A History Lesson

In honor of Black History Month, we’re sharing this piece written by Rev. Dr. Marvin A. McMickle. Rev. McMickle, pastor emeritus of Antioch Baptist Church in Cleveland, retired in 2019 as president of Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School in Rochester, New York, where he had served since 2011. It originally appeared online on The Real Deal Press ( 5/3/21) and is used with permission of the author.

Tim Scott, U.S. Senator from South Carolina recently said “America is not a racist country.” Perhaps Senator Scott should consider the following. In 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter drafted a list of concerns to be presented to the U.S. government on behalf of a new group called The Niagara Movement. This group was the forerunner of what in 1909 would become the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). There were two issues that were uppermost on their minds: voting rights and state sanctioned violence against African Americans at the turn of the 20^th century. In short, they wanted aggressive enforcement of the 14^th and 15^th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. ¹

At the turn of the 20^th century, every effort imaginable was being employed to limit the access of African Americans to the ballot box. The right to vote that was guaranteed at the federal level was being undercut at the state level as one white-controlled state legislature after another created obstacles to the voting rights of African Americans. At the same time, violence against African Americans by lynch mobs and at the hands of the justice system was ruthless and relentless. Black people were being lynched on a regular basis. Those that were not being killed were being beaten and terrorized if they ever sought to expand their rights as American citizens. This was the reality for African Americans during the years (1895-1925) that historian Rayford Logan referred to as “the nadir” or the darkest and most dangerous times for black people in this country. ²

In his book, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement, Aldon Morris discusses the three factors that white society used to maintain white supremacy and limit black aspiration. ³ Those three factors were [1] keeping black people as poor and economically marginalized as possible, [2] keeping them cut off from the vote and thus politically powerless, and [3] using force and the fear of physical reprisal including death if they tried to rise above their second-class status. Those were the things that the Niagara Movement and later the NAACP were trying to address at the turn of the 20^th century. These are the things that Tim Scott either denies or ignores when he says that “America is not a racist country.”

At the turn of the 20^th century … one white-controlled state legislature after another created obstacles to the voting rights of African Americans. 

The problem with his statement is that the things Du Bois and Trotter were decrying at the turn of the 20^th century are headline news in the third decade of the 21^st century. White people in state legislatures across this country are passing one law after another to suppress the voting strength of racial and ethnic minorities. Having been surprised at their losses in Arizona and Georgia in 2020, white Republican legislators and governors seem intent on not letting that happen again. 

At the same time, black people are being killed by police officers at an alarming rate. Whether killed by a choke hold or a bullet to the back of the head, every week another name is added to the list of black people brutalized by people who are sworn to uphold the law. Age does not seem to matter, since 12-year-old Tamir Rice was shot and killed here in Cleveland and sixteen-year-old Ma’Khi Bryant was shot and killed in Columbus, Ohio.

What Senator Scott seems not to understand is that racism is not simply the actions or attitudes of individual persons. That individual behavior is much more akin to personal prejudice. Racism and prejudice are not synonymous. Prejudice is a feeling held by a person. Racism is the power that can be exercised by a segment of a society to enforce its will on another segment of that society. Racism is the Holocaust that killed six million Jews at the hands of the Nazis. Racism is the near extermination of Native American tribal groups in the 19^th century in this country. Racism is the sustained and systematic use of power and authority to protect the rights of whites in this country by denying or limiting the rights of others.

Racism and prejudice are not synonymous.

Racism is the Governor of Georgia surrounded by six white males, behind locked doors, underneath the portrait of a slave plantation signing into law a voter suppression bill in 2021. Racism is qualified immunity that allows police officers to brutalize black people, alter arrest records, hide behind the blue wall of silence, and seldom if ever face any consequences.

If it had not been for a cell phone video posted on Facebook, racism was set to let the death of George Floyd be a “medical event” on the way to the hospital. Racism in 2021 is fueled by the same forces that were at work in 1903. “America is a racist country” even if not every white person harbors personal prejudice!

¹ Lerone Bennett, Pioneers in Protest, New York: Penguin Books, 1969, pp. 227-228.

² Rayford Logan, The Betrayal of the Negro, New York: Collier Books, 1954, p. 104.

³ Aldon Morris, Origins of the Civil Rights Movement, New York: The Free Press, 1984, pp. 1-3.

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