Black Radical Tradition in the Past now emphasizes that Reperations is needed now, 400+ years of exploitation of Black Bodies is too long for wait.

The year 2019 marked the four hundredth anniversary of the arrival of enslaved Africans on the shores of Jamestown, Virginia, in British North America. The origin story of the ensuing Black freedom struggle in what would become the United States of America then can be traced back to 1619, a defining moment in American and global history. Jamestown offers the racial origin story of what would become the United States of America. For Black America, the subsequent four centuries have produced a long struggle for citizenship, equality, and freedom that continues into the present but remains rooted in the nation’s original sin of racial slavery. Today, slavery’s aftermath hovers over contemporary American race relations in deep and profoundly disturbing ways, including how textbooks attempt to ignore the unsavory parts of this history, going so far as to characterize enslaved Africans brought to American shores as “workers” in a misguided effort to sanitize this painful chapter in our national story. Black History Month offers a window on the American past through the at times heartbreaking saga of the struggle for African American dignity in the United States. It subverts mainstream conventional narratives of American history by centering the grandeur and travails of the Black Freedom Struggle. While the history of Black people descended from the African Diaspora is global and spans millennia, the last four hundred years represent a crucial, though long ignored, erased and misunderstood history. The saga from racial slavery to freedom and the hope for equal citizenship contour Black freedom struggles as both social and political movements and as cultural and historical narratives focused on liberation, democracy, and civil and human rights. The Black presence in then British North America proved to be the single most important ingredient to the creation of what would become the United States of America and the modernization of global capitalism. Racial slavery proved to be the “magic” elixir that allowed dreams of freedom, democracy, wealth creation, and the pursuit of happiness to thrive alongside the degradation of Black lives. Black lives mattered in 1619 to the extent that they facilitated the creation of the world’s most expansive industrial and consumer economy, riches that were built by the unpaid labor of African Americans. Some of the best recent historical scholarship on slavery has, bolstered by a wealth of new archival resources and featuring unflinching narrative clarity, documented the intimate relationship between Black labor, the rise of white supremacy, and the invention of global capitalism. At their best these histories offer a thick description of why, historically at least, Black lives (at least in the manner they could be cultivated, exploited, and profitable to the production of liberal democratic capitalist institutions dominated by white power) have always mattered in America. This history, the struggle from slavery to freedom in America, remains stubbornly resisted by the vast majority of Americans despite the heroic efforts of pioneering Black scholars and activists, most notably Carter G. Woodson, the Harvard-trained historian who founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History in 1915 and, eleven years later, Negro History Week. Expanded to Black History Month in the wake of the Black Power Movement, its significance has grown thanks to the explosion of Black studies programs and departments at major colleges and universities, the growth of Kwanzaa celebrations by millions of African Americans, and the increased interest in Black popular culture as a result of both racial progress and the persistence of anti-Black racism. Politics and pedagogy inspired the movement to study Black history. Narratives of American history after the Civil War used racist history as a weapon. Before the invention of “fake news,” stalwarts of the defeated Confederate States of America innovated what might be called “fake history.” These histories spun Reconstruction as an unfair assault on white supremacy, an attack on white womanhood, and a betrayal of democratic values that elevated unqualified Blacks to elective office only to be driven out by the heroic actions of Klansmen and white supremacists. This narrative caught fire, through books and the modern technology of cinema in the early twentieth century. The same year Woodson founded the most venerable historical association for the study of Black life in American history, D. W. Griffith released The Birth of a Nation, a nakedly racist and technologically ambitious retelling of Reconstruction that cast White actors in blackface seeking to rape and assault virtuous White women only to be quelled by racial terrorists reimagined as patriots. The film dazzled President Woodrow Wilson, who watched from the comfort of the White House the silent era’s first cinematic blockbuster.While American presidents no longer screen such racist films in the White House, blackface and the cultural nostalgia and admiration for the Klan, Confederate flags, and other symbols of white supremacy continue to capture the American imagination, most often to the great detriment of the pursuit of racial equality and the protection of Black lives. Contemporary American political culture remains in the thrall of white supremacy and anti-Black racism that is the direct by-product of racial slavery and a still potent caste system that marked Black bodies—by virtue of their skin color—as both noncitizens and objects of systemic exploitation, ritualized violence, and cultural derision. The politics of racial disenfranchisement that began during slavery and continues into 2020 with the practice of voter suppression is a reflection of a society that still has yet