Quotes from Carol Anderson

Even as late as 1960, more than 98 percent of Mississippi's black adults were not registered to vote.49

Some 20 percent of Trump supporters believed the Emancipation Proclamation had been bad public policy and that the enslaved should have never been freed.

In fact, "in twenty states, the percent[age] of blacks incarcerated is at least five times greater than their share of resident population."163

I offered my life for a decadent democracy," pronounced the Reverend L. Francis Griffin, a black man who had served in the Jim Crow military during World War II and

Similarly, the amendments covering the criminal justice system—the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth—have offered little to no protection for African Americans because of numerous Supreme Court decisions that have embedded racism and racial profiling into policing, trial procedures, and sentencing.

Yet as myopic and convoluted as the rulings have been, there is a clear human rights pathway on this: The court simply has to acknowledge how profoundly embedded racism is in the criminal justice system—from racial profiling to police stops, to access to competent counsel, to jury selection, to the impact of the victim's race on the trial, to sentencing—and declare the death penalty unconstitutional.

As the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights reported in its study of the racial implications of the law, the criminal justice system is "ten times more likely" to rule a homicide justifiable "if the shooter is white and the victim black" than if an African American kills someone white and claims self-defense. 32 In fact, the report notes, stand-your-ground laws actually worsen and increase the racial disparity outcomes of self-defense claims. 33

Thomas Jefferson, who advocated expulsion of blacks from the United States in order to save the nation; and Kentuckian Henry Clay, who had established the American Colonization Society, which had moved thousands of free blacks into what is now Liberia—Lincoln soon laid out his own resettlement plans. He had selected Chiriquí,

The wholesale slaughter of African Americans in Colfax, Louisiana (1873), Wilmington, North Carolina (1898), and Ocoee, Florida (1920), resulted in the loss of hundreds of lives simply because whites were enraged that black people had voted.

It denied the enslaved the right to bear arms; ignored the right to self-defense for Black people; and put in place a "large-scale military machinery," the militia, "to crack down [on] any conspiracies or uprisings." 15 As early as 1639, Virginia prohibited Africans from carrying guns because "what white Southerners feared the most … [was] an armed black man unafraid to retaliate against both the system of slavery and those who fought to defend it.

The states couldn't possibly build two comparable systems. But if they really wanted Jim Crow, the NAACP began to make painfully clear, they would have to pay for it.5

In 1680, as racialized chattel slavery congealed, the legislature crafted a law denying the enslaved and free Blacks the right to self-defense if attacked by their " 'master' and/ or Whites." 18 Next, in 1723, the colony's statute explicitly stated that "no negro, mulatto, or indian [sic] whatsoever" should have a gun "under penalty of a whipping not to exceed twenty-nine lashes.

Right then he had a revelation: "They all hate black people, all of them. They're all afraid, all of them. Great God! That's it! They're all Southern! The whole United States is Southern!"17

Whether they trusted them or not, the plantation owners voiced concerns that if they didn't use "great caution … our slaves when armed might become our masters." 31 South Carolina then formally merged the separate slave patrol with the militia to strengthen the colony's internal and external defenses.

Reagan's "moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers" was now ready to saturate the United States with cocaine.

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Even when philanthropist Pierre S. Du Pont launched a program to bring these schools up to code, white residents made it clear that they not only opposed public funding for black schools but were equally resistant to private, philanthropic resources intervening as well.

The property value of black schools in Clarendon County, attended by 6,531 students, was "officially listed as $194,575. The value of the white schools, attended by 2,375 youngsters, was put at $673,850." Thus, the county spent nearly ten times more per capita on the white students' facilities.

In December 1952, Marshall argued before the U.S. Supreme Court that racial segregation violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth as well as the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment.

That would be the "elephant in the room."30 In fact, as H. R. Haldeman, one of the Republican candidate's most trusted aides, later recalled, "He [Nixon] emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.

Indeed, by 1963, not one black child attended a public school with a white child in South Carolina, Alabama, or Mississippi.

It was obvious, whether North or South, that no militia was going to stop a foreign invasion. The war proved that beyond a reasonable doubt.127 What the militia could do rather well, however, as George Mason noted, was keep slave owners safe.

Grappling with America's trenchant refusal to open up the doors to quality education, Time announced that the "gap between what the Negro now achieves and what he might achieve indicates that he is the nation's most wasted resource."122

Ronald Reagan breezily shared anecdotes about how Lyndon Johnson's Great Society handed over hard-earned taxpayer dollars to a "slum dweller" to live in posh government-subsidized housing and provided food stamps for one "strapping young buck" to buy steak, while another used the change he received from purchasing an orange to pay for a bottle of vodka. He ridiculed Medicaid recipients as "a faceless mass, waiting for handouts." The