Trouble So Hard

Lucas Vasquez de Ayllon and 600 Spanish colonists landed on Sapelo Sound in present–day McIntosh County, Georgia. On board were the very first enslaved Africans. From then onward, Black Americans have been subjected to cruelty, terror, and violence. They have been denied freedom, education and the right to vote. They have been demeaned, humiliated, denigrated, deprived, excluded, and murdered.

The largest slave rebellion in the British mainland colonies (sometimes Cato's Rebellion) in the colony of South Carolina. Twenty-five colonists and as many as fifty Africans were killed. The uprising was led by Africans, likely from the Central African Kingdom of Kongo.

Afterward, South Carolina legislature passed the Negro Act of 1740, restricting slave assembly, education, movement, and “keeping of drums, horns, or other loud instruments, which may call together or give sign or notice to one another or using of their wicked designs and purposes.”

A European intellectual/cultural movement that emphasized reason over superstition, science over blind faith. Traditionally, humans had identified themselves by membership in a clan, tribe, kingdom, locale, or religion. Then, in a 1684 essay, French physician François Bernier contrived the theory of race where individuals were distinguished by physical traits such as skin color.

In 1750, this chart by Philadelphia physician Samuel Morton was published in Types Of Mankind. Correlating his measurements of human brain size with natural intelligence—suggesting that Africans were a different species than white Caucasians—provided “scientific” justification for enslaving them, and helped resolve the contradiction between professing liberty and upholding slavery.

Race? In truth, European intellectuals, writers, and scientists of the time made it up, yet the deceptive concept continues—deeply embedded in American culture to this day.

During the eighteenth century, the Society of Friends (Quakers) involved themselves in political and social movements, becoming the first religious movement to condemn slavery and disallow members from owning slaves. They would play a prominent role in the Anti-Slavery Society and the Underground Railroad.

An informal connection of people—often Quakers—that helped slaves move to safety and freedom in the North and Canada. Eventually known as the Underground Railroad, estimates suggest between 70,000 to 100,000 fugitive slaves were involved. Courageous souls who helped were known as “conductors” or “station masters”, their homes “stations” or “depots.” Escape and travel directions were coded in song, story, and quilt patterns. Among the first to engage in this extraordinary mission were Levi Coffin of the New Garden Quaker Meeting (west of downtown Greensboro, North Carolina), and former slave Harriet Tubman. For more than 40 years in North Carolina, Indiana, and Cincinnati, Coffin helped more than 2000 former slaves safely negotiate their way to freedom. In later years, he became known as the “President of the Underground Railroad,” one of the greatest civil disobedience movements in American history.

A United States federal law that prevented traders from bringing new slaves into the United States “from and after the first day of January, in the year of our Lord, One Thousand Eight Hundred and Eight,” the earliest date permitted by the United States Constitution. The Act imposed heavy penalties on international traders, but it did not end slavery itself or the domestic sale of slaves. In fact, it encouraged slave breeding and slave auctions throughout the South.

The traveling minstrel show phenomenon began around 1828, and remained immensely popular throughout the 19th century. Shows consisted of comic skits, song, and dance. Most performers were white males in blackface makeup presenting a stereotype of Black people as dim-witted, happy-go-lucky, lazy, and superstitious.

Thomas Dartmouth “Daddy” Rice was an early performer who became famous for a skit called Jump Jim Crow. History is uncertain who Jim Crow was, but some sources indicate the real Jim Crow was an elderly, physically disabled Black slave Rice had seen singing “Jump Jim Crow” and jumping after each verse. Rice added verses, and the song became a 19th century hit. “Daddy Pops Jim Crow,” as Rice then called himself, would jump around as if disabled himself while performing “Jump Jim Crow.”

Within but a few decades, the name Jim Crow would become an infamous metaphor—a meme in present day—associated with restrictive Black Codes which arose across the south after the Civil War.

Before the 1830s there were few restrictions on teaching slaves to read and write. After the 1831 slave revolt led by Nat Turner, all slave states except Maryland, Kentucky, and Tennessee passed laws against teaching slaves to read and write.

This letter was sent by Eleanor Wayland Weaver in Madison County, Virginia, to her daughter Theodosia and son-in-law Jacob in Lewisburg, Ohio, on January 6, 1832. The letter discusses Nat Turner's rebellion:

“Dear Children you appeared to be very much alarmed about us respecting the Negroes rising...We hope our government will take some steps to put down Negro preaching. It is those large assemblies of Negroes causes the mischief. However I wish we had not one in this country they are an unhappy race & renders all those that have them unhappy. However we have them & we must do the best we can with them.”

