RACE RELATIONS

RACE RELATIONS, in complex societies, such as that of the United States, involve patterns of behavior between members of large categories of human beings classified on the basis of similar observable physical traits, particularly skin color. Race is a social status that individuals occupy along with other statuses, such as ethnicity, occupation, religion, age, and sex. In the United States racial status has often been paramount, transcending all other symbols of status in human relations.

While it is virtually impossible to chronicle the history of American race relations in any single publication, this entry provides a brief glimpse at some of the events that played a major role in continually evolving relationships among America's various races.

Although there have been numerous instances of friendly and egalitarian relationships across racial lines in American history, the major pattern of race relations has been characterized by extreme dominant-subordinate relationships between whites and nonwhites. This relation-ship is seen in the control by whites of the major positions of policymaking in government, the existence of formal and informal rules restricting nonwhite membership in the most remunerative and prestigious occupations, the often forcible imposition of the culture of white Americans on nonwhites, the control by whites of the major positions and organizations in the economic sector, and the disproportionate membership of nonwhites in the lower-income categories. Race relations have also been characterized by extreme social distance between whites and nonwhites, as indicated by long-standing legal restrictions on racial intermarriage, racial restrictions in immigration laws, spatial segregation, the existence of racially homogeneous voluntary associations, extensive incidents of racially motivated conflict, and the presence of numerous forms of racial antipathy and stereotyping in literature, the press, and legal records. This pattern has varied by regions and in particular periods of time; it began diminishing in some measure after World War II.

Race Relations in Early America

Before the Europeans arrived in America, there were at least 1 million Indians divided into hundreds of tribes and bands and speaking at least 200 mutually unintelligible languages. However, the first discussion of race, or the categorization of individuals based on physical features, occurred when three historical occurrences converged in America. The first Europeans arrived on the continent and labeled the indigenous ethnic groups "Indians." Shortly thereafter, Europeans began referring to themselves as "whites." Ethnic groups that were, for the most part, indigenous to Africa were brought to America and labeled as "Negroes." Since this early effort at categorization, the subject of race relations has been a controversial topic ripe with dissenting opinions and actions.

The first Africans arrived in the English colonies in 1619. Debate over the status of these new arrivals has been substantial. Some scholars suggest that the first Africans were probably indentured servants, individuals bound to a person for a specific amount of time. This would infer that Africans who were called indentured servants had approximately the same status as white indentured servants, many of whom paid their way to America by binding themselves to service for a limited period. However, other equally learned scholars argue that historical records do not indicate the existence of indentured servant status for early Africans, and believe that this "legend" occurred because the word "slave" did not appear in Virginia records until 1656.

Prior to the arrival of Africans aboard a Dutch manof-war, Europeans had attempted to enslave Native Americans. However, complex issues, including Native Americans' susceptibility to European diseases, the numerous avenues of escape available for Native Americans, and the lucrative nature of the African slave trade, led to a transition toward African slavery. Before this transition, numerous Native American nations—including the Pequot, Tuscarora, and Yamasee—and tens of thousands of individuals were displaced and relocated throughout the colonies. Colonists also drove Native Americans from their territories by signing treaties, which they quickly violated, and declaring war on the affected nations.

As relationships grew between Native Americans and African Americans and the evolution of Afro-Indian nations began to occur, colonists used the legislature to strengthen their hold on the enslavement of both integrating cultures. In 1662 the general assembly of Virginia had passed a law that ruled any child born of a slave mother would also be a slave, regardless of the father's legal status; by 1740 the South Carolina slave code declared that all Negroes and Indians in that particular province, as well as their descendents, would be and re-main slaves for the rest of their lives.

Africans and Indians, however, began to protest their enslavement. Slave revolts began as early as 1657 when an African-Indian uprising occurred in Hartford, Connecticut. Other early revolts occurred in 1690 in New-bury, Massachusetts, and in Queens County, New York, in 1708. This spirit of uprising continued throughout the 1700s, culminating in slave revolts in 1712 and 1739.

