Unequal: A Story of America: Prologue–Chapter 3

The real story of racial inequality—and resistance to it—is the prologue to our present. You can see it in where we live, where we go to school, and where we work. It’s reflected in our laws, in our system of government, and in who gets to call the shots. It’s even in the water we drink and in the soil we till.

They founded the Ku Klux Klan in 1866, a vigilante army meant to keep Black people out of politics and to force them back onto white-owned plantations, and they passed the Black codes—a set of state laws that seemed ominously like slavery.

But when their tug-of-war began to attract the notice of the few passengers remaining on the car, the conductor relented at last.

“You can go into that car if you want to,” he begrudged her.

The case had originated with a Black plaintiff named Homer Plessy, who attempted to ride a whites-only streetcar in New Orleans and was arrested, tried, and convicted for this “crime.”

Plessy’s lawyer, Albion W. Tourgée, appealed that decision and argued before the court that segregation’s “only effect is to perpetuate the stigma of color.”

Plessy’s lawyer, Albion W. Tourgée, appealed that decision and argued before the court that segregation’s “only effect is to perpetuate the stigma of color.”

Before the court’s decision, Black people could at least attempt to claim their constitutional right to equality: equal schools, equal homes, equal employment opportunities, and more. But after Plessy v. Ferguson, the nation swapped its patchwork of laws and customs for the ironclad rule of racial inequality.

Black students, where they could attend school at all, met in drafty, unheated structures.

I only sensed scorn and hate; the kind of despising which a dog might incur.

No Black person believed for a moment that “separate” could ever be “equal.” Racial segregation was meant to demoralize, dehumanize, and destabilize Black people.

But all around her, the segregated city buzzed with thousands of white government workers, politicians, taxi drivers, and streetcar operators, all of them insensitive to the racial inequalities that still afflicted the capital of the world’s largest democracy.

It took a daring First Lady named Eleanor Roosevelt to finally desegregate the White House in the mid-1930s, but she was in a distinct minority of white people.

In the 1930s and 1940s, spectators in the gallery of the US Senate could hear the likes of Mississippi senator Theodore Bilbo, who hurled racial epithets openly while his colleagues looked on and said nothing.

“Do you mean to tell me that you are not going to serve me?” Mary asked.
Terrell’s question was a carefully rehearsed ploy.

She had remained an activist into old age, looking for every opportunity to undermine the power of Jim Crow.

Passed in the 1860s and 1870s, the laws stated that all restaurants, theaters, bars, and hotels had to admit “any respectable, well-behaved person without regard to race, color or previous condition of servitude.”

It was a quiet victory, compared with the momentous decision the court would hand down eleven months later, when Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, declared “separate but equal” unconstitutional, overruling Plessy v. Ferguson once and for all.

A third man joined the fateful chase in his truck to cut off Arbery’s route of escape.

It took a video of the killing, national outcry, multiple changes in jurisdiction, and three months for charges to be brought against the three men who were eventually convicted of murder.

He often wore a tan uniform emblazoned with the letters TR.

The pages of the Free Speech crackled with new revelations, criticisms, and venom aimed at the city’s white leaders, whom she suspected of complicity in the lynchings.

She placed prominent people at the scene of the crime and also later exposed one of Moss’s white competitors as the devious purchaser of the People’s Grocery at a bargain-basement price.

These murders were not perpetrated under the cover of darkness.

White spectators snapped pictures of men and women suffering slow and agonizing deaths. Some of these ended up on memorial postcards and became ghoulish items for sale in drugstores and curio shops.

In all, between the end of Reconstruction and 1950, lynch mobs murdered over four thousand African American people in the South.

On his way home, an armed vigilante named George Zimmerman accosted Trayvon on a sidewalk and began following him home.

When a Black person is killed under suspicious circumstances, white people move quickly to assign guilt to the victim, not the perpetrator. These false stories—much as they did in lynching’s heyday—serve to fuel the cycle of white violence.

“Sweet Auburn” Avenue in Atlanta, Georgia, was a hub of religious, cultural, and economic life for Black people for much of the twentieth century; it was once dubbed “the richest Negro street in the world.”

Several biplanes—most likely crop dusters recruited for the attack—made bombing runs over the neighborhood, firing indiscriminately at residents and dropping explosives.

In 2003, Franklin helped bring a lawsuit against the city of Tulsa and the state of Oklahoma, seeking reparations for over one hundred then-living survivors of the massacre and three hundred children and grandchildren of victims.

“The wealth gap,” according to the historian Mehrsa Baradaran, “is where the injustices sown in the past grow imperceptibly in the present.”

A report commissioned by the state of Oklahoma detailed nearly $2 million in insurance claims from the Greenwood massacre, which would be valued at nearly $30 million today. The total financial impact on victims was likely much higher, as many victims, fearing for their lives, fled the city without attempting to recoup their losses.

“What if we had been allowed to maintain our family business?” asked one woman, whose grandfather’s shoe shop was destroyed by a white mob. “If they had been allowed to carry on that legacy, there’s no telling where we could be now.”

When the mob violence of these years finally ebbed, hundreds—perhaps thousands—of Black people had been murdered and many more injured.