Black Oppression in America | American Oppression

History of Black Oppression

13% of the population and 50% of crime. I’m sure it's something many of us have heard from various sources that blame crime on black communities and people. But what these sources overlook is the history of racial oppression that has created a system of discrimination throughout the United States. Despite the many attempts to diminish the United States' troubled past, that troubled history marks the beginning of black oppression in the United States. Our story starts in 1619 when the first slave ship arrived on the shores of the English settlement of Jamestown. This marked the beginning of over two centuries of inhumanity, brutality, and destruction for millions of enslaved persons that brought on both physical and mental suffering. The institution of slavery also destroyed the structure of black families in America. Enslaved persons were treated as property instead of people, and as a result families were often sold and separated. Henry Brown, an enslaved person from Virginia, was forced to actually watch his children and wife be sold and shipped away from one another. Henry described the experience of watching his children be taken away as "may God spare me ever again enduring the excruciating horror of that moment”. The greatest evil that slavery ever did was destroy Black families all throughout the U.S. and modern America continues to separate Black families through the modern institutions designed by the same system of slavery we are familiar with 300 years ago.

The assumption following the history of slavery, is often that the civil war and the end of slavery in 1865, was the end of all that suffering and injustice. The era of Reconstruction, a supposed time to help liberate the newly freed population, yet led to the shaping of modern institutions that have done the complete opposite. Although Reconstruction did attempt to pass some legislation to safeguard black people, the rise of terrorist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan quickly stopped that. Following the end of Reconstruction in 1866, Southern resentment led to the murders, intimidation, violence, and oppression of Black communities in the south. The KKK a white supremacist group is directly responsible for the deaths of 4000 black men, women, and children and 1400 white supporters of black rights from 1880 through the 1960s. Additionally, the KKK intermixed within Southern governments and passed legislation to designed oppress Black communities.

The history presented above may seem like a familiar story, however, Black oppression is rooted far deeper than racist white Southerners. Although slavery is illegal now, the modern institutions that exist continue to oppress and treat Black Americans as second class citizens. Those institutions range from systems as large as the prison industrial complex all the way to something as simple as having to wait longer to cross the street. The stories of oppression, hatred, and racism that the Black community in America has is comprised of millions of voices who face significant inequality every day. Through analyzing the shaping of these institutions and what they currently do to the Black community, we can see firsthand how these communities have suffered.

Henry "Box" Brown who, following the separation of his family pursued freedom by mailing himself to the North.
Henry Brown not only experienced the crushing loss of his children and wife but was also separated from his brothers and sisters at a young age.

The KKK was initially founded in 1865 and declined during the 1880s.
It wasn't until the 1920s that the group emerged yet again, fueled by the romanticization of the "Old South".

Black Americans continue to face systemic oppression in the U.S. among many different institutions.
All of these institutions individually sound highly discriminatory and unethical but when you couple them with the fact that Black Americans face all of these institutions together, its a humanitarian crisis.