A Brief History of Law, the Enforcement of Law, and African Americans
Below you will find a few dates in history that help tell some of the story of the African-American experience in America.
It is not offered up as a complete list of events or a full description of the important dates in African-American history. Nor is it by any means an all encompassing list of the many abuses and atrocities perpetrated against African-Americans. The list below is being presented as an example of how "the law" and the enforcement of law by "the law" has always - always - been arbitrarily applied in America along racial lines. It is a peek, a very limited peek, into how racism formed laws in America from its beginning.
When laws can restrict your movements - who you can associate with - what you buy - what you can sell - who you can sell to - who you can marry - how late you can be outside - if you can vote - creating barriers to voting - if you're free - if your family can remain intact - force you into a religion but then deny you the full measure of that religion - if you can gather in a group - impose penalties on those who help you - laws that have life and death over you... those laws come with enforcement of a particularly brutal nature, as all such laws that seek to oppress people will embrace, in order to keep control over those made subject to those laws.
The history of African-Americans and the enforcement of laws in America is filled with the violence perpetrated against African-Americans for no other reason than being born. For existing. For demanding more. For demanding better.
Even when decent laws were passed the enforcement of those laws were all too often lax. Allowing "Black Codes" and "Jim Crow" laws to flourish, and those laws were enforced - with deadly measures.
Even with "Jim Crow" off the books, that thinking still remains a frame of mind. It still remains a danger to African-Americans and all other people of color in America.
It's 2015 and the history of violence against people of color in America is still being written - because it is still happening.
We're not dealing with a few decades of police brutality and the enforcement of law, we're dealing with centuries of it.
I'm not speaking for anyone. I am speaking up for my family. I want my nephew and niece, and my cousins to be wary of the police. I want them to verify - and then still be wary. In America, their survival depends on it.
Justice is the exception when it ought to be the rule.
1657: Virginia amends its fugitive slave law to include the fining of people who harbor runaway slaves. They are fined 30 pounds of tobacco for every night they provide shelter to a runaway slave.
1662: Virginia reverses the presumption of English law that the child follows the status of his father, and enacts a law that makes the free or enslaved status of children dependent on the status of the mother.
1663: Maryland slave laws rules that all Africans arriving in the colony are presumed to be slaves. Free European American women who marry enslaved men lose their freedom. Children of European American women and enslaved men are enslaved. Other North American colonies develop similar laws.
1664: In Virginia, the enslaved African's status is clearly differentiated from the indentured servant's when colonial laws decree that enslavement is for life and is transferred to the children through the mother. Black and slave become synonymous, and enslaved Africans are subject to harsher and more brutal control than other laborers.
1664: Maryland establishes slavery for life for persons of African ancestry.
1664: New Jersey and New York also recognize the legality of slavery.
1664: Maryland enacts the first law in Colonial America banning marriage between white women and black men.
1667: England enacts strict laws regarding enslaved Africans in its colonies. An enslaved African is forbidden to leave the plantation without a pass, and never on Sunday. An enslaved African may not possess weapons or signaling mechanisms such as horns or whistles. Punishment for an owner who kills an enslaved African is a 15-pound fine.
1667: Virginia declares that baptism does not free a slave from bondage, thereby abandoning the Christian tradition of not enslaving other Christians.
1670: The Virginia Assembly enact law that allows all non-Christians who arrive by ship to be enslaved.
1670: Massachusetts permits the separate sale of children of enslaved parents.
1671: A Maryland law states that the conversion of enslaved African Americans to Christianity does not affect their status as enslaved people.
1672: Virginia law now bans prosecution for the killing of a slave if the death comes during the course of his his or her apprehension.
1673: The Massachusetts legislature passes a law that forbids European Americans from engaging in any trade or commerce with an African American.
1680: Virginia enacts a law that forbids all blacks from carrying arms and requires enslaved blacks to carry certificates at all times when leaving the slave owner's plantation. 1601-1700 1682A new slave code in Virginia prohibits weapons for slaves, requires passes beyond the limits of the plantation and forbids self-defense by any African Americans against any European American.
1682: New York enacts its first slave codes. They restrict the freedom of movement and the ability to trade of all enslaved people in the colony.
1685: New York law forbids enslaved Africans and Native Americans from having meetings or carrying firearms.
1600
1702: The New York Assembly enacts a law which prohibits enslaved Africans from testifying against whites or gathering in groups larger than three on public streets.
1705: The Colonial Virginia Assembly defined as slaves all servants brought into the colony who were not Christians in their original countries as well as Indians sold to the colonists by other Native Americans.
1712: New York City enacts an ordinance that prevents free blacks from inheriting land.
1712: New York City enacts an ordinance that prevents free blacks from inheriting land.
1724: Boston imposes a curfew on non-whites.
1724: The French colonial government in Louisiana enacts the Code Noir, the first body of laws that govern both slaves and free blacks in North America.
1735: South Carolina passes laws requiring enslaved people to wear clothing identifying them as slaves. Freed slaves are required to leave the colony within six months or risk re-enslavement.
1741: South Carolina's colonial legislature enacts the most extensive slave restrictions in British North America. The laws ban the teaching of enslaved people to read and write, prohibits their assembling in groups or earning money for their activities. The law also permits slave owners to kill rebellious slaves.
1762: Virginia restricts voting rights to white men.
1776: A passage in the Declaration of Independence authored by Thomas Jefferson at the Continental Congress meeting in Philadelphia, condemned the slave trade. The controversial passage is removed from the Declaration due to pressure from the southern colonies.
1700
1804: In 1804 the Ohio legislature passes the Ohio Black Codes and in doing so becomes the first non-slave holding state to place restrictions exclusively on its African American residents.
1807: New Jersey disfranchises black voters.
1821: New York maintains property qualifications for African American male voters while abolishing the same for white male voters. Missouri disfranchises free black male voters.
1829: More than half of Cincinnati's African American residents are driven out of the city by white mob violence. The Cincinnati riots usher in a more than century-long period of white violence against Northern black urban communities.
1857: On March 6, the Dred Scott Decision is handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court.
1865: Between September and November, a number of ex-Confederate states pass so called Black Codes.
1868: Opelousas, Louisiana is the site of the Opelousas Massacre on September 28, in which an estimated 200 to 300 black Americans are killed by whites opposed to Reconstruction and African American voting.
1875: On February 23rd Jim Crow laws are enacted in Tennessee. Similar statutes had existed in the North before the Civil War.
1800
1919: The Ku Klux Klan is revived in 1915 at Stone Mountain, Georgia, and by the beginning of 1919 operates in 27 states. Eighty-three African Americans are lynched during the year, among them a number of returning soldiers still in uniform.
1920: On August 26, the 19th Amendment to the Constitution is ratified giving all women the right to vote. Nonetheless, African American women, like African American men, are denied the franchise in most Southern states.
1954: On May 17, the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education declares segregation in all public schools in the United States unconstitutional, nullifying the earlier judicial doctrine of separate but equal.
1956: The Mississippi Sovereignty Commission is formed in Jackson, the state capital, to maintain racial segregation in Mississippi.
1963On June 12, Mississippi NAACP Field Secretary Medgar Evers is assassinated outside his home in Jackson.
1965: The Voting Rights Act is signed into law on August 6.
1968: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4. In the wake of the assassination 125 cities in 29 states experience uprisings. By April 11, 46 people are killed and 35,000 are injured in these confrontations.
1900
