton and Bobby Frank Cherry, were also brought to trial by A.G. Baxley. Blanton was convicted in 2001 and Cherry in 2002. Herman Frank Cash, the fourth bombing suspect, died before he could be tried.
James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner: civil rights activists killed on June 21, 1964, near Philadelphia, Mississippi, by Klansmen. Seven men, including Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price, were convicted in federal court of conspiracy to deprive the three victims of their civil rights. In 2005, Edgar Ray Killen, a former recruiter and organizer for the Neshoba County and Lauderdale County KKK, was tried and convicted in state court of three counts of manslaughter for the deaths of the three civil activists for planning and directing their murders and was sentenced to 60 years in prison, 20 years for each count to be served consecutively.
Viola Liuzzo: civil rights activist was shot and killed near Montgomery, Alabama, on March 25, 1965, by members of the Ku Klux Klan; less than two weeks later, a charred cross was planted on the front lawn of her Detroit residence. One of the men in the Klansmen's car was a paid FBI informant who provided evidence against the three Klansmen who killed Liuzzo. After the first state trial ended in a mistrial, an all-white jury took less than two hours to acquit one of the Klansmen. All three were later convicted on federal civil rights charges.
Jimmie Lee Jackson: civil rights activist was beaten by white Alabama State Troopers and shot by Trooper James Fowler on February 18, 1965, while participating in a peaceful voting rights march in Marion, Alabama. Although Jackson was unarmed, his killer was not charged with his murder until May 10, 2007. In a bargain with state prosecutors, Fowler pled guilty to manslaughter and served five months.
James Reeb: civil rights activist and Unitarian Universalist minister from Boston died as a result of being brutally beaten on the head with a club by white racists in Selma, Alabama, on March 11, 1965. He had answered MLK Jr.’s call to clergy around the country to join a second effort to march from Selma to Montgomery. The three white men indicted for Reeb’s murder were acquitted by an all-white jury.
Vernon Dahmer: civil rights activist and president of the Forrest County, Mississippi, chapter of the NAACP died on January 11, 1966, of severe burns and smoke inhalation after his Hattiesburg home was firebombed by a mob of white racists opposed to his efforts to register black voters. Thirteen men with KKK ties were tried. Four were convicted in part because Billie Roy Pitts (the bodyguard of KKK Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers) entered a guilty plea and turned state's evidence. However three of the four convicted were pardoned by Governor John Bell Williams within four years. In 1998, based on new evidence, the state tried Bowers for Dahmer’s murder and assault on his family. He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison, where he died in 2006.
Martin Luther King Jr.: national civil rights leader was assassinated on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was assisting city sanitation workers who were on strike. James Earle Ray was convicted of the murder and died in prison.
Cynthia Marie Graham Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lee Lance, Depayne Middleton-Doctor, Clementa C. Pinckney, Tywanza Sanders, Daniel Simmons, Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, and Myra Thompson: murdered on June 17, 2015, at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in downtown Charleston, South Carolina, by white racist Dylann Roof, who was arrested and charged with 33 federal crimes and nine counts of murder by the state.
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Although Black Americans are the principal focus of this essay, Hispanics and Asian-Americans have also faced numerous challenges to their Constitutional rights, including literacy and language tests, poll taxes, discriminatory immigration and naturalization laws, and intimidation and violence. Despite many Americans being unaware of the details, U.S. law prevented any person who was non-white from becoming a citizen. As was mentioned above, the Naturalization Law of 1790 determined that only white men of good standing could become U.S. citizens, meaning all others were barred, including Native Americans. That law stood until it was repealed, at least in part, on December 17, 1943, when Chinese were no longer barred from U.S. citizenship, a concession made only to keep the Chinese Army fighting against the Japanese in WWII. The well-known federal case of In re Ah Yup 1 F. Cas. 223 (C.C.D. Cal. 1878) (No. 104) found that Chinese were non-white and thus were ineligible for naturalization. Anti-Chinese sentiment was so high that in 1882 Congress enacted the Chinese Exclusion Act, which sharply restricted Chinese immigration to the United States, classified Chinese immigrants as permanent aliens, and excluded them from U.S. citizenship. Adding insult to injury, in 1922 Congress enacted the Cable Act, which stipulated: “any woman citizen who marries an alien ineligible to citizenship shall cease to be a citizen of the United States.” [8]
Concluding Thoughts
The famous German sociologist, Max Weber, proposed an intriguing analogy to a country’s beginning that revolved around a game played with dice that were honest at the onset. But, over time, each major historical event structured future socio-political development/evolution by becoming institutionalized, loading the dice as it were, establishing a directional bias that became stronger and more pronounced as time passed. To put it another way, according to Weber, historical events establish societal values and pre-dispositions that influence future events, thus shaping the direction of socio-political change.
