How and Why They Came

If Native Americans are the only minority group whose subordinate status occurred by conquest, African Americans are the exemplar minority group in the United States whose ancestors did not come here by choice. A Dutch sea captain brought the first Africans to the Virginia colony of Jamestown in 1619, and sold them as indentured servants. This was not an uncommon practice for either Blacks or whites, and indentured servants were in high demand. For the next century, Black and white indentured servants worked side by side, but the growing agricultural economy demanded greater and cheaper labor. By 1705, Virginia passed the slave codes declaring that any foreign-born, non-Christian could be a slave, and that slaves were considered property.

The next 150 years saw the rise of U.S. slavery, with Africans being kidnapped from their own lands and shipped to the New World on the trans-Atlantic journey known as the Middle Passage. Once in the Americas, the Black population grew until U.S.-born Blacks outnumbered those born in Africa. Early colonial slave codes, which were eventually replaced by U.S. laws, declared that the child of an enslaved laborer was also a slave, thus ensuring the practice of intergenerational slavery.

History of Intergroup Relations

There is no starker illustration of the dominant-subordinate group relationship than that of slavery. In order to justify their discriminatory behavior, enslavers and their supporters had to view Blacks as innately inferior. Enslaved people were denied even the most basic rights of citizenship, a crucial enabling factor for enslavers and their supporters. Slavery poses an illustrative example of conflict theory’s perspective on race relations, as the dominant group needed complete control over the subordinate group in order to maintain power. Extreme corporal punishments were common, including whippings, lashings, and branding. Crimes of war such as rape, family separation, and public executions were part of a larger system of social control, and the enslaved were prohibited from reading or obtaining an education. In the 1848 U.S. Supreme Court case Dred Scott v. Sandford, the court declared that enslaved people were property and that slaveholders were protected in this legal arrangement by the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment (which effectively meant that the enslaved laborers were still considered property even in free territories). The Dred Scott decision also established that persons of African descent (whether freed or enslaved) had no legal standing as citizens, and therefore could not sue—for their freedom or anything else—in federal court.

Slavery eventually became an issue over which the nation divided into geographically and ideologically distinct factions, leading to the Civil War. And while the abolition of slavery on moral grounds was certainly a catalyst to war, it was not the only driving force. Students of U.S. history will know that the institution of slavery was crucial to the Southern economy, whose production of crops like rice, cotton, and tobacco relied on the virtually limitless and cheap labor that slavery provided. In contrast, the North didn’t benefit economically from slavery, resulting in an economic disparity tied to racial/political issues. During the post-Civil War Reconstruction period, the Thirteenth Amendment (1863) was ratified to abolish involuntary servitude, the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) to guarantee birthright citizenship, and the Fifteenth Amendment (1870) to bar racial discrimination in voting.

In the South, what developed in the aftermath of the war was essentially slavery by a different name. Some of the practices that enabled the continuation of disenfranchisement and economic oppression included sharecropping, tenant farming, the convict lease system, voter suppression (i.e., the Black Codes), outright violence and intimidation, and gerrymandering, which is the drawing of Congressional districts in a way that reduces the power of Black votes.