Beneath these sterile facts lay a grisly reality. Blacks were systemically dehumanized for hundreds of years, a practice that had unique social and psychological effects on men.
quasi-slavery called peonage, which endured well into the middle of the 20th century. Here’s how it worked: black men (it was usually men) were arrested for petty crimes or no crimes at all; “selling cotton after sunset” was a favorite charge. They were then assessed a steep fine. If they could not pay, they were imprisoned for long sentences and forced to work for free. This allowed savvy industrialists to replace thousands of slaves with thousands of convicts. ‘Black men are the most incarcerated people on the planet ... warehoused in prison for nonviolent crimes.’ While some whites were caught up in this system, the forced labor camps were 80 to 90 percent populated by black men. This practice endured until 1948, when the federal criminal code was rewritten to helpfully clarify that the law forbade involuntary servitude. Around that time, determined activists—from the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. to Fannie Lou Hamer—organized to demand equal treatment. We know the civil rights story well: Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, which overturned the separate-but-equal doctrine; the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed various forms of discrimination; and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which carved a clear path to the unfettered right to vote.
our backs, that all the discrimination they had faced was behind them; that there would be no further barriers to opportunity, even unspoken ones; that it was time for them to wake up. Get a job. Get married, and start a family. Build wealth. Take hold of the American dream. We won’t stop you—we promise. We focused our social investments in this period—our brief War on Poverty—on women and children, because men were supposed to figure it out. But in the 1970s and 1980s, many of these black men didn’t. Just like their great-grandfathers never fully figured out how to teach their sons about manhood while being lashed in a field. Just like their grandfathers never completely figured out how to pass on lessons about building wealth when theirs was stolen through peonage and sharecropping. Their fathers tried to rally around Martin Luther King as a symbol of what they could be—but he was gunned down on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. In the post–civil rights era, many of these black men, men like Joe Jones’s father, weren’t quite figuring it out either. And neither are many of their sons and grandsons, those bright if often scowling men we see on our streets. S
Joshua DuBois [Eta Lambda, ‘11] was U.S. President Barack Obama’s first
And that, we told black men, was that. Immediately following the Civil Rights Movement, in the early 1970s, we assured these men, with fingers perhaps gently crossed behind CENTENNIAL ISSUE
director of the White House’s faithbased initiative, and is now an author, teacher, speaker, and CEO of Values Partnerships. Follow him on Twitter: @JoshuaDuBois 37