A refresher in African American history is in order.

Kidnapped Africans were first brought as slaves to the future USA in 1565, at St. Augustine, now in Florida. Three centuries later, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation freed slaves solely in the treasonous Confederacy; slavery in the USA was only constitutionally outlawed by the 13th Amendment, the first of the three Reconstruction Amendments.

Then the 14th Amendment gave the newly freed slaves citizenship; it also penalized any state that barred their voting by reducing its Congressional representation, a never-enforced provision. The 15th Amendment gave the former slaves the right to vote.

To gain the Presidency in 1876, Republicans agreed to end Reconstruction. Economic, political, social and educational progress by southern African Americans ended in a wave of terror. The former slaves were returned to the near-slavery of peonage and sharecropping.

The white South enforced this state of affairs with lynchings and even massacres; for instance in Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898; in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921. Police bigotry brings racial violence even to the present day.

Throughout, Black people have suffered from affirmative action for white people: limited access to education, jobs, housing, health care, even grocery stores; and to home ownership loans, the white American middle-class source of wealth accumulation.

Larry Koenigsberg

Eugene