to come to terms with its history. Black history remains more relevant now than ever, precisely because of its insistence on presenting an unvarnished look at American history. Yet many people seem to have either missed or purposefully ignored this important message. The good, bad, and ugly parts of this history cohere in the astounding juxtapositions of racial progress alongside racist tragedies. That history, at its best, is less invested in the single heroic achievements of Great Black Women and Men and more concerned with the lived-in reality of the Black quotidian, the ordinary Black folk whose courage, resilience, and intelligence guided the transformation of the community from slavery to freedom and in the process helped to reimagine American democracy. Malcolm X, the Black Power icon and most important Black working-class organizer of the second half of the twentieth century, famously observed during the 1950s and 1960s that Black Americans had endured four hundred years of racial oppression in speeches, interviews, and lectures. The relationship between Black identity, racial slavery, citizenship, and democracy represented perhaps the most powerfully cogent themes of Malcolm X’s rhetoric and political and cultural organizing. During the Civil Rights Movement’s heroic period—between the May 17, 1954, Brown Supreme Court desegregation decision and the August 6, 1965, passage of the Voting Rights Act—Malcolm X boldly linked contemporary struggles for Black citizenship with a long history of racial slavery, violence, subjugation, and Jim Crow. Malcolm insisted on speaking truth to power by denouncing American democracy as a corrupt political system poisoned by an ideology of white supremacy that both threatened and exploited Black lives across the nation. Malcolm’s political organizing, rooted in Black nationalist and pan-African traditions embedded in the Black Freedom Struggle, sought to frame the African American experience of racial slavery in a manner both easily digestible and politically revelatory to Black impoverished and working class audiences. If Malcolm defined the period from racial slavery to the civil rights–Black Power era as a revolutionary struggle for Black dignity, Martin Luther King Jr. defined this same period as part of a long search for Black citizenship. For King, Black citizenship encompassed more than just legal and legislative breakthroughs, which he staunchly lobbied and agitated for as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the most important civil rights mobilizer of his era. Citizenship meant not only the absence of negative structures of injustice and violence, but the positive ability of democratic institutions to nurture racial integration, environmentally safe neighborhoods, quality public schools, good jobs, adequate housing, health care, and a living wage. In truth, the Black Freedom Struggle from 1619 until 2019 encompasses the search for Malcolm X’s radical Black dignity and Martin Luther King Jr.’s Black radical citizenship. Despite major and minor political differences Malcolm and Martin came, over time, to shape and influence each other. King, especially after Malcolm’s assassination on February 21, 1965, came to appreciate the need for Black pride and political self-determination. During the last three years of his life, King became a vocal critic of war, racism, and white supremacy in a manner that recalled Malcolm’s words of fire. Malcolm, in private and in public, acknowledged the necessity of King’s goals of Black citizenship even as he, following Frederick Douglass, argued that Black freedom would ultimately be achieved via ballots or bullets. The reverberations of the African arrival in Jamestown helped to fundamentally shape the core of American democracy. Racial slavery formed the beating heart of the new world’s most unlikely and innovative democratic experiment. Black Americans found themselves in the star-crossed position of championing America’s vision of liberty, freedom, and citizenship while standing on the margins of freedom dreams articulated by the Founding Fathers and their political heirs. Between 1789 and 1865, racial slavery proved integral to America’s rapid geographical expansion and financial growth. The rise of abolitionism paralleled these developments, with Black women and men—through public advocacy, slave narratives, and acts of resistance that included organized escapes, rebellions, and work slowdowns—helping to lead these efforts. Perhaps none did more for the enslaved than Frederick Douglass. The modern civil rights struggle represented a second American Reconstruction, the sequel to the nation’s original post–Civil War attempt to fundamentally remake the nation as a true democracy. These efforts ended in the heartbreak of massive anti-Black violence, lynching, imprisonment, and land dispossession. By the end of the nineteenth century, America had indeed been remade, not as a racially integrated democracy, but an apartheid state euphemistically referred to as Jim Crow. The dogged political self-determination of the Black quotidian and the organizing efforts of African American women and men transformed America during this period, despite an onslaught of legal, legislative, and racial assaults expressly designed to strip Blacks of citizenship while exploiting their forced labor, conscription, imprisonment, segregation, poverty, and death in the name of profit and a new vision of white supremacy. Frederick Douglass’s assertion that “slavery is not abolished until the black man has the ballot” proved to be remarkably prescient. But it also proved to be incomplete. Citizenship encompassed far more than the vote just as white supremacy transcended the Klan and the crudest vestiges of racial hatred. Citizenship meant dignity, human rights, environmental justice, personal safety, and the ability to acquire political and economic power. Reconstruction is usually