Organized to end slavery in the United States, the movement was active from around 1830 to 1870 and had religious underpinnings. Early leaders mimicked tactics of British abolitionists. The movement would become a controversial political issue, spawning heated debates and violent confrontations.

Early abolitionists were mostly white. Among them were John Brown (the radical abolitionist who organized raids in Kansas and at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia)…and women who would become leaders in the women’s suffrage movement: Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. (In 1833, Stanton would found her own woman-led, interracial anti-slavery group, the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, and later organized the 1840 Seneca Falls Convention.) Some prominent Black leaders had escaped bondage like Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Tubman.

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery novel had a profound effect on the attitudes toward African Americans, slavery, and the Underground Railroad in America. Today, it might be labeled a blockbuster or exposé. It became the second best-selling book of the 19th century—after the Bible—and helped fuel the abolitionist cause. In the first year of publication, 300,000 copies were sold in the United States. One million copies were sold in Great Britain.

This from our old friend, Levi Coffin of the Underground Railroad: “Eliza Harris, the slave woman—who appeared in Stowe’s book—crossing the Ohio River, near Ripley, on the drifting ice with her child in her arms, was sheltered under our roof and fed at our table for several days. This was while we lived at Newport, Indiana.”

In September 1838 in Baltimore, a male slave—disguised as a sailor—boarded a train bound for Delaware, transferred to a steamship, and finally climbed aboard a second train to New York City. It was his second and final escape attempt. On arrival, he would declare himself free from slavery. The man would adopt the name Frederick Douglass and spend his life as an abolitionist, a journalist, an author, an orator, and a human rights activist. In 1855, he published My Bondage and My Freedom, in which he wrote of singing spirituals during his years in bondage: “A keen observer might have detected in our repeated singing of ‘O Canaan, sweet Canaan, I am bound for the land of Canaan,’ something more than a hope of reaching heaven. We meant to reach the North, and the North was our Canaan.”

After decades of simmering tensions between Northern and Southern states over slavery, states’ rights, and westward expansion, at 4:30 a.m. on April 12, 1861, Confederate troops fired on Fort Sumter in South Carolina’s Charleston Harbor. Less than 34 hours later, Union forces surrendered. Abraham Lincoln’s election to the presidency in 1860 caused seven Southern states to secede from the United States and form the Confederate States of America. Four more states would soon join them.

On September 22, 1862, President Lincoln issued the preliminary document that, as of January 1, 1863, declared all enslaved people in the states currently engaged in rebellion against the Union “shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.”

After two more years of war, slavery was fully abolished throughout the United States when Congress passed the 13th Amendment on January 31, 1865. It was ratified on December 6, 1865.

On April 9, General Robert E. Lee surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House. The Civil War was over, save for General Edmund Kirby Smith’s surrender on June 2 of the Trans-Mississippi Department, the last major army of the Confederacy, in Galveston, Texas.

In late 1863, President Abraham Lincoln and Congress began to consider the gargantuan challenge to reunite the Union if the North won the Civil War. Now, the Reconstruction of the South could begin.

Five days later—John Wilkes Booth, in a mad effort to save the Confederacy—shoots the president. Lincoln dies the following morning. Vice-president Andrew Johnson is sworn into office. Johnson—a Southern Democrat, while supportive of ending slavery—was a white supremacist. The following year he wrote, “This is a country for white men, and by God, as long as I am President, it shall be a government for white men.”

So, Lincoln is dead; Congress is recessed. Johnson declines to call Congress back to Washington, and begins writing a Reconstruction plan alone, one that will allow the Southern states to begin holding elections and sending representatives back to Washington.

By summer 1865, Johnson has pardoned all traitors and insurrectionists who have sworn allegiance to the Union, except for high Confederate officials and individuals owning property in excess of $20,000. (The latter have to petition the president for their pardons.) The cost of the war? Some six-hundred thousand lives and $6 billion dollars—yet no is one punished for their failed effort to destroy the country. That in turn helped concoct the myth of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy that still infects the United States today.

