Slavery, at one time enshrined, in coded language, in our Constitution, was abolished by the 13th Amendment, apparently passed 150 years ago today.  The justice and mercy of Law, what can one say?   I am about to go on a bike ride before tackling other things, but thought I’d tackle this old chestnut briefly first.

l always love the racist complaint that when it comes to slavery American Blacks should “just get over it”.  It was 150 years ago! they will heatedly remind you today.  A brief survey of those 150 years may be in order.  American states seceded from the Union, took up arms to defend their rights, including the Constitutional right to hold humans as property, to do with such property as they saw fit.  Although today most people consider slavery inexcusably evil, it was Constitutionally protected, more vigorously protected than many rights enjoyed by American citizens.

Treatment of American citizens was, and remains, largely a States Rights matter.  Advocates of States Rights seem brazen about the fact that the states most loudly demanding their rights are the same ones who took up arms against the government they felt, with mixed justice, was interfering with their Constitutional rights.  Demanding unthinkable things like the end of our genteel way of life, sir!  Damn you, sir, I say, damn you!

After a monstrously bloody war slavery was abolished by a Constitutional Amendment, the thirteenth.  The defeated rebel states had to endorse this amendment or forfeit the right to Federal funds to rebuild their war torn infrastructure (most of the fighting was in the Confederacy).  “Reconstruction” was a short-lived project, it lasted about as long as Prohibition and, though it began with great promise, did about the same amount of lasting good before it was abandoned.  When federal troops were removed from the South, and the Supreme Court severely limited the scope of the other Amendments designed to insure rights to the freed slaves, it was time for States Rights again.

We had states ruled in many cases by outfits like the Ku Klux Klan.  Can’t be sheriff, son, nor mayor, nor governor, neither, unless you move up in the Klan.  Black Codes in these states made it a crime for a black man to be unemployed and walking the streets without a certain amount of money in his pocket  Wealthy white men with fields to plow could bail out imprisoned Negroes and have them work to pay off their bail money.  The repayment was structured to last a lifetime.  The arrangement lasted less than a century, but surely seemed longer to those freed slaves who, on paper, had the same rights as anyone else.

A war was waged steadily throughout the 1930s, 40s, 50s and 60s and the Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s finally restored much of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, passed a century earlier.  Then it was only a matter of 50 years or so after that until the question of widespread poverty among the descendants of American slaves, and hopelessness, violence, racial profiling, killing by police and so forth would be back in the news.  

Malcolm X questioned why such barbarous conditions were considered a matter of Civil Rights when, more properly, they should be regarded as violations of Human Rights.  Let the U.N. decide whether America is still denying basic Human Rights to millions of its citizens, he demanded.   The ballot or the bullet, you know.  They chose, as they so often do, the bullet.  February 21, 1965.  Another big anniversary, less than a year ago, sir.