framed as the period from 1865 to 1877 that witnessed the passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Constitutional Amendments, which ended racial slavery, institutionalized birthright citizenship, and provided the vote for Black men, respectively. Black activists such as Callie House organized for reparations—in the form of government pensions for freed people—as part of a larger, sprawling political and social movement to reimagine American democracy. Reconstruction birthed the rise of public schools and social welfare that nourished democratic systems and that, over time, offered important access to Black communities in search of justice and citizenship. The subsequent period of 1877–96 featured the systematic disenfranchisement of Blacks through organized racial terror, lynching, and state and local laws that “redeemed” white supremacy in the South. The historian Rayford W. Logan famously referred to this period as the “nadir” of African American history. While racial violence in the form of lynching proved to be the most spectacular kind of violence during this era, it was far from the most enduring. The criminalization of Black bodies truly began in earnest during this era, something that an extraordinary new wave of scholarship is beginning to document with meticulous detail. The rise of mass incarceration, which helped to spark the twenty-first-century Black Lives Matter Movement, is rooted in white supremacist efforts to thwart Black citizenship following the end of slavery. In truth, the period of Redemption was part of the Reconstruction era. The hopes that interracial democracy could usher in Black citizenship through a literal and figurative reconstruction of American democracy coexisted alongside an emerging Jim Crow regime that eventually achieved bipartisan support among White members of both major political parties. But a substantive transformation did, in fact, take place. The Jim Crow system enshrined in law, upheld by the Supreme Court’s 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, and guaranteed through the violent subjugation of Black bodies murdered by night riders, incarcerated through convict-lease systems, and slaughtered in racial pogroms that formed archipelagos of tragedy across the United States fundamentally altered the nation-state. Jim Crow represented more than a system of racial and economic apartheid, demarcating the life chances of Blacks and Whites along a color line that transcended cities, regions, and neighborhoods around the nation. Racial segregation marked a caste system that, in small and large ways, denied Black Americans citizenship rights. Reconstruction gave rise to both a new ascendant community of Black politicians, entrepreneurs, civic leaders, social reformers, intellectuals, and artisans, and an aggrieved class of Whites determined to hold back these symbols of progress by any means necessary. If racial slavery represented the problem of race and democracy during the nineteenth century, the color line imposed by Jim Crow demonstrated its twentieth-century evolution. Ida B. Wells, an ally of Frederick Douglass, emerged as the most eloquent African American activist organizing against lynching in America. A brilliant and outspoken journalist, Wells confronted racism and sexism in her efforts to cull a new meaning of Black citizenship in a world scarred by Jim Crow. In this sense, Wells represented a long-standing Black feminist tradition within the Black freedom movement, one that identified the intersectional nature of racial oppression in America. The search for Black dignity and citizenship inspired millions of Blacks to leave the South for more fertile and welcoming geographic territories that fundamentally reshaped the Black experience. While the majority of Blacks still resided in the Old Confederacy, their presence along both coasts and in midwestern cities such as Chicago, Detroit, and St. Louis turned major American cities into veritable Black metropolises. Marcus Mosiah Garvey, the Jamaican-born activist who admired the conservative Black nationalist educator Booker T. Washington, became the most important Black political mobilizer between the First World War and the Great Depression. In essence, Garvey modernized Black nationalism, turning a political philosophy based on racial solidarity, political unity, and the cultural importance and cohesiveness of descendants of the African Diaspora into an organizing juggernaut. The Universal Negro Improvement Association affected millions of Black people across several continents and the Caribbean, innovating a sprawling network of cultural and political activism that forever reshaped the tenor of Black life in the Americas and beyond. The New Negro, perhaps most famously and enduringly identified by the Black philosopher Alain Locke, encompassed the intellectual ambitions of participants of the Harlem Renaissance, the quotidian strivings of Black migrants eagerly leaving the South, and Garvey’s own Pan-African dreams. Black conceptions of race and democracy grew as the century progressed. Black activists, intellectuals, and organizers adapted their conceptions of freedom to the times, utilizing labor, feminist, religious, liberal, socialist, Marxist, and conservative philosophies, organizations, and movements on behalf of Black liberation. What we have come to characterize as the Civil Rights Movement represents perhaps the most visible strand of a longer history of African American resistance to white supremacy and determination to achieve full citizenship through the transformation of American democracy. Nationally, Americans celebrate the most recognizable chapters of this long struggle, which took place during the 1950s and 1960s, some of the hottest years of the Cold War. However, the Black Freedom Struggle made unprecedented gains during the freedom surges of the Great Depression and the Second World War. Civil