Driving While Black

Confederate States Constitution 

“No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.” 

Article I, Section 9, Clause 4 

“The citizens of each State shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States; and shall have the right of transit and sojourn in any State of this Confederacy, with their slaves and other property; and the right of property in said slaves shall not be thereby impaired.” 

Article IV, Section 2 

“The Confederate States may acquire new territory; and Congress shall have power to legislate and provide governments for the inhabitants of all territory belonging to the Confederate States, lying without the limits of the several States; and may permit them, at such times, and in such manner as it may by law provide, to form States to be admitted into the Confederacy. In all such territory the institution of negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected by Congress and by the Territorial government; and the inhabitants of the several Confederate States and Territories shall have the right to take to such Territory any slaves lawfully held by them in any of the States or Territories of the Confederate States.” 

Article IV, Section 3, Clause 3 

Section 1, 13th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America 

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within 

More Americans died in our Civil War than in all of the other wars the United States fought combined. Although precise numbers are not able to be calculated, estimates put the military dead at approximately 750,000. An estimated 13,000 Union prisoners confined to the notorious Confederate prison at Andersonville perished… and the commander of that horrific concentration camp was tried for war crimes… and hanged. What did so many soldiers die for?

Reconstruction, the era that followed the Civil War, found Black Americans, supposedly freed, intimidated, brutalized and systematically crushed and “legally” deprived not only of the right to vote, but of most of what we consider human dignity and justice. White supremacists, acting under the protection of a legal system that simply negated African Americans as human beings, slaughtered their former slaves under the slightest pretext. Black bodies were found hanged, butchered, and charred… and southern white juries let the perpetrators walk away without consequences.

Segregation, and the Jim Crow laws supporting the practice, became the rule, well into the 20th century. The mantle of “genetic inferiority,” bolstered by the fake science of eugenics, decimated any notion of freedom and equality that African Americans believed they had been accorded under the Emancipation Proclamation and the implementing clause of the Thirteenth Amendment cited above.

“After the Compromise of 1877 led to the withdrawal of federal troops from the South, Democrats consolidated control of state legislatures throughout the region, effectively marking the end of Reconstruction… Southern blacks saw the promise of equality under the law embodied by the 13th Amendment, 14th Amendment and 15th Amendment to the Constitution receding quickly, and a return to disenfranchisement and other disadvantages as white supremacy reasserted itself across the South.

“As historian C. Vann Woodward pointed out in a 1964 article about Plessy v. Ferguson, white and black Southerners mixed relatively freely until the 1880s, when state legislatures passed the first laws requiring railroads to provide separate cars for ‘Negro’ or ‘colored’ passengers… Florida became the first state to mandate segregated railroad cars in 1887, followed in quick succession by Mississippi, Texas, Louisiana and other states by the end of the century…

“[On] May 18, 1896, the Supreme Court delivered its verdict in Plessy v. Ferguson. In declaring separate-but-equal facilities constitutional on intrastate railroads, the Court ruled that the protections of 14th Amendment applied only to political and civil rights (like voting and jury service), not ‘social rights’ (sitting in the railroad car of your choice).” History.com. Hotels, drinking fountains, seats on public transportation, bars and restaurants, restrooms, schools and even military units as late as World War II were segregated.

The Ku Klux Klan reignited in 1915, accelerated into popularity by the mega-racist film, Birth of a Nation, a spirit embraced by America’s political leadership. Democrat Woodrow Wilson exercised his presidential powers to purge the US Civil Service of Black employees. The Klan openly marched by the thousands down both Constitution and Pennsylvania Avenues in the mid-1920s. “America First” was their rallying cry. De facto and statutory inferiority was the law of the land until the Supreme Court reversed its ignominious ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson in its 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling, effecting desegregation in our public school.

“Writing the majority opinion in that 1954 case, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote that ‘the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place’ in public education, calling segregated schools ‘inherently unequal,’ and declaring that the plaintiffs in the Brown case were being ‘deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the 14th Amendment.’” History.com. Southern states defied that court order. In 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican, deployed federal troops when nine African American students were prevented from entering Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Until the Kennedy-Johnson administrations, Democrats seemed to be on the wrong side of history. It was the Republican Party, starting with Abraham Lincoln right through the Eisenhower administration, that did most for African American rights… until the GOP and the Dems flipped sides. Once the Republicans reconfigured their political strategy to reclaim the South from the Dems, having been crushed in the 1964 defeat of GOP conservative Barry Goldwater in the presidential race, the racial bias, the tilt of the justice system to preserve white supremacy, became a silent plank in the GOP platform. The silence became a roar under Donald Trump.

The killing of George Floyd this year exploded Black Live Matter protests across the land. People were shocked that such an outrage could occur in what most felt was a very liberal community: Minneapolis, Minnesota. But the Floyd death was hardly a departure of what the African American community has endured… almost everywhere. “Driving while black” isn’t a joke to those who are routinely pulled over… apparently because they are black. It’s called a “pretext stop” – quietly described by police as a backdoor to “clamp down on crime.” To Black Americans, it is simple and systematic racism. Black parents, teaching their children how to drive, often start with rule one: when pulled over by a cop, keep your hands on top of the steering wheel, visible at all times. If you don’t…

After the Floyd killing, some in Minneapolis decided to see what “driving while Black” really meant. “After the police killing of George Floyd, [Hennepin County Public Defender Jay] Wong compiled and analyzed one year of traffic data and race in Minneapolis. The goal, he said, is to quantify a metric of racial inequality in Minneapolis policing, which his office has witnessed anecdotally for years, and share the findings with others in the Twin Cities criminal justice system in hopes of sparking changes. The [Minneapolis] Star Tribune verified his findings…Black drivers and their vehicles are more often searched when pulled over during equipment or moving violations, according to a recent Minneapolis Police Department study with data from June 1, 2019 to May 31, 2020…

“The city is predominantly white, yet Black and East African drivers [under 20% of the total local population] accounted for 78% of police searches that started as stops for moving or equipment violations from June 2019 through May 2020, according to Minneapolis police data. Whites made up 12% of searches during the same types of stops in that time frame… For Black and East African drivers, 26% of searches resulted in arrest, compared with 41% of whites, according to the data.” Minneapolis Star Tribune, August 7th. The Toledo numbers above are yet another reflection of a national reality. No big secret to any Black family.

As an older white American of European extraction, raised as a Protestant, I am ashamed of my country. For those Americans who rail at the thought that the lingering effects of well over two centuries of systematic racism, much of that period embracing cruel slavery, could possibly be assessed against “the rest of us”… think again. Without uncomfortable protests, “taking a knee” at athletic events and loud speeches, louder marches, and even louder cries for change… nothing will change. It’s 2020… and the same old/same old just doesn’t cut it anymore. It’s just time. Enough! Let’s fix this and deal with bringing this entire country out of this pandemic and back to economic prosperity. But if we do not “fix this,” if Black lives really don’t matter to most of us, who and what exactly are we as a nation?

              I’m Peter Dekom, and until you have visited a historically preserved antebellum plantation to see the hovels and restraints used to control slaves, you may never understand.