Lecture: African American Experiences I: Slavery, Emancipation, and Jim Crow
Lecture script · about 15–20 minutes spoken · Week 6
Opening
Picture a club whose rulebook says any member may vote after passing a reading test. That sounds fair. Now add one detail. The officers choose which passage each member reads. One member gets a short paragraph from a sports page, and another gets two pages of dense legal language. Both took "the same test", and the rulebook never says who gets which passage. You've probably met a rule like that somewhere, a rule that is equal on paper and unequal in practice.
In this lecture, I want you to read some of the most important rules in the history of the United States that way. In Week 2 you learned that racialization is the process of attaching racial meaning to a group, practice, or relationship that was not classified that way before. You also learned that institutional discrimination happens when an organization's rules or routine practices produce unequal treatment, whether or not anyone intends it. In Week 3 you met the line between immigrant peoples and peoples who became part of the country by force, and enslaved Africans were on that second list. And in Weeks 4 and 5 you read Native nations' history, from removal to survivance.
This week begins a new unit. We'll start with slavery and the year 1619. Then we'll read a Supreme Court case about citizenship, a proclamation that freed some people but not others, and three amendments that changed the Constitution. After that comes Jim Crow, and finally one family's account of leaving the South. Next week, in Week 7, you'll see how people won the civil rights laws that answered the system we read here. A word on names before we start. Black and African American are both in common use, and Black is the broader term. In my own voice, I'll say "enslaved people", because slavery was a condition forced on people, not who they were.
1. Slavery from 1619
Think about a document that decides what you're allowed to do. A work permit, a lease, a ticket. Each one ties you to a status. Slavery tied a person to the most complete status there is, because it made the person property.
So here's the term. Slavery is a system in which people are held as property and forced to work without pay or freedom.
In the English colonies, the story begins on the coast of Virginia. According to the National Park Service, the first ship carrying enslaved Africans to the English colony of Virginia arrived at Old Point Comfort in August 1619. The people aboard had been taken captive from the kingdom of Ndongo, in present-day Angola. I want you to hold onto that detail. Those people had names, families, and a homeland before anyone put them on a ship.
Now let's measure how long slavery lasted in law. The first arrival in Virginia came in 1619. The 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery, was ratified in 1865. Take 1619 away from 1865 and you get 246 years. That's the span from the first arrival to abolition in the Constitution. Generation after generation of families were born into a status they never chose.
Here's where Week 2 comes back. As you hear this week's laws and cases, watch a legal status being given a racial meaning. Enslaved or free. Citizen or not. That is racialization at work, and the next case shows the Supreme Court doing it in plain words.
Pause and try this. Slavery ended by constitutional amendment in 1865. Starting from the 1619 arrival, how long did it last?
Count it before you go on.
Here's the answer. 246 years, because 1865 minus 1619 is 246. Slavery didn't fade away on its own; it ran for 246 years and ended by amendment.
2. Dred Scott and citizenship
Imagine a membership card that your friend carries and you are told you can never hold, no matter what you do. The question isn't whether you followed the rules. The question is whether the rules ever counted you in at all.
In 1857 the Supreme Court answered that question about citizenship. In Dred Scott v. Sandford, decided in 1857, the Court held that a Black person whose ancestors were brought to the country and sold as slaves was not a citizen under the Constitution. Notice that the phrase "sold as slaves" is the Court's framing, not mine. I'm repeating the holding so you can read it for what it did.
And here's what it did. It drew citizenship along a racial line. Read the words again: a Black person whose ancestors were brought here in slavery. That covers free Black people as well as enslaved people. So the case wasn't only about one man, and it wasn't only about slavery. It was about who could ever count as a citizen.
The course traces this question on a thread called the citizenship thread. It follows who could become a citizen, across many groups, from law to law. Dred Scott v. Sandford sits on that thread in 1857. Hold that year, because in the next few minutes you'll hear the Constitution answer it.
Pause and try this. A friend says the Dred Scott case was only about enslaved people. Which words in the holding show it reached free Black people too?
