American History, the National Anthem, and Isolated Racism

When American history is taught in school, it tends to be segmented and broken up into pieces. Here you have a bit talking about the origins of African slavery and the triangle trade. Then we’re off to talk about the Salem Witch Trials, or the First Great Awakening, or the French and Indian War. And then the Revolution and the Constitution and changes in production and family patterns and Native American removals and the War of 1812 and women reformers and then suddenly the textbook remembers slavery and throws in a chapter on the antebellum South.

Then we’re off to talk about Jacksonian Democracy and Seneca Falls and Manifest Destiny, and then we get to the Civil War, so we have to talk about slavery again. After touching on Reconstruction and the instatement of Jim Crow, we’re off to talk about immigration and industrialization and progressive reformers and populism and strikes and the temperance movement and women’s suffrage and the roaring twenties and the Great Depression and WWII and then, just as we get started on the Cold War, the textbook remembers that there are black people, because the civil rights movement gave them no other choice.

Here’s the thing: Black people didn’t experience it like this. They didn’t just go conveniently disappear every time our history textbooks take their focus off of them. I’ve been thinking about this a lot in the wake of San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s decision to sit during the National Anthem. I’ve seen a lot of people express shock that a verse of the National Anthem touches on slavery, and surprise that the War of 1812 had anything at all to do with slavery. Well I’m sorry, but slavery didn’t stop existing between the section on the triangle trade and the chapter the antebellum South.

So let me tell you some things you probably did not know.

During the American Revolution, the British offered freedom to any slaves that defected to areas they occupied. Thousands did, and left with the British at the end of the war; most were taken to Nova Scotia, where they began new lives as free people.

Slavery wasn’t limited to the South. At one point, every northern colony had slavery; slavery persisted after the Revolution in many states. Slavery didn’t end in New York until 1827, in Rhode Island until 1842, or in Connecticut until 1848.

In the early 1790s, white Americans opened their homes to white refugees of the slave rebellion in Haiti. After the rebellion succeeded, U.S. refused to recognize Haiti’s independence for over fifty years, worried American slaves would copy it.

In 1800, Virginia slaves plotted to capture Governor James Monroe and hold him hostage to bargain for the freedom of the state’s slaves. They came close enough to success that the Virginia legislature toyed with abolishing slavery as too risky.

The Texas Revolution—of Alamo fame—was motivated in large part by Anglo Texans’ desire to continue practicing slavery, which had been banned by the Mexican government. The Republic of Texas immediately reinstated slavery.

After the Civil War, some southern states allowed former masters to claim as “apprentices” black children whose parents were unmarried or poor, allowing them to re-enslave African American children. In some states this went on for fifty years.

Eleven-year-old Sarah Rector became a millionaire when the Standard Oil Company struck oil on her land. At the time, Oklahoma law required that African Americans with significant property be given white guardians to “manage” their wealth.

During the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, black residents were treated poorly in relief camps managed by Herbert Hoover, conscripted into forced labor and shot if they resisted. This was when black voters began to shift to the Democratic Party.

Beginning in 1934, the Federal Housing Administration created a rating system that shaped the mortgage loan industry for the next three decades. Neighborhoods with black residents were de facto given bad ratings, making it difficult to obtain loans.

I’m willing to bet that almost none of my readers knew all of these things.

Over and over and over again I see people treat slavery as though it was simply an isolated mistake. We did a bad thing, we realized it was a bad thing, we fought a war to end it, and then it was over. They don’t see it as something that is threaded through American history. They don’t see it as something that is threaded through America today—something that isn’t truly over yet. They don’t see it as something that affects every bit of American history. Instead, they see it as something they can set aside. Something that is unfortunate, but can still be ignored.

I’ve seen so many people, these last few days, say “sure, those lines of the National Anthem were racist when they were written, but we’re not racist anymore today, so the context is different.” Or they’ve said “it’s just that one verse, and no one remembers it anymore, the rest of the song is fine.” All though the greater point were not that racism has been so intertwined with our nation for centuries that it even has a place in our national anthem. As though racism is something that can just be “over” and forgotten. As though closing your eyes makes fixes everything.