Years later, a sense of historical irony came over the nation. During the time when the colonies were fighting for their freedom from British rule, Abigail Adams, the wife of founding father John Adams, told her husband that she could not understand how the colonists could fight for their own freedom while they were daily stealing the freedom of those who had as much right to freedom as anyone. Then, on 5 March 1770, former slave Crispus Attucks became the first person to die in the Boston Massacre, and became, to many, the martyr of the American Revolution. Despite this apparent show of bravery and the fact that 20 percent of the overall population in the thirteen colonies was of African descent, the Continental Congress in 1775 barred people of African descent from joining the Revolutionary Army.

On 4 July 1776, America issued its Declaration of Independence, which professed that all men were created equal, endowed with certain inalienable rights, and entitled to liberty. It was this act, which a number of African Americans considered hypocritical, that helped fuel the creation of an African American polity that would eventually lead the way for a civil rights movement.

Gabriel's Insurrection, Black Cultural Identity, and Race Relations

Africans and their descendants in the new United States outnumbered Europeans south of the Mason-Dixon line in 1800; in fact, close to 50 percent of all immigrants (including Europeans) who lived in the thirteen American colonies between 1700 and 1775 came from Africa. A forced migration of these proportions had an enormous impact on societies and cultures throughout the Americas and produced a diverse community of peoples of African descent.

An event known as Gabriel's Insurrection characterized race relations in the early nineteenth century. In the spring of 1800, the slave Gabriel Prosser, whose intention was to create a free black state in Virginia, organized a slave uprising. Prosser hoped that slaves from the surrounding territory would join him and his comrades and, eventually, that the uprising would reach such proportions that the whites would be forced to discuss Prosser's vision for a free black state. When Prosser's plans to attack the city of Richmond became known, Governor James Monroe ordered in the federal militia, which ultimately suppressed the insurrection. Prosser and fifteen of his followers were hanged in October of that year.

During this time, Africans and their descendants forged two distinct identities: one as black Virginians sharing a provincial culture, and a second as African Americans sharing a fate with enslaved peoples throughout the hemisphere. In his Ploughshares into Swords (1997), the historian James Sidbury contends that African ethnicity mattered in the New World. To highlight the absence of racial solidarity, Sidbury points to the refusal of slaves from one locality to aid those of another in resisting their common oppressor. Ironically, the lack of a broader collective identity was itself the primary "Africanism" in early Virginia.

In the half-century after 1750 four developments fostered a broader racial consciousness. First, as plantation slavery expanded into Piedmont counties, links between old and new quarters enlarged the boundaries of community. Second, evangelical Christianity created a network of the faithful, especially as black Baptists pushed to establish autonomous churches. At the same time, the American Revolution gave black Virginians a reason to see themselves as a cohesive people. In particular, Dunmore's Proclamation addressed the colony's slaves in collective terms. Finally, events in Saint Domingue, Haiti, provided a model of revolutionary racial justice that prompted black Virginians to situate themselves in a larger African diaspora.

By 1800 Prosser and his neighbors asserted a double consciousness that was at once provincial (black and Virginian) and global (black Virginian and African American). Sidbury carefully roots community and identity in concrete social relations, specific to time and place. People can simultaneously inhabit multiple, and potentially antagonistic, communities. Likewise, identities are "crosscutting," the term Sidbury uses to capture the tension among an individual's class, race, gender, status, nativity, and religious positions. Race was the foundation of many, but not all, of the communities to which enslaved Virginians belonged. When Haitian slaves arrived with their exiled masters in Richmond in 1793, local slaves skirmished with the strange, predominantly African refugees. In 1800 Prosser and his allies excluded women from their uprising. They also debated whether to spare Quakers, Methodists, Frenchmen, and white women. Not long after, two slaves alerted their master to the plot, another black man turned the fleeing Prosser over to the authorities, and several co-conspirators turned state's evidence. Where other historians have mythologized a homogeneous "slave community," Sidbury introduces complexity and conflict.

Native American Relations

After the American Revolution white Americans increased their migration into Indian territories to the West and into the Spanish Empire (and after 1821, Mexico). The policy of the federal government toward Indians before the Civil War was the removal of Indians to then unwanted territories west of the Mississippi River. By 1821 the tribes in the Great Lakes region had been forcibly relocated, and the Indians of the Southeast were forcibly removed between 1817 and 1835.

