• 1776: Declaration of Independence “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.– That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” – Now, we know that did not mean “all”.

• 1808 – 1844: Church denominations begin to wrestle with and split over slavery. Authority is deferred to local congregations in an effort to avoid having to take a position or take sides between the North (free states) and the South (slave holding states).

• 1845: Southern Baptist Convention is born as a reaction to the Baptist position against slavery.

• 1850: Fugitive Slave Act – Established even harder penalties for anyone who did not assist in returning an escaped slave. The secondary consequence was that it cast constant suspicion over every black person as to whether or not they were an escapee.

• 1852: Frederick Douglass made his famous speech “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”

• 1854: Kansas Nebraska Act – A territorial organic act that created the territories of Kansas and Nebraska with the goal of opening up new lands to development and facilitating construction of a transcontinental railroad. But the Kansas–Nebraska Act is most notable for effectively repealing the Missouri Compromise, stoking national tensions over slavery, and contributing to a series of armed conflicts known as “Bleeding Kansas”. Southern leaders refused to allow the creation of territories that banned slavery; slavery would have been banned because the Missouri Compromise outlawed slavery in territory north of latitude 36°30′ north. To win the support of Southerners the repeal of the Missouri Compromise was included, with the status of slavery instead decided on the basis of “popular sovereignty.” Under popular sovereignty, the citizens of each territory, rather than Congress, would determine whether or not slavery would be allowed. Wikipedia

• 1857: Dred Scott Decision – A landmark decision of the US Supreme Court in which the Court held that the US Constitution was not meant to include American citizenship for black people, regardless of whether they were enslaved or free, and so the rights and privileges that the Constitution confers upon American citizens could not apply to them. The decision was made in the case of Dred Scott, an enslaved black man whose owners had taken him from Missouri, which was a slave-holding state, into Illinois and the Wisconsin Territory, which were free areas where slavery was illegal. When his owners later brought him back to Missouri, Scott sued in court for his freedom and claimed that because he had been taken into “free” US territory, he had automatically been freed and was legally no longer a slave. Scott sued first in Missouri state court, which ruled that he was still a slave under its law. He then sued in US federal court, which ruled against him by deciding that it had to apply Missouri law to the case. He then appealed to the US Supreme Court. The Supreme Court issued a 7–2 decision against Dred Scott. In an opinion written by Chief Justice Roger Taney, the Court ruled that black people “are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States.” Wikipedia

• 1859: John Brown’s Raid – Referred to by some as a Dressed Rehearsal for the Civil War. Wikipedia

• 1860: Abraham Lincoln is elected – He was on duty during the abolition of slavery but he was not an advocate of equality.

• 1861: Gardner Spring Resolution – Presbyterian church resolutions that were adopted a few weeks after the Battle of Fort Sumter and had the effect of giving the Presbyterian Church’s assent to Abraham Lincoln’s attempts to keep the Union intact in the face of Southern secession. That was seen by the southern members as support for abolition and began the denominational split. Wikipedia

• 1861 – 1865: Civil War – Many will say this was about states’ rights but the underlying right in contention was the ability to own slaves. Sadly, Christians evolved into both pro and anti slavery theologies – each justifying their positions passionately and eloquently with scripture. Genesis 9:18-29 was used to justify slavery through the “Curse of Ham”. Positions calcified and justifications were polished over the years. Its no wonder why the watching world shakes its head at us.

• 1865: 13th Amendment – Abolished slavery

• 1868: 14th Amendment – Separate but Equal (NOT) Wikipedia

• 1870: 15th Amendment – Right to vote expanded unless incarcerated

• 1863 – 1877: Reconstruction and Ugly Responses – The beginning of what is now referred to as the “Jim Crow Era”. Jim Crow laws were state and local laws that enforced racial segregation in the Southern United States. The laws may have changed but the attitudes did not. The “Lost Cause” emerged as an ideology in the South and its narratives typically portray the Confederacy’s cause as noble and they also portray both its leaders and armies as exemplars of old-fashioned chivalry who were defeated by the Union armies a way of coping with their defeat in the Civil War. Wikipedia

• 1877: Rutherford B. Hayes is elected President in one of the most fiercely disputed elections in American history.

• 1896: Plessy v. Ferguson Decision – This was a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision that upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation under the “separate but equal” doctrine. The case stemmed from an 1892 incident in which African American train passenger Homer Plessy refused to sit in a car for blacks. Wikipedia

• 1898: Wilmington, NC Massacre – America’s only successful Coup d’Etat. This coup was the result of a group of the state’s white Southern Democrats conspiring and leading a mob of 2,000 white men to overthrow the legitimately elected local Fusionist biracial government in Wilmington. Wikipedia

• 1915: Birth of a Nation. This KKK narrative silent movie becomes our first “blockbuster”. President Woodrow Wilson hosts several viewings.

• 1915 – 1930: The KKK becomes disturbingly mainstream by merging Biblical doctrine with white supremacy.

