Shortly after Jamestown colonists established rules on how to govern, they created a brutal system of laws on how to enslave
Freedom House Museum in Alexandria, Va., once the site of a company selling enslaved people, displays original bars from a window. By Michael E. Ruane Michael E. Ruane Reporter covering local news, Washington institutions and historical topics Email Bio Follow April 30 at 11:28 AM In October 1705, Virginia passed a law stating that if a master happened to kill a slave who was undergoing “correction,” it was not a crime.
The answers were often poisoned by legislators’ views on race, slavery and white dominance. And they had catastrophic impacts that the country continues to deal with today. “Slavery is really a creature of local law,” said Eric Foner, professor emeritus of history at Columbia University. “Slavery is created by colonial law and then state law.”
In 1748, the Virginia burgesses passed a law mandating the death penalty for any enslaved person who poisoned his or her master. The assembly met for only six days — during which one representative died — but it would become the first meeting of what Jamestown Rediscovery, the group supporting the archaeological study of the historic site, calls “the oldest continuous lawmaking body in the Western Hemisphere.”
A lighthouse marks Virginia’s Fort Monroe National Monument, in the area once known as Point Comfort. The first documented captive Africans to reach the mainland of English North America landed here in 1619. The White Lion, often misidentified as a Dutch ship, had, in company with another British vessel, just ambushed the St. John the Baptist in the Gulf of Mexico.
Thus, on a summer day in 1619, were the first enslaved Africans brought to the mainland, starting an agonizing journey across the landscape of American history. It was one of a tangle of oppressive laws that grew in the wake of slavery, which trapped African Americans in lives of penury and semi-bondage well into the 20th century.
Three years later, the 14th Amendment asserted among other things that black people were U.S. citizens — something the Supreme Court had previously denied — and deserved “equal protection of the law.” “Almost every law and method . . . was employed by the legislatures to reduce the Negroes to serfdom,” W.E.B. Du Bois, the African American historian and civil rights activist, wrote in 1903.
On June 7, 1892, a mixed-race shoemaker named Homer Plessy boarded an East Louisiana Railroad train in New Orleans and entered the whites-only car.But his case proved to be a disaster. Often the killings were a “ritual of torture, mutilation and death, a voyeuristic spectacle . . . for the benefit of the crowd,” he wrote.
But he was black, and Oklahoma law required that his education be provided “upon a segregated basis.” The Brown plaintiffs argued that segregation in public schools was fundamentally unequal. The court agreed.But six decades of legal segregation, and two and a half centuries of subjugation, would take painful years of violence, racial upheaval and new legislation to undo.
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