Given Theirhistory Of Racial Subordination, how have black people gained any protection against the multifaceted forms of discrimination that threaten their well-being and undermine their rights? The answer can be stated simply: Black rights are recognized and protected when and only so long as policymakers perceive that such advances will further interests that are their primary concern. Throughout the history of civil rights policies, even the most serious injustices suffered by blacks, including slavery, segregation, and patterns of murderous violence, have been insufficient, standing alone, to gain real relief from any branch of government. Rather, relief from racial discrimination has come only when policymakers recognize that such relief will provide a clear benefit for the nation or portions of the populace. While nowhere mentioned in the Supreme Court’s Brown opinion, a major motivation for outlawing racial segregation in 1954, as opposed to the many failed opportunities in the past, was the major boost that this decision provided in our competition with communist governments abroad and the campaign to uproot subversive elements at home. This fortuity continues a long history of similar coincidences motivating the advancement or sacrifice of black interests. Three major examples of what I call interest-convergence covenants involve the abolition of slavery in the northern states, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Civil War amendments to the Constitution. Lincoln’s issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, and the divergent responses of blacks and whites to his action, were foreshadowed by abolition policies in the northern states a half-century earlier. In the northern states, slavery was abolished by constitutional provision in Vermont (1777), Ohio (1802), Illinois (1818), and Indiana (1816); by a judicial decision in Massachusetts (1783); by constitutional interpretation in New Hampshire (1857); and by gradual abolition acts in Pennsylvania (1780), Rhode Island (1784), Connecticut (1784 and 1797), New York (1799 and 1827), and New Jersey (1804). In varying degrees, abolition in the North was the result of several factors: idealism stemming from the Revolution with its “rights of man” ideology; the lesser dependence of the northern economy on a large labor force; the North’s relatively small investment in slaves combined with the great hostility of the white laboring class to the competition of slaves; the fear of slave revolts; and a general belief that there was no place for “inferior” blacks in the new societies.
Surficial Geology of the North Scituate quadrangle, Rhode Island