Reflections on Black History: Code switching – Making history our greatest weapon
For this Black History Month, the Banner reached out to members of our community and asked them to share their thoughts and feelings about our Black history and culture. We think you will find their responses as inspirational as we did. — Ronald Mitchell, Publisher and Editor, Bay State Banner
Code switching: Making history our greatest weapon
by Steven W. Tompkins
Each year when the calendar flips to February, we as a nation train our collective focus on the stories of Black people in American history, highlighting some of the myriad achievements, accomplishments and contributions we’ve made, indispensable fibers woven into the great tapestry that is the United States.
Inevitably, justifiably, we tell and retell the true tales of the most legendary Americans: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, Harriet Tubman and Rosa Parks, Thurgood Marshall and Shirley Chisholm, Arthur Ashe and Althea Gibson, Booker T. Washington, Sojourner Truth, The Tuskegee Airmen, Oprah Winfrey, President Barack Obama. The list is long and its members all worthy of mention, forever, on repeat.
But, alongside this pantheon of celebrated Americans who have striven so mightily to succeed, there are the odds, there is the adversity, there exists the terrible thing that they struggled and fought and emerged victorious against.
For every Josephine Baker, Marian Anderson or Louis Armstrong there were owners of concert halls, supper clubs and hotels that would partake of their great talents and the treasures that each of them would bring, but not allow them full citizenship, denying them the right to enter through the front door or eat where they performed or even rest after giving their all to the paying customers that they always drew in.
For every Little Rock Nine sent into the world to shatter one more obstacle to equity and equality, to melt the frozen hearts of a nation, diseased and hardened by racism, there were riotous crowds, protected by a complicit National Guard, to help slow down and stall progress for one more day.
For every Fredrick Douglass, brilliantly bridging the gap between slavery and freedom, paving the way forward for a people in need of his great intelligence, knowledge and fighting spirit, there were slaveholders who refused to see a man — free where he stood — conspiring to kidnap and reacquire their “property.”
One could make a cogent argument that our history, so filled with adversity and hardship and loss, would dictate that we only sing songs of greatness attained, battles won and barriers broken to better balance four centuries and counting of inequality. But it is this very struggle that demands that we all, as Americans, know deeply and understand intimately the events that have shaped us as a society and brought us all to this moment. Especially when this moment includes a gravely dangerous movement, led by people in power who would deny the rest of us what is ours by attempting to separate us from our history, erasing it, and with it any hope of adding still another victory to our endless list of challenges.
It is in this spirit that I take this space to share some of this history, for those who don’t know it, in the hopes that it will not only prevent anything of its like from ever repeating, but also inspire us to do better, for not just some, but all Americans.
Many of us have varying degrees of knowledge about the horrors of slavery in America; the Civil War fought between the Confederate South and the Union North from 1861 to 1865; the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863—even as the war raged on—which would mark the official ending of slavery in the states; and the fleeting period of post-slavery Reconstruction from 1865 to 1877.
But, embedded between those dates, there exists a time of even shorter duration with an impact that is as consequential as it was brief, setting the stage for what would become the second wave of Black mass incarceration an entire century later in the early 1970s.
As Black Americans were finally freed from the brutality of nearly two-and-a-half centuries of bondage, southern plantation and agricultural business owners attempted a backdoor reinstatement of a new kind of slavery: the Black Codes.
Beginning in Mississippi and South Carolina in 1865 and overtaking nearly every southern state in some form or fashion, the Black Codes were a series of draconian laws targeting Black people that all but guaranteed their inability to comply, thus ensuring their arrest and subsequent free labor as prisoners consigned to work for some of the very people and plantations they had been freed from.
Under these laws, Blacks were prohibited from “walking without purpose,” or “walking at night,” or “hunting on Sundays.” They were required to have written evidence of contracted, year-long work. They were restricted from holding jobs beyond “servant” or “farmer” unless they paid a tax annually between $10 and $100, which almost none could afford. They were forbidden from leaving one job for another without permission. All of these, and the vague definition of “vagrancy,” were enough to send violators to prison where they could “work off their debts to society,” if they were lucky. Violence was often the unspoken shadow accompanying any sentence.
Though these laws would officially end with the enactment of the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution in 1867 and 1870, respectively, by that time, Black people made up more than 90% of the prison population in southern states. The Black Codes also stripped most offenders of their newly acquired voting rights, post-incarceration, either temporarily or permanently.
Today the population of prisons across the United States is roughly 37% Black, even though we only account for about 13% of Americans. As you read this, there are still 10 states in the United States that deny the right to vote of some or all formerly incarcerated people.
From my perspective as both the sheriff of Suffolk County and an avid student of history, the throughline between our collective past and present is unmistakable. Though our progress as Black citizens, and that of our nation, has been both substantial and undeniable, the vestiges of our past oppression are as tangible as the backlash to our success is inevitable. A simple query of “backlash to Black success” in your search engine may cause a shock to the system of those less acquainted with our history.
But it is this very history that should fill you with enough light in these dark times to celebrate this special month of American achievement. It should give you the confidence that we will always take those proverbial two steps forward after any step backward. And it should grant you the fighting spirit to take those steps, just as those who we are celebrating today did before us.
Steven W. Tompkins is the sheriff of Suffolk County and chairman of the Board of Trustees for Roxbury Community College.
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