Look back at whom the holding named.
Here's the answer. The holding named any Black person whose ancestors were brought to the country and sold as slaves, free or enslaved. So it drew citizenship along a racial line for free Black people too.
3. The Emancipation Proclamation
Imagine a store sign that says, "All sale prices apply at our downtown location." You read it at the store across town and expect the sale. The words "all sale prices" sound universal. But the sign's reach is set by its last four words.
The Emancipation Proclamation works the same way. It was an executive proclamation, an order issued by the President. It was not a law passed by Congress, and it was not an amendment to the Constitution. It took effect in January 1863.
Here's what it did, according to the National Archives. It applied to the states that had seceded from the Union. And here's what it did not do. It left slavery untouched in the loyal border states and in parts of the Confederacy already under Union control.
So let's count. The proclamation took effect in 1863, and the 13th Amendment came in 1865. That puts the amendment 2 years after the proclamation. The proclamation left slavery untouched in the loyal border states, and it took an amendment to finish the job.
One honest caveat, though. Reading the proclamation's limits doesn't make it unimportant. It was a real order with real reach in the states it named. A careful reading says both things at once: what it did, and what it left for the 13th Amendment to finish.
Pause and try this. A classmate writes that the Emancipation Proclamation freed every enslaved person in 1863. What's the fix?
Think about where the proclamation applied.
Here's the answer. It applied only to states that had seceded, and it left slavery untouched in the loyal border states and in parts of the Confederacy under Union control. The 13th Amendment ended slavery everywhere in 1865, 2 years later.
4. The Reconstruction amendments
Think about the house rules in a shared apartment. You can change a house rule with a quick conversation. Changing the lease takes everyone's signature, plus the landlord's. The Constitution is the country's lease, and changing it is hard on purpose.
So when the country changed it three times in a row, that mattered. The Reconstruction amendments are the three constitutional amendments ratified after the Civil War. Each one does one job, and I'll give you each one in its own words.
The 13th Amendment, ratified in 1865, abolished slavery "except as a punishment for crime". Underline that exception in your mind. It is part of the text.
The 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, opens with its citizenship clause: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States". Its equal protection clause forbids a state to deny to any person within its jurisdiction "the equal protection of the laws".
The 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870, bars denying the vote "on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude".
Now go back to the citizenship thread. Dred Scott v. Sandford came in 1857, and the 14th Amendment came in 1868. That's 11 years from a ruling that denied citizenship by race to a clause that makes all persons born here citizens. And all three amendments arrived within 5 years, from 1865 to 1870.
Here's the word I want you to notice: "persons". The citizenship clause covers all persons born or naturalized here. The equal protection clause protects any person within a state's jurisdiction. That wording is why this amendment keeps coming back in this course. People of many backgrounds have gone to court under the 14th Amendment, and you'll read their cases in later weeks.
Pause and try this. Someone tells you the 14th Amendment is only about Black citizens. Which one word in its clauses answers that?
Find the word both clauses share.
Here's the answer. The word is "persons". Both clauses speak of persons, not of one group, which is why every later group in this course uses the 14th Amendment.
5. Jim Crow and the Plessy case
Go back to the club with the reading test. The rulebook was equal on paper, and the officers made it unequal in practice. Now imagine a whole region writing rules like that into its laws. Then imagine a court saying those rules were allowed.
That region had a name for its system. Jim Crow is the system of state and local laws and customs that enforced racial segregation and disenfranchisement in the South from the late nineteenth century to the 1960s. Disenfranchisement means taking away or blocking a group's right to vote.
Here's how it worked on the vote. After the 15th Amendment, former Confederate states wrote literacy tests and grandfather clauses into their laws. A literacy test is a reading or writing test required before a person could register to vote. A grandfather clause excused some would-be voters from new requirements based on who their ancestors were, so the requirements fell on Black voters. The 15th Amendment said the vote couldn't be denied on account of race. These devices didn't need to name race to block Black voters.
