Our Nation's Trauma and Finding a Way to Heal
Luther and Mary Holbert are tied to a tree outside Doddsville, Mississippi. Around them is an angry mob of more than 600 men, women, and children. The crowd is whipped into a frenzy – over the next few hours they cheer as the couple are brutally tortured and eventually burned alive.
This brutal scene isn’t some artifact of antebellum life – it took place in 1904, decades after the end of the Civil War. And it wasn’t an isolated incident. Between 1865 and 1950 more than 6000 Black people were killed by white lynch mobs.
Such stories and statistics are horrific, yet, they’re important to recall. They demonstrate the awful stain that racism and white supremacy have left in the United States – a stain that still remains today.
The key message here is: Racism structured American society well after the Civil War concluded.
When the Civil War finally ended in 1865, America was at a crossroads. Not only did the country have to rebuild physically, but it also had to reconfigure its social and economic structures. For more than two centuries, the nation built its wealth on the back of a cruel racial caste system. Now, more than four million formerly enslaved people had to be integrated into society.
During this period, called Reconstruction, Northern politicians pushed through the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. In theory, these constitutional orders eliminated slavery and guaranteed freed people equal citizenship and the right to vote. But, in practice, these laws fell short.
Many states, especially in the south, found ways to re-entrench white supremacy. Legislatures passed poll taxes and literacy tests to keep Black communities from voting. They also passed new, strict laws called Black Codes. These codes made vague acts like “loitering” criminal offenses. With these laws, many freed Black people were swept up by local police and punished with forced labor – effectively recreating slavery as a legal institution.
By the time Reconstruction ended in 1867, much of the optimism and opportunity felt after the war had faded. Then, in 1896, the Supreme Court issued a decision in the case Plessy v. Ferguson. This ruling established the “separate but equal” doctrine which laid the legal groundwork for segregated institutions in the coming decades. So, even after the Civil War, Black Americans were subject to discriminatory and oppressive structures which kept them from experiencing their full rights as citizens.
The Reckoning (2021) is an unflinching look at contemporary American society. This sharp treatise draws informative connections between the nation’s traumas and its current issues.
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Blink 3 von 12 - Eine kurze Geschichte der Menschheit
von Yuval Noah Harari
