Barack Obama's victory had so much emotional significance for black Americans that even Bush-loyal Condoleezza Rice stated in a press conference that he was personally extremely proud of this election result. Inscribed in the black collective consciousness is a long history of legal and social inequality.
Given the election results, it's hard to imagine now, but at the start of his campaign, Obama couldn't even count on the vote of the black population. Not just because of the popularity of his main rival Hillary Clinton with black voters. Ironically, their initial reluctance stemmed in part from the fact that for many it was not even clear that Obama was “black.” According to his autobiography Dreams from My Father. A Story of Race and Inheritance (released in the Netherlands as Dreams of my father. The story of my family) he has considered himself a black American from the start of his adolescence, despite his white mother who raised him with her parents. But for many black voters, it wasn't his skin color and his Kenyan father that first determined whether he was black. "He's not black like me," wrote conservative columnist Stanley Crouch. What mattered most was the idea that because of his heritage he did not share with them a centuries-long history of slavery, segregation and discrimination.
Dred Scott
That history plays a major role in the collective memory of black Americans. Slaves did not count in society. They were violently oppressed, the biological and cultural ties with their ancestors were forever severed and the sense of human dignity was taken from them. The moral low was reached in 1857, when the US Supreme Court dismissed the case of slave Dred Scott, who had sued his owner to obtain his freedom, because slaves and their descendants were not citizens and could therefore not sue. . Black people had no rights that a white person had to respect, according to Chief Justice Roger Taney, himself a slave owner.
This was a break with the past. One of the two judges on the court who disagreed with the ruling pointed out that civil rights did apply to black Americans in the past. The constitutions of most northern states passed after 1776 protected black voting rights, and some southern states even allowed free blacks to be elected to public office.
But with the expansion of slavery in the South, this progressive tide turned after 1820. After often heated political debates, black voting rights were restricted, including in northern states such as New York, and even abolished in some southern states. However, the ruling in the Dred Scott case of 1857 went much further. This deprived not only slaves, but also free blacks their civil rights. American citizenship was directly associated with the white 'race', although there was no reference to skin color in the US Constitution.
This also set the fire in the pan. Federal unity was in jeopardy, and with the election of Confederate candidate Abraham Lincoln in late 1860, the Civil War was inevitable. Abolition of slavery was not Lincoln's first commitment, but it became his goal over the course of the war.
After the victory in 1865, slavery immediately came to an end with the addition of the Thirteenth Amendment to the American Constitution. Black civil rights, including the right to vote and stand for black men, were explicitly granted and protected in the Fourteenth (1868) and Fifteenth Amendments (1870).
The Confederate states that had seceded could only be re-admitted to the Union if they included clauses in their constitutions protecting black rights. Using an occupying army as leverage, the Northern government enforced the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. During this period of the Reconstruction of the South (1867-1877) the freed slaves made massive use of their acquired rights. Thanks to black voters, many Confederate state governments became Republican, Abraham Lincoln's party, seeing the former slaves as their great liberators. Despite intimidation by white Democrats, several hundred black candidates were elected to southern state congresses. In 1870, a black American was first elected to the Senate and the House of Representatives in Washington.
Mouthed
Around the presidential election of 1876, the political mood in the North changed. The protection of the rights of the freed slaves was no longer a priority. The centennial celebration of national independence was used as an opportunity for reconciliation with the re-admitted southern states. After the withdrawal of the Union troops in 1877, the Democrats gradually returned to power in the South.
Soon, black civil rights were curtailed through voter registration and special legislation called the "Jim Crow laws," believed to be named after a figure from the popular black minstrel shows, among white Americans. in which black slaves were ridiculed. These laws prevented blacks from exercising their right to vote. The blatant "grandfather clauses," for example, made it impossible for black southerners to register as voters, because from then on they had to prove that his grandfather had had the right to vote before the Civil War — an efficient method of limiting voting rights almost to whites. Add to this the large-scale intimidation and violence, including by the Ku Klux Klan founded in 1865. In the period 1882-1892 alone, approximately 1,400 black Americans were lynched, mainly in the South.
After 1890, the vast majority of the black population of the South was thus excluded from the democratic process and politically silenced. The last black Congressman from the South was elected in 1897, but after his term expired, it would not be until 1971 before another black politician represented a Southern state in the United States Congress.
The statutory curtailment of the right to vote only applied in the Southern states. This is not to say, however, that blacks were only marginalized here, or that this was the only method of reducing black Americans to second-class citizens. The principle of 'white supremacy' and legally established racial segregation also reigned supreme in the North. It all started in 1867, when the northern state of Pennsylvania ruled that racial segregation on public transportation was allowed. In 1896, the Federal Supreme Court affirmed this in Plessy vs. Ferguson, a case brought by Homer Plessy who had been arrested for sitting as a black person in a train compartment reserved for white passengers. In this controversial case, the court ruled that it was not unconstitutional to offer separate facilities to people of different races as long as these facilities were of equal quality:the 'separate but equal doctrine'.