Former Confederate veterans and sympathizers were outraged over Reconstruction. They saw it as humiliating and vindictive imposition, and they rallied against former slaves’ freedom. In Pulaski, Tennessee, they formed what would become the most infamous of American hate groups, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). Pretending to be the ghosts of dead Confederate soldiers, they dressed in white robes and hoods, and engaged in nighttime terrorist raids against formerly enslaved people, employing intimidation, property destruction, assault, and even murder to deter Black men from voting.

African Americans enjoyed a period when they could vote, participate in the political process, acquire land, seek their own employment, and use public accommodations. Yet there was broad-based anger toward their new freedoms. White-dominated state legislatures and local jurisdictions began writing what were known as Black Codes,—or, beginning in the 1870s, Jim Crow laws—that enforced racial segregation and reversed political and economic gains made by Black people. Mandated racial segregation in public facilities was enforced until 1965.

Petty offenses, like walking on the grass, vagrancy, and stealing food were criminalized. Former slaves were arrested, convicted, and leased to plantations, lumber camps, mines, factories, brickyards, railroads—sometimes at the very place they’d been enslaved. Even those declared innocent by a court, but unable to pay court fees, were funneled into the convict leasing system. Outside Tallahassee, Florida, trains would be stopped, men rounded up, jailed, sentenced, and contracted out to turpentine and lumber outfits. Leasing fees generated substantial amounts of revenue for Southern state, county, and local budgets, and lasted through World War II.

A legislative act that declared all persons born in the United States to be citizens, “without distinction of race or color, or previous condition of slavery or involuntary servitude” and to testify in court trials. President Andrew Johnson vetoed the legislation, but the 39th United States Congress overturned it, and the bill became the nation's first civil rights law.

As former slaves began to register to vote, settle towns, establish businesses, and run for public office, lynching gained momentum. White males saw themselves as the protectors of their women and way of life. Feeling threatened, they turned to lynching and terror to control the Black population. Lynching in America documented more than 4000 racial lynchings from the end of Reconstruction through 1950s.

Mark Twain was so disgusted that he wrote an unpublished essay about mass lynchings around 1901, referring to this epidemic as the United States of Lyncherdom. The essay was published after his death in 1923.

A lynching might begin with a spurious accusation, criminal or otherwise, followed by arrest or vigilante seizure, imprisonment, and the gathering of a “lynch mob.” Victims would be ruthlessly tormented, beaten, shot, then hanged from a tree, their bodies often set afire or dismembered for souvenirs. Frequently lynchings were public affairs, spectacles on the order of a carnival or athletic event, and were photographed for posterity. This image is a postcard; note the smiling face of the shorter man, fourth from the right.

Former slave Joseph Rainey was elected to the South Carolina Senate in 1870. He then won a special election to fill the vacancy of incumbent U.S. Congressman B.F. Whittemore, who resigned rather than be expelled for selling an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy. Rainey was seated in December of 1870 and reelected four times, serving until March 3, 1879. Rainey lost his seat in 1878 when the Democratic Party rigged elections across the South, his opponent winning 62 percent of the vote in majority Black districts.

The 14th Amendment was ratified July 9, 1868, and granted citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the United States—including former enslaved people—and guaranteed all citizens “the equal protection of the laws.” It was ratified July 9, 1868.

The 15th Amendment protects the voting rights of all citizens regardless of race or the color of their skin, including former slaves. It was ratified on February 3, 1870.

By 1873, many white Southerners were calling for redemption, the reversal of Black civil rights and the return of white supremacy. Political pressure to return to the old order was repeatedly backed up by mob and paramilitary violence, with the Ku Klux Klan, White League, and Red Shirts assassinating pro-Reconstruction politicians and terrorizing Southern Blacks. Finally, to settle the disputed election of 1876, Democrats allowed Ohio Republican Rutherford B. Hayes enough votes to become next president—if his administration will allow white Democrat ‘redeemers’ to reclaim their states from African Americans, however they saw fit. In essence, Northern Republicans agreed to take the presidency in exchange for withdrawing federal troops from the South, thereby ending Reconstruction and opening the door to Democrats’ consolidation of control over state legislatures throughout the region.

Now, 12 years after the Civil War’s end, with Northerners fatigued and apathetic with Reconstruction, the South slid back into patterns of the antebellum era. Historian W. E. B. DuBois described the period as one where “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.”

