Imagine sitting in your home with your family, in your community surrounded by your extended families and neighbors. Suddenly, someone kicks in your door, ties up you and your family, blindfolds you, kidnaps you, loads you into a vehicle and hauls you off to an unknown place.
Perhaps not exactly step by step, but the concept of this process happened over 400 years ago to a group of people living in Africa. These African people would become slaves in what became the United States, a foreign land to a foreign people who spoke a foreign language and worshipped a foreign god.
Today, according to History, “51.5 million people of African descent live in North America (United States, Mexico and Canada), approximately 66 million in South America, 1.9 million in Central America, and more than 14.5 million throughout the islands of the Caribbean.”
Recently cities, municipalities and states in this country are addressing the need for reparations in policies and laws. It is barely a beginning.
The New York City Council recently passed “legislation establishing municipal efforts to acknowledge and address the legacy and impact of slavery and racial injustices in New York City. The package of legislation would establish a Truth, Healing and Reconciliation process on slavery within New York City, a reparations study” and more.
California Gov. Gavin Newsome recently signed an official apology for slavery, while Chicago and Asheville, N.C., lawmakers are considering efforts to introduce reparations.
Even with these minor advancements, little has changed. Since 1619, and for the next 400 years, these same people now referred to as The Descendants of the Atlantic Slave Trade, are facing the same injustices that they faced over the last four centuries. Many are still being treated as a commodity as they were from their introduction into this country.
A 2022 study found, “In order to gain a better understanding of the racialization of criminal justice outcomes, it is necessary to acknowledge the failure of the criminological discipline to adequately account for the historical context within which these disparities may emerge… Slavery—an institution in which Whites decimated Black life and culture while building generational wealth for them and their descendants—set a precedent for how Black people would be treated over time.”
The common practices that took place in the D.A.S.T. community were that they were treated as if they were less than human, received inhumane treatment, faced unbearable torture and punishment, and worked in harsh labor conditions under terms that were not fair or favorable to anyone.
In the 2017 book, Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America’s Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing, Dr. Joy DeGruy Leary writes that Black Americans who descended from slaves are affected by that trauma as it is passed down through generations.
After the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, most thought –and probably correctly so– that these injustices and commodification of a human being in the United States were terminated.
Nevertheless, that was not the case.
In the years after freedom from slavery was adopted in the United States, the South went through a period that was termed the Reconstruction Period from 1861 to 1900.
Acknowledgement of that era is only recent. The Department of The Interior announced earlier this year five additions to the Reconstruction Era National Historic Network in Pennsylvania, N. Carolina, New Mexico and Texas. The point was “to recognize and amplify sites and programs throughout the country that share stories of freedom, struggle, education and self-determination associated with the period of Reconstruction.”
In the late 19th century, Blacks were getting involved in the political process and in the South, they made up a large number of the Republican party in states like Mississippi. In order to thwart the newfound rights of Blacks nationally, the Democratic Party and President Andrew Jackson (in office 1829-1837) blocked efforts to help Blacks move forward.
The origination of the Ku Klux Klan in Tennessee in 1865 enacted fear on Black Americans and made them afraid to progress. To add further damage, Southern states and local governments created Jim Crow Laws.
With all of these efforts, nationally and locally, the newly so-called free Blacks were basically still treated as poorly as slaves. In 1964 the Civil Rights Act passed the United States Congress.
However, in Mississippi in 1965, Black protestors protesting the State Penitentiary system because of its inhumane treatment of Blacks, found themselves incarcerated in the very place that they were protesting against. Not only were they locked up, they were stripped naked, humiliated by the white guards, starved, beaten just as their ancestors were nearly 400 years earlier.
The Social Security Act of 1935 was supposed to offer federal programs to help families with dependent children. But after the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the SSA Act became the “No Man In The Household” rule.
Many claim the demise of the Black family structure for the last century contributes to the prison industrial complex. With states like Mississippi, where State Auditor noted in 2022that the Mississippi prison system is 50% populated by fatherless families, started building private prisons, enacting tough law enforcement procedures to arrest blacks.
And yet, many work against that stereotype with efforts including a nonprofit founded in Arkansas in 1998, Watch D.O.G.S., standing for Dads of Great Students, who demonstrate their presence and contributions to family as role model fathers.
Today Blacks are still being treated unjustly. The largest population of Blacks in this country is still in the South. And while the murders of Blacks at the hands of white police and white Supremacists did not begin or end with the 2020 murder of George Floyd, it continues today. Police have killed 1,024 people so far in 2024. Of those, 245 were Black. Black people are nearly three times more likely to be killed by a police officer than a white person is.
As the 2024 presidential election nears, it is possible that for the first time in history, there will be a Black woman president with Kamala Harris but polls show that there is a nearly 50-50 chance she will not win.
Yes, there is healing going on in the inner cities and amongst the Black communities through community-based organizations, community violence intervention programs, and non-profits. Still, stipulations and uncertainties hover over the process that may take as much time to heal as it took to get to this point.
Four hundred years is too long. Justice and fairness for Blacks in this country must happen now.