• 1918: Mary Turner was lynched on May 19th after criticizing the people who lynched her husband the day before. Read More

• 1920: 19th Amendment – Women gain the right to vote

• 1921: Tulsa Race Massacre – The Tulsa race massacre (also called the Tulsa race riot, the Greenwood Massacre, or the Black Wall Street Massacre) took place on May 31 and June 1, 1921, when mobs of white residents, many of them deputized and given weapons by city officials, attacked black residents and businesses of the Greenwood District in Tulsa. Wikipedia. Here is a second layer I have learned. People that look like me drove the indigenous people out of the Georgia and Carolinas. Those souls could not find peace until they reached the God-forsaken land which became Oklahoma. People that look like me also enslaved black image bearers in the South which resulted in the Underground Railroad and Great Migration. Both of these traumatized people groups settled in what was referred to as the Indian Territory. And, they thrived!!! Until, that area sought statehood. When it became Oklahoma… that designation brought with it Jim Crow laws 😢 and a cloud formed over the land. Eventually oil was discovered. Suddenly – the white folk decided they wanted that land too 🤬 So they came, they invaded, they killed and they took. Like they had before. Some would say “like they always do”. 💔 I feel the weight.

• 1954: Brown v. Board of Education – a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that U.S. state laws establishing racial segregation in public schools are unconstitutional, even if the segregated schools are otherwise equal in quality. Handed down on May 17, 1954, the Court’s unanimous (9–0) decision stated that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal” Wikipedia

• 1955: Emmett Till is murdered in Money, MS (10 miles from my hometown of Greenwood, MS; his body was carried there when it was discovered in the Tallahatchee River.

• 1955: Rosa Parks is arrested for refusing to move back on a bus to make room for a white man. This was the beginning of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Wikipedia

• 1963: “I have a Dream” Speech – Martin Luther King Jr. delivered a speech to a massive group of civil rights marchers gathered around the Lincoln memorial in Washington DC.
• 1965: Bloody Sunday – On March 7th, Civil Rights marchers attempt to march across the Pettit Bridge in Selma, AL. Alabama State Troopers violently confront them with dogs and billy clubs.

• 1965: Watts Riots – August 11th, Marquette Frye, an African-American motorist on parole for robbery, was pulled over for reckless driving. A minor roadside argument broke out, which then escalated into a fight with police. Rioting ensued for 5 days.
• 1968: Martin Luther King, Jr. is assassinated in Memphis, TN on April 4th.
• 1991: Rodney King Incident / 1992 Los Angeles Uprising – On March 3, 1991, King was beaten by LAPD officers after a high-speed chase during his arrest for drunk driving on I-210. A civilian, George Holliday, filmed the incident from his nearby balcony and sent the footage to local news station KTLA.[2]:85 The footage clearly showed an unarmed King on the ground being beaten after initially evading arrest. The incident was covered by news media around the world and caused a public furor. The officers’ acquittals in 1992 sparked the riots. Wikipedia
• 1994: Mississippi won the conviction of Byron de la Beckwith for the 1963 sniper killing of state NAACP leader Medgar Evers.

• 2002: Bobby Frank Cherry was convicted of killing four black girls in the bombing of a Birmingham church in 1963 – the deadliest attack of the civil rights era.

• 2020: Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd are killed – Here we are. In the midst of both a pandemic due to COVID-19 and heightened racial tensions.

Diving into History

Thoughts from B.J. Winfrey – shared by Bill Rawlings

George Washington’s dentures were NOT made from wood rather than the teeth of his slaves.

We know about slavery emancipation, but not 1860’s vagrancy laws targeting former slaves and perpetuating free labor via the prison system, in all but one former Confederate state and lasting 60 years with often harsher conditions than plantation life.

We know about Rosa Parks and the bus boycott, but not the practice of sharecropping in the Deep South where many black people didn’t realize they were free from slavery until the 1960’s.

We know about black ghettos, but not about Black Wall Street and the massacre in Tulsa which was buried for decades.

We may remember about the Watts and L.A. Riots, but not Tulsa or Wilmington.

We remember the New Deal, but not red lining.

We know about the G.I. Bill after WWII, but not that black people were excluded from the wealth building benefits impacting multiple generations.

After Nazi Germany was defeated, memorials of Hitler and the Third Reich were taken down, but Confederate memorials were erected well after the Civil War had ended.

We heard about the war on drugs, but not that federal grants were given to police departments based off of arrests and that profit incentives in the prison system fueled dramatic increases in prison populations.

We learned that crack was used mainly by lower income black people and carried stiff judicial penalties, but not that cocaine primarily used by wealthier white people carried a far lesser penalty…a 100-1 ratio meaning 5 grams of crack cocaine mandated the same minimum sentence as 500 grams of powder cocaine.

We heard about apartheid, but not that the U.S. has more black people incarcerated than South Africa ever did at the height of their struggle.