As the South was resisting political rights for Black citizens, a hereditary association for descendants of Confederate soldiers was born. Its purpose was to fund monuments—including KKK monuments—and promote white supremacy and the mythical Lost Cause. According to the Institute for Southern Studies, the UDC “elevated the Klan to a nearly mythical status during the first half of the 20th century and funded the construction of a monument to the Klan in 1926.”

A Supreme Court decision stating that racial segregation did not violate the 14th Amendment. Known as the “separate but equal” legal doctrine, Plessy stated that so long as the facilities provided to each “race” were equal, state and local governments could require that services, facilities, public accommodations, housing, medical care, education, employment, and transportation be segregated by “race.” Essentially, it upheld Jim Crow laws and legalized racial segregation.

A silent movie adaptation of the novel The Clansman, by Thomas Dixon Jr. Set during Reconstruction, the plot concerns heroic Ku Klux Klan Southern whites, Northern politicians who wanted to disenfranchise them, and violence committed by former slaves. Reviewers, editors, and NAACP railed against its inaccuracies as the production attempted to breathe new life into racial divisions via the mythical Lost Cause.

Early in the new year, the Black-owned newspaper The Chicago Defender reported several hundred Selma, Alabama Black families had quietly packed up to take their chances in the North and West. Weary of Jim Crow segregation laws, lack of education opportunities, unmet promises of Reconstruction, menial labor and low wages, and segregation at every turn, they fled the terror of the South. It wasn’t lost on them that an African American was being lynched every four days somewhere south of the Mason-Dixon line.

Slowly, word began to circulate that Northern industry needed workers. African Americans began to break bonds with the South in what would become The Great Migration. Some 6 million Black people left the South to build communities, churches, businesses and schools elsewhere—and reshaped America’s racial distribution in the process.

Migrants followed three major routes: to the East and West coasts and into the Midwest. Witnessing the evaporation of its historical cheap labor source, whites attempted to slow the exodus using intimidation, dominance, brutality, and imprisonment. And yet Black people left in droves.

The Red Summer of 1919 was a string of multi-state race riots in more than 26 cities. Thousands of Black people across America were shot, lynched and burned alive. Black-owned businesses and homes were wiped out, and millions of dollars of generational wealth was stolen.

Two years later, the Red Summer would be a precursor to one of the worst single incidents of racial violence in American history, the Tulsa or Black Wall Street Massacre. A likely contrived allegation, between a Black teenage male and a white girl riding an elevator, set off the affair. The prosperous 35-block Greenwood District was looted and burned to the ground by mobs of white residents—many deputized and armed by city officials. Weapons included a low-flying plane, shooters spraying bullets from aloft. It is estimated that over 800 were injured; nearly 300 died. Afterward, the white rioters returned home and pretended the riot had never happened. No investigations, arrests, trials, or punishments ever materialized. It remained that way until the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1997 was created by the State Legislature.

The common denominator? Racial hatred against Black Americans, people who had risen from slavery and were now prospering.

German Nazi lawyers gather to begin writing the notorious anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws. For a nearly a decade, they’d been studying Jim Crow laws of the American South—those praised by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf—that created a second-class citizenship for Blacks, Puerto Ricans, Filipinos, Chinese, and Native Americans. Map translation: “Statutory Restrictions on Negro Rights.”

As part of the New Deal, the federal government—via the Federal Housing Administration (FHA)—began a program to increase housing stock for white, middle-class, lower-middle-class families. African Americans and other people of color were left out of the new suburban communities—pushed instead into urban housing projects.

The FHA heightened segregation further with the use of “redlining,” creating color-coded maps across the entire United States. Anywhere African Americans lived was shaded in red indicating for appraisers that these neighborhoods were too risky for FHA mortgage insurance.

Drafted into the Army during WWII, a Black sawmill worker in Sandersville, Georgia, Willie Lee Duckworth was assigned to New York’s Ft. Slocum training center. Returning from a grueling night march, his 200-soldier company struggling to stay in step, Duckworth began keeping cadence with the infectious call and response rhythm of a song from his Georgia upbringing. What would become known as the Duckworth March or Sound Off—when chanted in unison by 200 voices—woke the entire base. The march cadence song was so effective that Duckworth was dispatched to training posts across the country to teach it to new recruits. A decade later, to the delight of young people everywhere, Black rock and roll musician Bo Diddley would employ a near-identical rhythm.

On May 17, the United States Supreme Court entered a landmark decision that state laws which established racial segregation in public schools violated the “equal protection clause of the 14^th Amendment, even if the segregated schools are otherwise equal in quality.”