But, as an alternate scenario, what if that game started with loaded instead of honest dice, biasing a country’s socio-political system in a pre-determined direction from the get-go? What if the initial playing field had not been level and the resulting game had not been unbiased at any point? In that variation on Weber’s analogy, events that predisposed a country to favor whites over non-whites would set in motion a support process that increased the future likelihood of favoring whites.
Weber’s loaded dice can easily be identified across American history: the Constitution recognized black slavery as legal and blacks as inferior; the Naturalization Law of 1790 allowed only white men to become citizens; the infamous 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision ruled blacks were not fully human; the 1871 Blyew v. United States decision found that in nearly all Southern and Border States whites could kill, rob, or cheat Black Americans as long as the only witnesses were black since by state law blacks could not testify against whites; the 1875 United States v. Cruikshank decision left Black Americans throughout Southern and Border States without the protection of federal law; the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Law prevented people of Chinese nationality from immigrating to the U.S. solely because of their racial heritage; the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision found racial separation was legal; Native Americans were not allowed to become American citizens until the mid-20th Century; 127,000 U.S. citizens were imprisoned during World War II and their property was confiscated without judicial process because of their Japanese ancestry; and today we cannot ignore the Affirmative Action programs that are increasingly under attack across the U.S. Connecting those dots should not be difficult.
The very real problem we face today is that conservatives cannot see or cannot allow themselves to see historical reality: that America’s national identity was rigged as ethnocentric from the outset, favoring whites and handicapping people of color, whether enslaved or free blacks, Native Americans, Hispanics, and Asians. From our earliest beginnings as a country, whites were virtuous and superior and non-whites were despicable and inferior and thus not deserving of the same rights and freedoms, no matter what awe-inspiring words were enshrined in the Constitution. What conservatives shield themselves from is that good intentions are meaningless when immoral, unethical, and inequitable acts by whites against people of color are the societal and governmental norm.
Achieving freedom and equality requires, at minimum, a legal system that is fair to all. Although people need a level playing field for success to be attainable, structured inequity translates into success largely for the favored in-group and failure for devalued out-groups. If the source of that inequity is government law/policy that is enforced at all levels from local to national, then transitioning to an unbiased future will be extraordinarily difficult.
To trumpet American Exceptionalism today in the face of our history of ethnocentrism is an act of arrogance that ignores or justifies more than three centuries of white oppression of non-whites and creates the beautiful myth that all people in the U.S. enjoyed freedom and equality as a natural right throughout our history. We owe not our country unconditional love or approval. Rather we owe ourselves the courage to be honest in the face of hard reality. We’re not a perfect country; after all, has such ever existed? But the claims conservatives make that America is, in essence, better than every other country in the world flies in the face of our history. It’s that refusal of conservatives to acknowledge the warts and flaws and self-serving immoral behavior that inevitably characterizes all countries that puts the lie to American Exceptionalism.
Starting from colonial settlement onward we became an “Exceptional country” through a process designed to enrich and empower whites at the expense of all others. We became an “Exceptional country” because a coalition of Southern white plantation owners and Northern white merchants were able to exploit the unpaid labor of savagely oppressed and enslaved blacks that transitioned after the Civil War into the savage oppression of Black Americans through Black Codes, Jim Crow laws, and violent socio-political restraints. We became an “Exceptional country” through a century of legal, illegal, and extra-legal acts by whites from all political parties and at all levels of government aimed at oppressing non-whites.
