Racism against African Americans

Even free African Americans have faced restrictions on their political, social, and economic freedoms, being subjected to lynchings, segregation, Black Codes, Jim Crow laws, and other forms of discrimination, both before and after the Civil War.

Thanks to the civil rights movement, formal racial discrimination was gradually outlawed by the federal government and came to be perceived as socially and morally unacceptable by large elements of American society.

[3] In recent years research has uncovered extensive evidence of racial discrimination in various sectors of modern U.S. society, including the criminal justice system, businesses, the economy, housing, health care, the media, and politics.

[14] Thomas Jefferson, a slave owner himself, called for science to determine the obvious "inferiority" of Black people that is regarded as "an extremely important stage in the evolution of scientific racism.

[20] Thousands of Black people were resettled in Liberia, where they formed an American English-speaking enclave which could not assimilate back into African life and as a result, most of them died of tropical diseases.

[24]: 198  General Daniel Ullman, commander of the United States Colored Troops, remarked "I fear that many high officials outside of Washington have no other intention than that these men shall be used as diggers and drudges.

The South of course interpreted the Emancipation Proclamation as a hostile act, but it allowed Lincoln to abolish slavery to a limited extent, without igniting resistance from anti-abolitionist forces in the Union.

[35] Segregation, which began with slavery, continued with the passage and enforcement of Jim Crow laws, along with the posting of signs which were used to show Black people where they could legally walk, talk, drink, rest, or eat.

"[43]In addition, racism, which had been viewed as a problem which primarily existed in the Southern states, burst onto the nation's consciousness following the Great Migration, the relocation of millions of African Americans from their roots in the rural Southern states to the industrial centers of the North and West between 1910 and 1970, particularly in cities such as Boston, St. Louis, Chicago, Detroit, New York City (Harlem), Cleveland, Los Angeles, Oakland, Seattle, Phoenix, and Denver.

Known economic push factors played a role in migration, such as the emergence of a split labor market and agricultural distress which resulted from the boll weevil destruction of the cotton economy.

In 1900 Reverend Matthew Anderson, speaking at the annual Hampton Negro Conference in Virginia, said that "...the lines along most of the avenues of wage earning are more rigidly drawn in the North than in the South.

There seems to be an apparent effort throughout the North, especially in the cities to debar the colored worker from all the avenues of higher remunerative labor, which makes it more difficult to improve his economic condition even than in the South.

"[47][48] Within the housing market, stronger discriminatory measures were used in correlation to the influx, resulting in a mix of "targeted violence, restrictive covenants, redlining and racial steering".

Till had been badly beaten, one of his eyes was gouged out, and he was shot in the head before being thrown into the Tallahatchie River, his body weighed down with a 70-pound (32 kg) cotton gin fan tied around his neck with barbed wire.

Tens of thousands filed past Till's remains, but it was the publication of the searing funeral image in Jet, with a stoic Mamie gazing at her murdered child's ravaged body, that forced the world to reckon with the brutality of American racism.

The visceral response to his mother's decision to have an open-casket funeral mobilized the Black community throughout the U.S.[59] Vann R. Newkirk wrote "the trial of his killers became a pageant illuminating the tyranny of White supremacy".

For example, in February 1960, in Greensboro, North Carolina, four young African American college students entered a Woolworth store and sat down at the counter but were refused service.

The men had learned about non-violent protest in college, and continued to sit peacefully as Whites tormented them at the counter, pouring ketchup on their heads and burning them with cigarettes.

[62][63] With the bombing occurring only a couple of weeks after Martin Luther King Jr.'s March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, it became an integral aspect of transformed perceptions of conditions for Black people in America.

Data on house prices and attitudes towards integration suggest that in the mid-20th century, segregation was a product of collective actions taken by Whites to exclude Black people from their neighborhoods.

"[73] In the reception to honor his Olympic success Owens was not permitted to enter through the main doors of the Waldorf Astoria New York and instead forced to travel up to the event in a freight elevator.

[78] In 1973, African American baseball legend Hank Aaron received hundreds of thousands of hate mail letters from fans, angry at him for trying to break the all-time homerun record at the time set by Babe Ruth.

[81] While substantial gains were made in the succeeding decades through middle class advancement and public employment, Black poverty and lack of education continued in the context of de-industrialization.

In 1996, journalist Gary Webb wrote the Dark Alliance series for the San Jose Mercury News where he asserted that the CIA-backed Contras played a major role in the crack epidemic.

Similarly, the six-day 1992 Los Angeles riots erupted after the acquittal of four White LAPD officers who had been filmed beating Rodney King, an African-American motorist.

[92][93] Black Americans were also depicted as expendable and their suffering as commonplace, as evidenced by a poem about "Ten Little Nigger Boys" dying off one by one that was circulated as a children's counting exercise from 1875 to the mid-1900s.

[98] Since the mid-2010s, the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have identified White supremacist violence as the leading threat of domestic terrorism in the United States.

[106] The Katz and Braley study also found that African-Americans and Whites view the traits that they identify each other with as threatening, interracial communication between the two is likely to be "hesitant, reserved, and concealing".

This exercise in racial extremism has been dragged into the modern era through the weaponizing of 9-1-1, often by White women, to invoke the power and force of the police who they are fully aware are hostile to black men".

After he had asked her to put her dog on a leash (as per the rules in an area of the park to protect other wildlife), she approached him, to which he responded "Please don't come close to me", before she yelled, "I'm taking a picture and calling the cops.