Racial Discrimination, African Americans - Politics and Government - History, Slavery - Social Sciences, United States - Ethnic & Race Relations, 20th Century American History - Civil Rights, Civil Rights - African American History, United States History

Alienable Rights

Name: Alienable Rights
Author: Francis D. Adams
ISBN: 9780060199753

by Adams, Francis D., Sanders, Barry

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Overview

In a devastating narrative that spans more than three centuries, from colonial times to the present day, Alienable Rights reveals how whites have excluded blacks from virtually every area of American life, denying them full citizenship and equality.

Brought to America early in the seventeenth century, the first slaves were treated in much the same way as indentured white servants who had come from England. After only a few years, however, whites ostracized blacks, who were viewed as an inferior race, and passed laws making their enslavement permanent, denying even free blacks the most basic rights enjoyed by whites. Though many slaves fought honorably in the Revolutionary War, earning their freedom, the Constitution (1787) sanctioned slavery, making it — in the words of one of the signers — the document's "most prominent feature." Three years later, Congress passed the nation's first naturalization act, limiting citizenship to "free white persons" only.

Throughout the country, a popular colonization movement developed, attracting whites who hoped to make the United States a purely white nation by transporting all blacks to Africa or the Caribbean. Though the Civil War ended slavery, the subsequent congressional attempt to remake southern society during Reconstruction failed because whites in both the North and the South were unwilling to accept blacks as equals, with the same rights to vote, to attend school, and to move freely throughout American society. Instead, the Supreme Court approved the subterfuge of "separate but equal," which allowed state governments to maintain racial segregation by providing blacks with inferior institutions of theirown.

The "Jim Crow" system was overturned by the civil rights movement that followed World War II, but much of the progress of the 1960s and 1970s was blunted by an angry backlash in the 1980s.

The authors contend that the drive for African American equality has never had the support of the majority of white Americans. Racial progress has come in brief historical bursts when a committed militant minority — abolitionists, radical Republicans, civil rights activists — stirred the nation to action, pressuring it to change; but, invariably, advances have been followed by concerted efforts to restore white privilege.

About the Author

Barry Sanders teaches at Pitzer College, The Claremont Colleges, in California. He lives in Southern California.

About the Author, Francis D. Adams

Barry Sanders teaches at Pitzer College, The Claremont Colleges, in California. He lives in Southern California.

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Editorials

Kirkus Reviews

Can whites and blacks ever coexist peaceably in America? The answer, to judge by this depressing essay, seems to be no. Martin Luther King Jr. suspected that the issue of equality was insoluble largely because whites were "deeply racist" and were unwilling to address their racism. Historians Adams and Sanders (The Private Death of Public Discourse, 1998) give no reason to think King wrong, arguing that "our history is largely the product of an elemental desire of America’s white citizenry to keep blacks at arm’s length and deny them entry to white society." Though that "largely" is debatable, the authors catalogue the many manifestations of that desire: the long history of slavery; the relentless drive of early-19th-century leaders such as Thomas Jefferson to expand American territory precisely in order to spread slavery; the long indifference of the North to the slave trade; the determined efforts of state voting commissions to evade 15th Amendment guarantees; the nationwide imposition of Jim Crow laws; and the continuing de facto separation of the great mass of African-Americans into a permanent underclass. Though significant gains were made during the decades of civil- and voting-rights activism, the authors acknowledge, many advances were just as significantly undone with the rise of the "New Federalism" of Ronald Reagan and company, who saw to it that "the search for racial equality had nearly disappeared from the nation’s domestic policy agenda" by the early ’90s. Bill Clinton was heralded by black voters, but his eight years in office revealed a constant "inability to get things done" on their behalf, and the present administration seems unwilling to recognize that a problemexists, despite the disparities between African-Americans and nearly every other ethnic group in nearly every facet of social and economic life. In light of this legacy of ill treatment, the authors close by making a reasoned if somewhat cursory case for reparations. Given the powerful evidence they present, it seems a small price to pay for centuries of wrong—though "an admission that the majority of white citizens seem unwilling to make."