Settlers in Georgia coveted Spanish and Seminole land in Florida. The Georgians were also upset that when Britain controlled Florida the British often incited Seminoles against American settlers who were migrating south into Seminole territory. These old conflicts, combined with the safe-haven Seminoles provided Africans, caused the United States to support a group of recent settlers (mainly from Georgia) who lived in northeastern Florida and called themselves the Patriots. The Patriot War was unsuccessful in part because the United States became involved in the Creek War in Alabama. But soon attention turned again to Florida. One of the initial attacks of the First Seminole War (1817–1818) was the attack on the Negro Fort. The cry of "Negro Fort!" became a battle cry among Seminoles and Africans in Florida. By 1817 reports claimed that 600 blacks were training as soldiers and were highly regimented, an even larger number of

Seminoles were preparing to fight invaders into their territory. Many Africans had decided that they would follow Bowlegs as king, and Nero was their commander. Forces under General Andrew Jackson fought the Seminoles for several years. Although the war officially ended in 1818, unofficial U.S. military expeditions into the territory continued until Spain formally ceded Florida to the United States in 1821. As soon as the United States acquired Florida, it began urging the Indians there to leave their lands and relocate along with other southeastern tribes to Indian Territory, in present-day Oklahoma. Some Seminole leaders signed a treaty in 1832, and part of the tribe moved. But other Seminoles refused to recognize the treaty and fled to the Florida Everglades.

The Second Seminole War (1835–1842), usually referred to as the Seminole War proper, was the fiercest war waged by the U.S. government against American Indians. The United States spent more than $20 million fighting the Seminoles. In 1842, a nominal end to the hostilities arrived, however no peace treaty was signed. By this time most Seminoles had been moved from Florida and relocated to Indian Territory. A Third Seminole War broke out in 1855, when conflicts—largely over land—arose between whites and some Seminoles who remained in Florida. Constant military patrols and rewards for the capture of Indians reduced the Seminole population in Florida to about 200 when the Third Seminole War ended in 1858.

In 1862 Indians were designated wards of the Bureau of Indian Affairs rather than enemies, and in 1871 Congress declared an end to the policy of signing treaties with Indian nations. Numerous conflicts took place during the nineteenth century as Indians resisted the invasion of their territories and their placement on reservations. Of the Indians in California, 70,000 were killed by war and disease between 1849 and 1859, and other groups were similarly devastated. The defeat of the Plains Indians was made possible, in part, by the reduction of the bison herds from an estimated 13 million in 1867 to 200 in 1883.

With the defeat of the Apache in 1886, the Indian wars came to an end; the Indian population had been reduced to about 200,000 and was forced into impoverishment on reservations under the paternalistic and often corrupt control of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. From 1887 to 1934 federal policy toward Indians was governed by the General Allotment Act (Dawes Severalty Act) of 1887, under which Indians were to be transformed into individualistic and responsible farmers on family owned plots. The policy reduced reservation acreage from 139 million acres in 1887 to 47 million acres by 1933.

African American Relations

Throughout the colonial period and until 1819, slaves escaped from the Lower South into East and West Florida. While the famous "Negro Fort," once the British Fort Gadsden, was taken by American troops in 1816, it was not until 1819 that the United States made a bold play to take all of East Florida. In that year, Congress attempted to put a stop to slave runaways and Indian raids across the Florida border by sending General Jackson to make war on the encampments and communities of Africans and Native Americans. Jackson claimed all of Florida for the United States. Spain was not strong enough to reclaim Florida and the descendants of many fugitives moved on to Cuba or retreated into the swamps.

The bloodiest insurrection of all, in which some sixty whites were murdered, occurred in Southampton County, Virginia, in August 1831. Nat Turner, its leader, besides being a skilled carpenter, was a literate, mystical preacher. He had discovered particular relevance in the prophets of the Old Testament. Besides identifying with the slave experience of the Israelites, Turner and other slaves felt that the social righteousness preached by prophets related directly to the men's situation. Turner's growing hatred of slavery and his increasing concern for the plight of his brothers led him to believe he was one of God's chosen instruments. In early 1831 Turner collected a small band of followers, and in August they moved from farm to farm, slaughtering the white inhabitants, gaining many of the slaves who were freed in the process. When word of the massacre spread, they were met by armed resistance. Some of Turner's men were killed and wounded, and Turner and several of his followers were captured and executed.

