Slavery and race relations

SIGNIFICANCE: The enslavement of people of African ancestry was closely connected to the development of both racial prejudice and racial inequality in the United States. The heritage of slavery prevented African Americans from entering into the mainstream of American life even after slavery was abolished. Debates over responsibility for slavery and the legacy of slavery have complicated relations between African Americans and whites.

One of the theoretical points debated by historians is whether Europeans and Euro-Americans imposed slavery on people from Africa because they viewed Africans as inferior or whether racism came into existence as a justification for slavery. Some historians have suggested that as Europeans expanded their control over much of the world, they came into contact with many who were unlike themselves in appearance and in culture. Ethnocentrism, the tendency to see one’s own group as the standard by which all others are to be judged, may have led Europeans to see the people of Asia and Africa as inferior to themselves. Thus, people from China, as well as people from Africa, were brought to the Americas as forced labor at various times.

Historians such as George Frederickson, however, have maintained that racism was a consequence rather than a cause of slavery. From this point of view, the growth of plantation economies in North and South America encouraged the importation of slave labor because these economies required large numbers of workers. Native Americans did not make good slaves because they were in their homeland and could easily escape.

Slave owners needed to justify holding other humans in bondage, according to this theory, so they argued that their slaves were childlike and needed the protection of their masters. Thus, the influential apologist for slavery Henry Hughes argued in his Treatise on Sociology (1854) that the simple slaves as well as the masters benefited from the arrangement.

To some extent, the relationship between slavery and racism is similar to the ancient question of whether the chicken or the egg came first. The European enslavement of Africans was probably encouraged by feelings of European superiority. Once slavery became established, though, it was necessary to justify it, and the American descendants of Europeans could comfort themselves with claims that their slaves were inferior beings.

Many of the stereotypes of African Americans developed during slavery continued to flourish well into the 20th century. The racism of slavery outlived slavery itself; films, radio programs, and books before the Civil Rights era often portrayed Black Americans as childlike, comic, servile, or dangerously unable to control themselves. The sociologist Stanford M. Lyman has observed that popular American films ranging from Birth of a Nation (1915) to Gone with the Wind (1939) drew on the racial images of slavery to portray “good” African Americans as humorous, loyal, obedient family servants and “bad” African Americans as rebellious and violent.

Consequences of Master-Slave Relations

Economist Raymond S. Franklin has noted that one of the debates regarding consequences of master-slave relations concerns whether slaves and their descendants were in some way damaged by being owned and controlled. A number of historians, including Kenneth Stampp, Stanley Elkins, and William Styron, have held that being slaves left psychological scars on the slaves and damaged social institutions that slaves passed on to free Black Americans. Along these lines, in 1966, Daniel Patrick Moynihan published a controversial report on the Black family, in which he maintained that the experience of slavery contributed to the weakness of the Black family. More recently, Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson has claimed that the slave status undermined the roles of husband and father for Black men and reinforced the central role of women in families.

Franklin observes that some historians and social thinkers have argued that the master-slave relationship actually strengthened many Black social institutions by promoting the need to resist slavery. Historian Herbert Gutman, for example, offered evidence that slavery had actually strengthened Black families. The historian Eric Foner has traced the origins of the Black church, a central institution in African American history, to the religious activities of slaves who organized themselves into churches after emancipation.

Geographical Consequences of Slavery

Slaves were heavily concentrated in the southern part of the United States. Even after the end of slavery, African Americans continued to be a southern population. In 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, 94 percent of the people of African ancestry in the United States were concentrated in the slave-owning states of the South. This percentage declined notably in the years following World War I, as the descendants of slaves moved to other regions over the course of the 20th century. Nevertheless, at the end of the century, the geographical legacy of slavery was still evident; the 1990 U.S. census showed a majority of the American Black population residing in the South.

In many areas of the South, working as sharecroppers or low-paid wage laborers during the years following slavery, African Americans continued to do much the same sort of agricultural labor that they had performed as slaves. In order to maintain White domination, in regions with large Black populations, southern Whites sought to replace slavery with segregation, which placed African Americans in a separate and disadvantaged position. This kept African Americans dependent on Whites and subservient to Whites in a manner that was similar in many ways to the old master-slave relationship. These patterns may have even survived the years following the Civil Rights movement. As recently as the 1990s, sociologist Ruth Kornfield, looking at a rural community in Tennessee, found that patron-client relationships between white employers and Black employees continued to mirror master-slave relationships.

