Introduction

Abstract

Throughout the entire racial history of the United States, a series of state-sanctioned institutions have exited that have “regulated” the African American population for the purpose of preserving white power and privilege. During the first two and a half centuries of the black presence on the North American continent, the predominant mode of black oppression was enslavement. Blacks as a group were relegated to life outside of civil society; they were legally defined as private property, not citizens, and were largely excluded from legal and constitutional rights. After a brief experiment in biracial democracy known as Reconstruction (1865–77), African Americans were relegated to a subordinate economic and social status through the regime of Jim Crow segregation. Although technically “free,” the majority of blacks found themselves tethered to the land by sharecropping, debt peonage, “convict-leasing,” and other forms of penury. In the twentieth century, as millions of rural southern blacks migrated to the industrial northeast and Midwest, seeking employment and a better way of life, they quickly confronted a newer form of racial exclusion and stigmatization—the urban ghetto. Ghettoization once again relegated blacks to the margins of America’s commercial, cultural, and political life; through policies such as “redlining” by banks and financial institutions, blacks were denied the credit and capital needed to purchase their own homes and businesses. They continued to encounter fierce discrimination in employment and suffered from substandard schools, health facilities, and housing. Each of these institutional barriers to racial access and opportunity reinforced the deep-seated cultural and psychological assumptions of black inferiority that millions of white Americans uncritically accepted as normative and customary.