Nearly 400 years in the making: it’s morning in America

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

(Sunrise in Washington D.C.)

The first Africans brought to the English colonies in North America came on a Dutch privateer that landed at Jamestown, Virginia, in August 1619. African American History – MSN Encarta. By 1750 there were nearly 240,000 people of African descent in British North America, fully 20 percent of the population, mostly concentrated in Southern colonies, but present in all colonies.

By the time of the drafting of the U.S. Constitution in 1787, slavery had become an institution in America. And slavery was institutionalized in the U.S. Constitution, relegating Africans to chattel property of their owners. Three-fifths of slaves were counted as a “person” only for determining the population of a state for purposes of reapportionment of congressional districts with each dicennial census.

The nation was ripped apart by five years of Civil War motivated primarily by an Abolitionist movement to end the institution of slavery. It was the deadliest war in American history, pitting brother against brother and father against son,leaving a deep and lasting scar on the American soul. With the adoption of the Thirteenth, Fourtheenth and Fifteenth Amendments at the end of the Civil War, slavery was ended and former slaves were given personhood and citizenship. But this did not result in “equality” under the law for these former slaves.

With the end of federal protection after the Reconstruction era came the rise of Jim Crow laws in the South, which spread to other states under Black Codes. Segregation of African-Americans replaced slavery as an institution in America. Life was litte better than before for many African-Americans.

Segregation finally began to unravel in post World War II America from the federal courts and far-sighted politicians, and even from America’s favorite pasttime, baseball. But pernicious racism maintained the sanction of law until the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, one hundred years after the end of the Civil War.

When President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he is purported to have told his aid, Bill Moyers, that “we have lost the South for a generation.” (Of course, it was not limited to the South, but included Appalachia and the “white flight” from Northern cities to the suburbs in places like Boston, Detroit and Chicago as well).

Richard Nixon devised the “Southern Strategy” to appeal to these disaffected “Dixiecrat” Southern white voters based upon coded appeals to their racial animus and prejudice to turn the Democrats’ “solid South” into a Republican “solid South.” That strategy finally came to fruition with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 (with only a minor deviation for Bill Clinton, a son of the South, for president in 1992 and 1996).

This political tactic to divide Americans along the fault lines of racial animus and prejudice has continued to this very day, including this 2008 campaign. That pernicious racism continues is shameful and despicable. Despite all the progress we have made as a nation, there are still those who continue to preach hatred, fear and suspicion to divide Americans along the ancient fault lines of racial prejudice and bigotry for purely political gain. From Patrick Buchanan (Nixon) to Lee Atwater (Reagan/Bush) to Karl Rove and his minions (Bush/McCain), these hate mongers should now be forced back into the muck under the rock from which they crawled. Let us hope that the final curtain has fallen on their time on the political stage.

After nearly 400 years of living with the original sin of slavery and institutionalized segregation and racism, Americans have elected their first African-American president of the United States. The skinny Black kid with the funny sounding name, Barack Obama, the son of an African immigrant and a white American woman from Kansas, is president-elect. My God what a great country we live in! Nowhere else on earth is this story even imaginable.

This is one of the most historic days in our nation’s history. May it mark the beginning of our redemption as a nation before the eyes of God. And may it mark the beginning of a time when this nation lives out the true meaning of its creed that “all men are created equal.” “Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!” May race, color, creed or sex never again divide us in our politics.

Let us come together and begin the Great Reconciliation. Let us come together and begin to build a more perfect Union.

It’s morning in America! May God bless the United States of America.