Simply because conservatives want to believe the best of the U.S. does not mean that was what transpired in the real world. Wishing it were so does not create historical reality.
For a century after 250 years of the almost unimaginable evil of slavery, federal, state, and local governments turned what was essentially a blind eye to a highly organized and efficient system of legally-based repression, intimidation, and savagery in Southern and Border States that focused physical and psychological violence against Black Americans with the specific intent of depriving them of Constitutional rights in order to maintain and strengthen white supremacy. It was not until passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957, Civil Rights Act of 1964, and Voting Rights Act of 1965 that American citizens who were first granted suffrage after the Civil War by the 15th Amendment were finally able to vote after 100 years of violent subjugation by state and local governments and white supremacists. That century of systematic, nationwide de jure and de facto hostility and repression has never been officially acknowledged by the U.S. government. Nor has the government apologized for more than two centuries of enslaving blacks. Nor has an apology or any type of broad-based support, not to mention financial/economic reparations, ever been offered to Black Americans by the federal or state governments.[9]
People who trumpet American Exceptionalism cannot allow themselves to see that this country was founded on ethnocentrism and has continued throughout history to operate on that precept because that’s the way the Weberian dice had been loaded. Which makes the U.S. like all too many other countries that were organized around and operated through in-group favoritism and out-group hostility.[10] Because to acknowledge that historical reality would negate their sense of superiority over other countries and pop their American Exceptionalism balloon. Although it is impossible for conservatives to admit, at our innermost core what makes Americans exceptional is our almost limitless addiction to hypocrisy and denial.
To all conservative politicians and their followers who beat the drum of American Exceptionalism and discount or ignore our shameful history of racial hostility and oppression, I offer the words of Joseph N. Welch, chief counsel for the U.S. Army, as he addressed Senator Joseph McCarthy during a 1954 Senate investigation:
"Have you no sense of decency . . .? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"[11]
END NOTES
[1]
Source: http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2011/10/07/text-of-mitt-romneys-speech-on-foreign-policy-at-the-citadel/?mod=google_news_blog
[2] Source:
https://twitter.com/marcorubio/status/598577980298829824?lang=en
[3] https://www.nationalreview.com/nrd/articles/339276/exceptional-debate.
[4] Steven
F. Lawson, 1999. Black ballots: Voting rights
in the South, 1944-1969. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
[5] Steven
F. Lawson. Ibid, p. 14-15 and http://www.nps.gov/nhl/learn/themes/CivilRights_VotingRights.pdf.
See also Michael Perman. 2001. Struggle
for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888-1908. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press.
[6] Source:
Chris Danielson. 2013. The color of
politics: Racism in the American political arena today. New York: Praeger
Publishing. See also:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/biography/flood-vardaman/
[7] Quoted
in http://www.nps.gov/nhl/learn/themes/CivilRights_VotingRights.pdf Also see:
William Bradford Huie. 2001. “The shocking story of approved killing in
Mississippi,” in Racial violence on trial:
A handbook with cases, laws, and documents, p. 245. Christopher Waldrep,
ed. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO; and Stephen J. Whitfield. 1991. A death in the delta: The story of Emmett
Till. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
[8] Charles
J. McClain. 1996. In search of equality:
The Chinese struggle against discrimination in nineteenth-century America.
Oakland, California: University of California Press. Also see: http://www.nps.gov/nhl/learn/themes/CivilRights_VotingRights.pdf;
McClain, Charles J. 1995. Tortuous path, elusive goal: The Asian quest for
American citizenship. Asian American Law
Journal. 2:33-60. Available online: http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1020&context=aalj
[9] See
Ta-Nehisi Coates: http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/05/the-case-for-reparations/361631/
[10] See: Axelrod,
Robert, and Ross A. Hammond. 2003. “The evolution of ethnocentric behavior.”
Revised version of a paper prepared for delivery at Midwest Political Science
Convention, April 3-6, 2003, Chicago, Illinois. Available online:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~axe/research/AxHamm_Ethno.pdf
[11] For the original
quote, see: http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6444/
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