Within hours, Southern white political leaders condemned the decision and vowed to defy it. Virginia Senator Harry Byrd described the decision as “the most serious blow that has yet been struck against the rights of the states in a matter vitally affecting their authority and welfare.” In November, while not stipulating a method for ending segregation, the Court directed federal district judges to implement desegregation “with all deliberate speed.”

Virginia Governor Tom Stanley, Senator Harry Byrd, and the State Legislature put up roadblock upon roadblock against school integration as directed by the Brown decision. Eventually, outraged state officials ginned up an action called “Massive Resistance” including legislation to “force the closure of any school that planned to comply” with the Brown court decision. And close the schools they did … across the state.

Prince Edward County, aided and abetted by state officials, shuttered its 21 public schools and diverted tax revenues to pay for white students to attend a new private, segregated “academy.” If that sounds like the “voucher” programs of today, that’s exactly what it was. On the first day of school in September 1959, 14 buses helped ferry 1,475 white students to the private academy, while 1,700 Black children stood and watched. It took five years for courts to overturn the policy. By then, the illiteracy rate for Blacks ages 5 to 22 had jumped from 3 to 23 percent. The shutdown was widely condemned as a national disgrace.

The early 1960s saw growing national tension over racial barriers in education, public transportation, and use of public accommodations, restaurants and theaters. In 1963, following continuing incidents of harsh treatment toward peaceful protestors by the police and the murders of civil rights activists, a reluctant President John F. Kennedy called for a meaningful civil rights bill. While his efforts were locked down in filibustered Senate, Kennedy was assassinated. Prodded by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Kennedy’s successor, President Lyndon B. Johnson, took up the cause, and the bill passed in the House and Senate in 1964.

The act prohibited discrimination—in hiring, promoting, and firing—on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin. It addressed voting rights, employment, public accommodations, education, and more.

This was the first of three marches held along the 54-mile highway from Selma, Alabama, to the state capital of Montgomery. Its purpose was to protest the denial of voting rights to African Americans, along with the murder of 26-year-old activist Jimmie Lee Jackson, fatally shot by police during a peaceful protest just days before.

In response, civil rights leaders planned to take their cause directly to Alabama Governor George Wallace, despite his promise “to use whatever measures are necessary to prevent a march.” Led by John Lewis of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Reverend Hosea Williams of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the marchers crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge over the Alabama River—and were met by a line of state and county officers poised to attack. When demonstrators did not promptly obey an order to disband and turn back, troopers brutally attacked them on horseback, wielding weapons and chasing down fleeing men, women, and children. Dozens of civil rights activists were later hospitalized with severe injuries.

Two days later, Dr. Martin Luther King led roughly 2,500 people back to the Pettus Bridge before turning the marchers around—obeying a court order that prevented them from making the full march. That restraint gained the support of President Johnson, who said, “Americans everywhere join in deploring the brutality with which a number of Negro citizens of Alabama were treated when they sought to dramatize their deep and sincere interest in attaining the precious right to vote.” Johnson promised to introduce a voting rights bill to Congress within a few days.

The third march began on March 21—under the protection of 1,000 military policemen and 2,000 Army troops. Thousands of people joined along the way, with roughly 25,000 people entering the capital on the final leg of the march. On March 25, the marchers made it to the steps of the Alabama State Capitol building, where they staged a demonstration and delivered a petition intended for Gov. George Wallace. Dr. King told the assembled crowd: “There never was a moment in American history more honorable and more inspiring than the pilgrimage of clergymen and laymen of every race and faith pouring into Selma to face danger at the side of its embattled Negroes.”

As he had promised, President Lyndon Johnson signed legislation that would overturn legal barriers, at state and local levels, preventing African Americans from exercising the right to vote guaranteed by the 15^th Amendment. Putting an end to literacy tests, poll taxes, grandfather clauses, etc., it gave the federal government authority to preapprove voting and election changes (Section 5, preclearance requirement) in states with histories of discrimination—like North Carolina. It is considered one of the most far-reaching pieces of civil rights legislation in United States history.

This landmark United States Supreme Court case ruled that busing was an appropriate remedy for the problem of racial imbalance in public schools. The goal was to ensure that schools would be "properly" integrated and that all students would receive equal educational opportunities, regardless of their race.