righters, Black nationalists, socialists, liberals, Marxists, and feminists forged movements for freedom, citizenship, and democracy that paralleled, overlapped, and intersected with each other during this period. W. E. B. Du Bois, the leading Black scholar of his or any generation, helped to lead this struggle for Black citizenship alongside NAACP and labor organizer Ella Jo Baker, the singer and activist Paul Robeson, and labor leader Asa Philip Randolph. The “Double V” campaign announced that the victory over fascism in Europe required the elimination of domestic racism and white supremacy at home. The two-front struggle found Black soldiers resisting the small indignities of Jim Crow seating in public accommodations and waging larger battles to gain fair treatment from the military during the war, including equitable access to the GI Bill, which offered education and housing benefits for veterans after the fighting ended. Martin Luther King Jr. served as the major political mobilizer during the Civil Rights Movement’s heroic period. Bookended by the legal integration of public schools and the passage of voting rights, this era represents the first half of the Second Reconstruction. The subsequent Black Power era, which King lived to see for its first three years, ratcheted up the civil rights struggle’s push for radical reform by offering a structural or systemic critique of racism, war, poverty, inequality, sexism, and violence. King’s radical legacy continues to be overwhelmed by his iconography at the exact time we need it the most. The radical King spoke truth to power to sitting American presidents, questioned the fundamental unfairness of capitalism, blasted the Vietnam War, and railed against militarism, racism, and materialism. King marched alongside Black Power activist Stokely Carmichael in the withering heat of Mississippi, accused the United States Congress of being unapologetically racist, and planned a campaign of massive civil disobedience in Washington, DC, under the banner of poor people across the racial spectrum. If this sounds familiar, it should. Contemporary social justice movements and the forces of racial oppression, white supremacy, economic injustice, and violence that have spurred these struggles echo aspects of the First and Second Reconstruction. America’s Third Reconstruction is rooted in a historical context that produced the watershed presidential election of Barack Obama; the Great Recession of 2008 and its continuing impact on communities of color; the fires of Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, Maryland, in the throes of New Jim Crow oppression; and American involvement in continuous global warfare. Dr. King’s contemporary legacy can be seen in the Black Lives Matter movement and its subsequent policy agenda calling for a massive redistribution of wealth and resources toward racial and economic justice around the nation. Movements to end mass incarceration, racial segregation in housing and education, unemployment, hunger, and violence plaguing urban, rural, and suburban neighborhoods in America represent the direct results of King’s radical political activism. White supremacy altered Reconstruction, popularized in the imagery of the Ku Klux Klan and other expressions of organized racial terror. Large numbers of White Americans participated in Black subjugation through active participation in segregated churches and in civic, political, and social groups, and through the quiet consent of flourishing anti-Black violence. Recently, one aspect of that violence has been memorialized in the Lynching Memorial founded by human rights activist Bryan Stevenson. White racists during the Civil Rights era organized under the banner of White Citizens Councils. Composed of some of the leading citizens of the South, the councils gave a respectable face to the political, economic, and racial status quo. Their organized efforts at “Massive Resistance” against the integration of public schools helped resurrect nostalgia for the Confederate flag, funneled public taxes into the creation of all-White private schools, and provided moral authority for violence and murder of civil rights activists. America’s Third Reconstruction features some of the same historical cast of characters operating, once again, under a new name. Massive resistance against Black citizenship and racial integration and the quest to redeem White privilege still persists. Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential election and subsequent administration have provided ballast for multiple forms of white supremacy—civic, political, religious—that have sanctioned the racial and religious scapegoating of Blacks, immigrants, Muslims, women, and a host of marginalized groups. But this era, like the nation’s first two periods of Reconstruction, has witnessed dynamic movements on behalf of racial justice and deep democracy. Certainly, the presidency of Barack Obama, whatever its shortcomings, offered a thrilling reimagining of the contours of American history. Obama’s presence in the White House reaffirmed some of the nation’s highest civic ideals and captured the imagination of a generation of young people. However, Obama, unlike King, was no social movement leader, but a president constricted by the limitation of the office. King’s ninetieth birthday provided an extraordinary opportunity to examine how far we have traveled as a nation toward the dream of racial and economic justice for all, and the distance that still remains in achieving his notion of a beloved community. Struggles thought to have been won—like voting rights—continue to be debated in courts throughout the nation, with the current stalemate resulting in the kind of voter suppression unseen since the days of Jim Crow. New rights arenas have been revealed by LGBTQ+, Muslim, non-able-bodied, LatinX, and other communities that build upon, while expanding, the fights