However, the ruling also contained a dissenting opinion. John Marshall Harlan, who was the only one voting against, stated that the constitution was color blind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. Separation of citizens on the basis of their race, Harlan ruled, is a symbol of submission and as such violates civil liberty and equality before the law as enshrined in the United States Constitution.
Although the "separate but equal doctrine" has led to racial segregation in public facilities, including education, for more than half a century, Harlan's view would later be considered the morally and constitutionally correct one. In 1954, the Supreme Court followed his argument in Brown versus Board of Education of Topeka, a case brought by black Oliver L. Brown who wanted to send his daughter to a white school. The court ruled that segregated education is inherently unequal because it evokes a sense of inferiority in black children and denies them the constitutionally granted equal legal protection.
Dropped
So, in 1954, a start was made on breaking down the Jim Crow system, but it would take another 20 years and a long civil rights struggle before it was completely dismantled. First, dozens of youths, threatened and taunted, forced their way through angry crowds to claim their right to integrated education under the protection of national forces, thousands of demonstrating students were attacked by police dogs and dispersed with fire guns and tear gas, Birmingham found. , Alabama, four little girls were killed when someone dropped a bomb into their church and were killed in cold blood during the campaign to register black voters in Mississippi in the so-called Freedom Summer of 1964, and four civil rights activists were killed in cold blood and dozens of churches and homes burned. stabbed.
It was only under pressure from the media coverage of these shocking events that President John F. Kennedy finally enacted civil rights legislation in 1963. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 put an end to centuries of legally sanctioned oppression against Americans of African descent.
That this did not eliminate the economic disadvantage was shown in 2006 when the consequences of Hurricane Katrina became visible to everyone. Six years earlier, the controversial 2000 presidential election had already shown that in southern states like Florida, black citizens were still faced with a hard time registering as voters and could not be sure that their votes would count. By the time mainstream America made this shocking discovery, countless black Americans had already dropped out and didn't even bother to register or go to the polls.
Combatant
The centuries-old process of institutionalized and legalized social injustice and inequality is ingrained in the collective consciousness of black Americans. This history has left wounds that have not yet healed.
However, there is a downside:Black Americans have not simply suffered the injustice. The black history is also one of resistance and militancy. The very fact that slaves managed to start families, form a community, develop a culture and practice religion is proof of resilience and perseverance. Slaves, moreover, often sabotaged or escaped, with the help of the likes of the legendary Harriet Tubman, who returned to the South dozens of times after her own escape to show slaves the way. There was a whole system of clandestine routes to the north and Canada, with shelters manned by white and black abolitionists, the Underground Railroad.
The struggle for black civil rights did not begin until Rosa Parks refused to stand up for a white passenger in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955, an act of resistance that sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the rise of Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement. . That battle started when Dred Scott filed a lawsuit against his master a century earlier because he had lived with him as a slave for some time in a state where slavery was forbidden.
Homer Plessy, too, hadn't accidentally sat in the wrong compartment, but teamed up with a group of civil rights activists to initiate a trial against Louisiana's segregation laws. In 1909, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was founded, and has since fought for civil rights through legal channels.
New generation
The black civil rights movement did not end poverty, poor public education and undemocratic practices, but it paved the way for the new generation of black Americans who, thanks in part to affirmative action programs, could climb up in society and politics.
This is the generation to which Barack Obama belongs. Born in 1961 and raised in Hawaii and Indonesia, Obama was not personally involved in the Civil Rights Movement, but he was a product of it. "I'm here because somebody marched," he said shortly after his candidacy at a rally in Selma, Alabama, to commemorate the famous 1965 protest march from Selma to Montgomery led by Martin Luther King. Obama thanked the many veterans of that march in his audience:"I'm here because you made sacrifices. I stand on the shoulders of giants.”
Obama is indeed part of the history of black Americans, if only because he made it his own. In his book The Audacity of Hope (published in the Netherlands as The reconquest of the American dream ) he writes that his image of America and American history is defined by the idea that generations of people who looked like him have been oppressed and stigmatized and that race and class still shape our lives.
In his acclaimed Speech on Race of March 2008, Obama acknowledges the anger and bitterness of older black generations, as well as that of white Americans who see their jobs go abroad and lose their homes. With his dual heritage as a black man of mixed descent, he opposes a broad, multi-ethnic coalition that aims to realize a better America — "a more perfect union" as he refers to the opening words of the US Constitution mentions.
Rather than falling victim to the past or seeking scapegoats for the current economic slump, he wants grievances turned into aspirations for all Americans. As he put it in his speech after his first primary victory:“Hope is what led a band of colonists to rise up against an empire; what led the greatest of generations to free a continent and heal a nation; what led young women and young men to sit at lunch counters and brave fire hoses and march through Selma and Montgomery for freedom's cause.'
That Obama has managed to turn the dual legacy of social injustice and black resistance into the hope of a brighter future for all Americans — that's what was written on the faces of the ecstatically happy and ethnically diverse crowd that gathered on November 4. 2008 celebrated his election victory in Chicago's Grant Park and the nearly two million people who came to Washington on January 20, 2009 to attend his inauguration.