The continuing concentration of African Americans in the South was one of the reasons that early actions of the Civil Rights movement concentrated primarily on this region. Despite the stubborn survival of many old patterns of racial inequality in this region, numbers have given African Americans in this part of the country some measure of power. In 1993, two-thirds of the Black-elected officials in the United States were from the southern states. Furthermore, the major southern cities of Atlanta, Georgia; New Orleans, Louisiana; Birmingham, Alabama; and Richmond, Virginia, all had Black mayors.

The Legacy of Slavery and Urbanization

Although the South did not cease to be home to the largest proportion of African Americans, the group did shift from being heavily rural to being heavily urban. Over the course of the 20th century, the agricultural jobs that Black Americans continued to perform after slavery became increasingly unavailable as farms mechanized. In the years following World War II, African Americans moved to cities. They tended to settle in central urban areas because the U.S. government built housing projects reserved for the poor in these urban areas, and the heritage of slavery and of the system of segregation that had emerged from slavery left African Americans disproportionately poor. During the same years, Whites were moving from cities to suburbs. Racism, an ideology with roots in America’s centuries of slavery, contributed to the unwillingness of homeowners, real estate companies, and mortgage lenders to allow African Americans to move into homes in the suburbs.

As a result of the movement of Whites to suburbs and African Americans to cities, the two groups came to live in separate places. Although schools and other public facilities ceased to be legally segregated after the 1960s, many urban neighborhoods and schools contained virtually no Whites. This not only limited contact between members of the different races, but it also separated African Americans from the jobs and opportunities that became much more abundant in the suburbs. Further, even after it became easier for middle-class African Americans to move into suburban neighborhoods, the poorest were left isolated in inner cities.

Questions of Responsibility

Professor and social commentator Shelby Steele has observed that the question of innocence is central to race relations in the United States. Many African Americans maintain that they are innocent victims of the aftermath of slavery. The problem of race relations, from this perspective, is one of achieving equality of condition for people who suffer disadvantages as a group through no fault of their own.

White Americans also frequently put forward claims of innocence. They maintain that White people alive at the end of the 20th century, well more than a century after the end of slavery, cannot be held responsible for the legacy of slavery. Therefore, programs such as affirmative action that aim at increasing African Americans’ share of positions in employment and education seek to benefit the descendants of slaves at the expense of Whites who are innocent of responsibility for slavery. In discussing issues of historical responsibility, Whites will often become defensive, and any assertions of Black disadvantage will sometimes be seen by Whites as moral accusations.

Reparations

The issue of reparations is one of the most controversial consequences of the thorny ethical issue of historical responsibility. The term “reparations” refers to compensation paid by one nation or group of people to another for damages or losses. The U.S. government, for example, has made some payments to Japanese Americans for violating their civil rights by imprisoning them during World War II.

Advocates of reparation payments for African Americans, such as the scholar Manning Marable, have argued that slavery was a massive denial of civil rights to this group. These advocates point out that slave labor built up much of the nation’s wealth, allowing it to industrialize and therefore making it possible for the United States to achieve its current level of development. They point out that the descendants of slaves continue to suffer damages from slavery because African Americans have lower incomes, on average, than other Americans and tend to hold much less of the country’s wealth.

Opponents of reparations maintain that while slavery is a historical source of contemporary disadvantages of African Americans, reparations would attempt to right a past injustice by penalizing present-day Whites. Further, if reparations were paid to all African Americans, some rich African Americans would be receiving tax money taken from middle-class or even poor Whites. Finally, opponents of reparations suggest that payments of this sort would be enormously unpopular politically and might increase racial hatred and conflict.

Bibliography

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Berlin, Ira. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. Cambridge: Belknap, 1988.

“Confronting Slavery’s Legacy: The Reparations Question.” Brown University, slaveryandjusticereport.brown.edu/sections/confronting-slaverys-legacy-the-reparations-question/. Accessed 23 Nov. 2024.

D'Souza, Dinesh. The End of Racism: Principles for a Multiracial Society. New York: Free, 1995.

Franklin, Raymond S. Shadows of Race and Class. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1991.

Frederickson, George M. White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History. New York: Oxford UP, 1981.

Marable, Manning. Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction and Beyond in Black America, 1945-2006. 3rd ed, University Press of Mississippi, 2007.

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Reuf, Martin. Between Slavery and Capitalism: The Legacy of Emancipation in the American South. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2014.