King led. The revolutionary King searched for universal social justice for all through the particular movement for Black citizenship. He defined Black citizenship as not merely the absence of racial injustice but the right to a guaranteed job and income, decent housing, safe and racially integrated communities, health care, food justice, and a society where those who felt left out could marshal the “right to protest for right.”The year 2020 marks the 401st anniversary of the arrival of enslaved Africans on the shores of Jamestown, Virginia, the dawn of the Black experience in the west. Racial slavery and its afterlife mark the core of the American story, a narrative that King claimed as a badge of honor rather than a mark of shame. This history continues to be mistaken by some as a burden when it should instead be recognized as a tremendous responsibility. It is one that a new generation now bears and will be better able to shoulder by wrestling with the way in which King’s holiday and life represent not just a celebration of the past but a window into a liberated and more humane future for us all. The murder of George Floyd, a forty-six-year-old Black man, by Minneapolis Police on May 25, 2020, sparked the largest movement for racial justice in American history. Over the course of the following six weeks, over 4,700 separate demonstrations took place, with between seven and twenty-six million Americans self-identifying as participating in protests. Black Lives Matter 2.0 unleashed a national and global moral and political reckoning on race and democracy that can be dated back to 1619. Racial justice uprisings in the wake of George Floyd came on the heels of the COVID-19 pandemic, which amplified and accelerated racial disparities in education, housing, employment, health care, and criminal justice. Black America confronted, suffered, and died from COVID-19 at largely disproportionate rates compared to their White counterparts. The mass unemployment triggered by shelter-in-place orders that upended the US and global economies also greatly affected Black families, including children who were more likely to lack computers and technologies that could allow them to continue their education amid the crisis. The unprecedented participation in demonstrations by White allies inspired an outpouring of support for Black Lives Matter, perhaps most remarkably from the NFL, that included corporations issuing statements that proclaimed their solidarity with the Black community. Antiracism, which has been the hallmark of the Black Freedom Struggle since before Jamestown, became the lingua franca of a new national era of racial justice consciousness. Black scholars, writers, and thought leaders have found themselves in demand like never before and enjoyed the accolades and exposure from seeing their work on best-seller lists for the first time. Monuments of white supremacy came tumbling down as demonstrators literally toppled and in other cases pressured local authorities to remove Confederate symbols that were erected as part of campaigns of racial terror during Redemption and the Civil Rights era. America’s Third Reconstruction, then, unfolded in the shadow of commemorations of two earlier efforts to institutionalize Black dignity and citizenship. Racial violence contoured the fire this time, as it had in earlier eras. Law enforcement violence against largely peaceful demonstrators became so rampant on social media as to offer a definitive explanation for radical policy agendas—including calls to defund the police and abolish prisons—that were advocated by Black Lives Matter and other Black radical organizers for some time.The added presence of White support helped to illustrate the remarkable durability of a racial caste rooted in slavery, segregation, mass incarceration, and the continued denial of Black citizenship. National protests in support of Black Lives Matter also exposed tensions and vulnerabilities within the system of white supremacy. The incompetence and corruption emanating from the White House exposed the dangers of American democracy’s open embrace of white nationalism fueled by racism, fear, and hatred. Millions of White Americans became receptive, for the first time, in listening to Black people offer an alternative explanation for the unfolding national racial and political crisis, one that replaced narratives of American exceptionalism with a more troubled history stretching back to 1619.Perhaps most important, Black intellectual traditions rooted in Black feminism have helped to lead the nation to this particular moment. Movements for intersectional justice forged in the crucible of slavery, patriarchy, and racial capitalism have been the hallmark of Maria Stewart, Ida B. Wells, Lorraine Hansberry, Angela Davis, Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith, Fran Beale, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Beth Richie, Barbara Ransby, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, and Keisha Blain, to name a few. The grassroots organizing of Patrisse Khan-Cullors, Opal Tometi, Alicia Garza, Brittany Packnett, Tamika Mallory, and many others helped to produce the most radically inclusive social justice movement in American history, one that recognized that to make all Black Lives Matter required rejecting homo- and transphobia and embracing sex workers, the mentally and emotionally ill, as well as the non-able-bodied, homeless, cash-poor, and incarcerated. Parts of the Black Freedom Struggle that have—both through state-sanctioned violence and internecine conflicts—seemed to fragment and shatter into thousands of pieces have been reconstituted as a movement of incandescent beauty and breathtaking potential. The movement for recognizing Black humanity in all of its fullness has, after 401 years, taken firm hold of the narrative of American identity, citizenship, freedom, and democracy. We must never let it go.