Racial violence enforced the whole system. Lynching is a killing carried out by a mob outside any court or legal process, and under Jim Crow it was used to terrorize Black communities and enforce segregation. In this course we describe it in words, with no count and no image, out of respect for the people who were killed and their families.
And then the Supreme Court gave segregation its legal footing. In Plessy v. Ferguson, decided in 1896, the Court upheld, by a 7–1 vote, a Louisiana law requiring separate railway accommodations by race. That ruling is the source of the separate but equal doctrine: state-required separation by race did not violate the 14th Amendment if the separate facilities were called equal.
Let's place it. The equal protection clause came in 1868, and the Plessy case came in 1896. That's 28 years after the Constitution promised equal protection. Now read it with Week 2. A state law that assigns seats by race is a rule written by an institution and applied to everyone. Segregation written into law is institutional discrimination.
Pause and try this. A summary calls segregation in the South a matter of custom. What does the Plessy case add?
Ask which part was law.
Here's the answer. In 1896 the Supreme Court upheld a Louisiana law requiring separate railway accommodations, so segregation was written, passed, and enforced as state law. Jim Crow ran on law and custom together.
6. The Great Migration and E2
Think about a family that moves across the country for a job. One parent goes first, finds work, and writes home. Months later, the rest of the family packs what fits in a few suitcases. If your family has made a move like that, you know it changes a family. When a great many families make that move, it changes a country.
The Great Migration is the movement of Black people from the South to the North, Midwest, and West from roughly the 1910s to the 1970s, to escape racial violence and Jim Crow and to pursue work and education. The chapter gives the National Archives' estimate in words, and it's worth reading there.
Now let's hear the course archive. It's an illustrative, unnamed public library's collection, built for this course. Its excerpts are identified by role and decade, and none of them is a real person's words. Excerpt E2 comes from a woman whose family moved north in the Great Migration in the 1940s, interviewed in the 1990s. She says the family left in 1943. Her father went first, to work in a shipyard, and sent for them that spring. On the train they had to sit in the car set aside for Black passengers until they were out of the South. In the new city nobody told them where to sit. But there were neighborhoods where the bank would not lend to them. And her mother said it was "different, not finished."
Let's walk the reading in the field's order. What does it say? A move, a separate train car, and a new city with its own barrier. Who made it? A narrator, about half a century later, telling how one family left the Jim Crow South. Whom did it affect? A father, a mother, and their children. What does it leave out? No city, no state, no railway. So you check its dates against the record. The Plessy case came in 1896, and the family left in 1943. That's 47 years after the Court upheld separate railway accommodations, and E2's family still rode in a car set aside for Black passengers.
Now add one comparison across groups. The 15th Amendment barred denying the vote by race, yet states wrote literacy tests into law. In Week 5 you read that the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 made Native Americans born in the United States citizens, yet some states barred Native Americans from voting until 1957. In both, a federal right on paper was narrowed by state law in practice.
Pause and try this. E2's mother called the new city "different, not finished". Which detail in E2 shows what wasn't finished?
Pick one line from the excerpt.
Here's the answer. The neighborhoods where the bank would not lend to them. Nobody posted seating rules in the new city, but a barrier was still there, so the move changed the kind of barrier, not the fact of one.
Closing
Let me pull it together in the order we went. Slavery is a system in which people are held as property, and in the English colonies it began with the 1619 arrival in Virginia, 246 years before the 13th Amendment ended it. Dred Scott v. Sandford, in 1857, drew citizenship along a racial line.
The Emancipation Proclamation, in 1863, applied only to states that had seceded. The three Reconstruction amendments abolished slavery, made all persons born here citizens with equal protection of the laws, and barred denying the vote by race.
Jim Crow answered with segregation, disenfranchisement, and violence, and Plessy v. Ferguson, in 1896, upheld separation as law. And in the Great Migration, families like E2's left the South for cities that were different, not finished.
Next in this module come the slide deck, the Readings & Resources page, the lecture tutorial, the practice set, and the quiz. And next week, in Week 7, you'll follow the civil rights laws and the Black freedom movements that took on the separate but equal rule.
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