The Turner massacre was universally depicted as the work of savages and brutes and, as a result, new laws controlling the slaves were passed throughout the South. Both the violence of the slaves and the verbal abuse of the abolitionists served only to strengthen the South in its defense of the institution of slavery. Slaves who revolted were depicted as beasts that could not be freed because they would endanger society. Submissive slaves were pictured as children in need of paternal protection from the evils of a complex, modern world. They were never seen as men whose rights and liberties had been proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence.

By 1804 all the northern states had either eliminated slavery or passed laws for its gradual abolition. But the humanitarian motives behind the antislavery laws were not sufficient to prevent the imposition of a system of severe discrimination and segregation on the 10 percent of the African American population that resided in the North. Before the Civil War, African Americans in the North were restricted from entering various states, given inadequate and segregated schooling, barred from most public facilities, excluded from jury service and denied the vote, and nursed in segregated hospitals and buried in segregated graveyards.

The Post–Civil War Period

After the Civil War, African Americans improved their economic status as a whole, engaged in civil rights efforts to enforce new antidiscrimination laws, and became politically active. However, between 1877, when the federal troops were withdrawn from the South, and 1910, a new system of segregation and discrimination was imposed on African Americans. With each depression in the late nineteenth century, African Americans lost their hard-won gains, were deserted by liberals, and saw a number of rights eliminated or curtailed by U.S. Supreme Court decisions in 1873, 1883, and 1896.

With the passage of numerous state and local ordinances dealing with segregation, the disfranchisement of the African American voter, and the economic relegation of African Americans to the lowest menial occupations, the apartheid system was complete, not to be seriously challenged by white liberals or African Americans until after World War II. In the North between 1865 and 1945, African Americans could vote and segregation was never formalized into the legal code; but de facto segregation and a disproportionate placement in the less desirable occupations were still a social reality for African Americans in the North.

With the end of the Mexican-American War in 1848, half of Mexico was annexed to the United States, and the estimated 150,000 Mexicans who lived in the territory rapidly became a numerical minority as Americans inundated the area. Most of this Mexican population was reduced to landless menial labor by 1900, through discriminatory property taxes and title laws. As the economic status of Mexicans was reduced, those of Spanish and of Indian-Spanish, or mestizo, descent were lumped together by Americans and viewed as a single, distinct, and inferior race—a view intensified by the entrance of over 700,000 legal immigrants from rural Mexico into the United States between 1900 and 1930. (In 1930 the U.S. Census Bureau, for the first and only time, divided Mexican Americans into 4.6 percent white and 95.4 percent colored.)

During the same period European and Asian immigrants arrived in the United States in increasing numbers to meet the demands of an expanding economy. Between 1820 and 1920 some 30 million Europeans entered America. Being white, most of them entered the American mainstream within two or three generations, the rate of assimilation being affected primarily by the degree to which their cultures approximated that of Americans of British descent.

Asian immigrants, however, had a different experience. The peak years of Chinese immigration were from 1861 to 1890 (249,213) and 1891 to 1920 (239,576) for the Japanese. All were met with resistance. The Chinese were barred from voting in California in 1848 and from testifying in court between 1854 and 1872. The California constitution banned Chinese persons from working in corporations and government, and forced them to pay discriminatory taxes and fees. This state-sanctioned discrimination made for an essentially lawless West that ignored

the numerous acts of violence committed against Asian immigrants.

By arriving in a more stable period, the Japanese avoided this "frontier" situation but were excluded from white unions and denied ownership of land by a number of western states (a practice declared constitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1923). Further Chinese and Japanese immigration was almost terminated by congressional acts in 1902 and 1924.

The Twentieth Century

By the beginning of the twentieth century almost all nonwhites were in the lowest occupation and income categories in the United States and were attempting to accommodate themselves to this status within segregated areas—barrios, ghettoes, and reservations. The great majority of whites, including major educators and scientists, justified this condition on the grounds that nonwhites were biologically inferior to whites.