Responding to a report on the growing heroin epidemic among U.S. servicemen in Vietnam, President Richard Nixon claimed drug abuse to be “America's public enemy number one.” It was therefore necessary “to wage a new, all-out offensive” by greatly increasing penalties, enforcement, and incarceration for drug offenders.

A top Nixon aide, John Ehrlichman, later admitted: “You want to know what this was really all about. The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

The prison population exploded during President Ronald Reagan’s administration. When Reagan took office in 1980, the total prison population was 329,000. When he left office eight years later, it had nearly doubled to 627,000. Hardest hit were communities of color, disproportionately incarcerated then and still today.

From 1925 to 1980, the prison population stayed consistent with the general population. In the 1970s, politicians from both parties used fear and thinly veiled racial rhetoric to push increasingly punitive “tough on crime” policies, beginning with President Richard Nixon’s “war on drugs.” Prisons quickly became overcrowded, and a for-profit prison industry emerged. Today, corporations are paid a daily fee for each prisoner held. To maximize prison populations, private prison corporations generously support local law enforcement agencies, political candidates and political action committees. (PACs).

Today, the United States incarcerates more people than any nation in the world, including China.

The Law Enforcement Support Office (LESO) began the transfer of surplus military equipment to non-military law enforcement agencies. The equipment included small arms and ammunition, weapons, and tactical vehicles—ostensibly for use in drug law enforcement, but was later expanded to include counter-drug and counter-terrorism procedures.

The 1994 Crime Bill encouraged even more punitive laws and harsher practices to lock up more people for longer periods of time. It also gave states money to perpetuate policies that bred bloated prisons. Spurred in part by laws like the Crime Bill, incarceration grew, at both the federal and state levels. In Texas, incarceration quadrupled.

In the original 1971 Swann case, when courts mandated busing to desegregate the schools, they also noted that when the school system was thought to be unitary*, busing would end. The school board would then design a new plan that best suited the students in Charlotte-Mecklenburg.

That envisioned end to busing came to a head in 1999 when a parent sued the Mecklenburg County school board after his daughter was classified as “nonblack” and denied entry into an elementary-school magnet program. The school system opposed the end of race/ethnicity busing, but the court declared the mandate of a unitary system had been met and lifted the busing order. That ruling was upheld on appeals, and the United States Supreme Court refused to hear the case. Busing by race and/or ethnicity ceased, and schools immediately began to resegregate.

*Unitary school system: one “within which no person is to be effectively excluded from any school because of race or color.”

On November 4, 2008, after a campaign that lasted nearly two years, Americans elected Illinois senator Barack Obama to be their 44th president. The result was historic. Obama, a first-term United States senator became—upon inauguration on January 20, 2009—the country’s first African American president. Alas, the backlash to advancements by Black citizens—so often prevalent in our history—begins anew.

A landmark Supreme Court Decision that overturned election spending restrictions dating back more than 100 years. The court previously had upheld certain spending restrictions, arguing that the government had a role in preventing corruption.

Instead, the 2010 court’s 5–4 majority ruled that corporations and other outside groups can spend unlimited money on elections because limiting “independent political spending” violates the First Amendment right to free speech. Additionally, the court ruled that unharnessing election spending would not present a substantive threat of corruption, if the donor is not formally “coordinating” with a candidate or political party.

Both assumptions have proved to be dead wrong. Instead, the ruling ushered in massive increases in political and dark money spending from outside groups, dramatically expanding the already-outsized political influence of wealthy donors, corporations, and special interest groups.

The United States Supreme Court held that the key pre-clearance requirement of the 1965 Voting Rights Act was unconstitutional and left it to Congress to update the legislation. Without the full protections of the VRA, state and local governments with a long history of discrimination were free to adopt election voter suppression laws not possible for many decades. As of June 2023, legislators in all 50 states have introduced, pre-filed, or carried over 392 bills with restrictive voting provisions.

On May 25, 2020, a 46-year Black man, George Floyd, was detained after a store clerk called police, thinking Floyd had tendered a counterfeit $20 bill. While a white Minneapolis police officer kneeled on his neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, and a bystander filmed the incident by cellphone, George Floyd was suffocated to death. Another in a long string of deaths at the hands of law enforcement officers, this one set off massive outrage across the U.S.

In the weeks that followed, demonstrations took place in more than 2,000 cities and towns in all 50 states and in major cities across the globe. The act of “taking a knee” for George Floyd quickly became a common element in such actions. For 8 minutes and 46 seconds!