Although the period was largely characterized by the accommodation of nonwhites to subordination, a number of major incidents of racial conflict did occur: the mutiny and rioting of a number of African American soldiers in Houston, Texas, in 1917; African American–white conflict in twenty-five cities in the summer of 1919; and the destruction of white businesses in Harlem in New York City in 1935 and in Detroit in 1943. A major racist policy of the federal government was the forcible evacuation and internment of 110,000 Japanese living on the West Coast in 1942—a practice not utilized in Hawaii, and not utilized against Italians and German Americans.

Following World War II major changes occurred in the pattern of white dominance, segregation, and non-white accommodation that had been highly structured in the first half of the twentieth century. After the war a number of new nonwhite organizations were formed and, with the older organizations, sought changes in American race relations as varied as integration, sociocultural pluralism, and political independence. The government and the courts, largely reacting to the activities of these groups, ended the legality of segregation and discrimination in schools, public accommodations, the armed forces, housing, employment practices, eligibility for union member-ship, and marriage and voting laws. In addition, in March 1961 the federal government began a program of affirmative action in the hiring of minorities and committed itself to a policy of improving the economic basis of Indian reservations and, by 1969, promoting Indian self-determination within the reservation framework.

Although government efforts to enforce the new laws and court decisions were, at least at the outset, sporadic and inadequate, most overt forms of discrimination had been eliminated by the mid-1970s and racial minorities were becoming proportionally represented within the middle occupational and income levels. Changes in dominance and social distance were accompanied by white resistance at the local level, leading to considerable racial conflict in the postwar period. The Mississippi Summer Project to register African American voters in Lowndes County in 1965 resulted in the burning of 35 African American churches, 35 shootings, 30 bombings of buildings, 1,000 arrests, 80 beatings of African American and white workers, and 6 murders.

Between 1964 and 1968 there were 239 cases of hostile African American protest and outbursts in 215 cities. In 1972 Indian groups occupied Alcatraz, set up roadblocks in Washington, D.C., and occupied and damaged the offices of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in that city. The Alianza movement of Chicanos in New Mexico in 1967 attempted to reclaim Rio Arriba County as an independent republic by storming the courthouse in Tierra Amarilla. Mexican American students walked out of high schools in Los Angeles in 1968, and a number of Chicano organizations boycotted the Coors Brewery in Colorado between 1968 and 1972. During the 1970s Chinese youth organizations in San Francisco, California, staged a protest and engaged in violence, claiming the right to armed self-defense against the police and the release of all Asians in American prisons.

The major developments in the 1970s were the increased efforts on the part of federal agencies to enforce the civil rights laws of the 1960s; a greater implementation of affirmative action programs, involving efforts to direct employers to take positive actions to redress employment imbalances (through the use of quotas in some cases); and the resistance in numerous communities to busing as a device to achieve racial integration in the public schools. In the 1970s America saw an influx of 4 million immigrants, followed by 6 million more in the 1980s. Millions more arrived in the country illegally. Most of the immigrants originated in Asia and Latin America and, by 1999, California, which was the nation's most populous state, had a makeup that included more than 50 percent nonwhites.

Hate crimes continued to grow from the early 1980s to 2002. In 1982 Vincent Chin, a Chinese American, was beaten to death in Detroit, Michigan, by two out-of-work autoworkers. The men blamed the Japanese for their lack of work and mistakenly believed that Chin was Japanese. In July 1989 a young African American man was assaulted in the mostly white area of Glendale, California. Despite these and numerous other instances of hate crimes throughout these decades, race relations became embedded in America's social conscience with the Rodney King beating. On 3 March 1992, a young African American man named Rodney King was pulled over for reckless driving in Los Angeles. Several police officers beat King, and despite the videotape of a bystander, an all-white jury acquitted the officers. Riots erupted in Los Angeles, resulting in 53 deaths, 4,000 injuries, 500 fires, and more than __BODY__ billion in property damage. When speaking to reporters, King uttered what are now some of the more famous words surrounding race relations: "People, I just want to say, you know, can we all get along? Can we just get along?"