1: Education of African Americans Amid Anti-Black Political and Social Governance

In this effort, we will capitalize Black when referencing Black people, organizations, and cultural products. We base this usage on the definition provided by Michael J. Dumas: “Black is understood as a self-determined name of a racialized social group that shares a specific set of histories, cultural processes, and imagined and performed kinships” (Dumas, 2016, p. 12). Black, as a synonym for Negro, colored, and more recently—African American, replaces those terms in the literature; authors and researchers currently capitalize “black” in the Black freedom struggle histories/stories.

European Whites looked upon the enslaved and free Blacks in the same manner as European Whites viewed natives in other colonized locations throughout the world: The European White as the colonizer and the natives as the colonized. The American political relationship to its Black citizens has been a hoax. This relationship is more appropriately defined as the colonizer (United States) and the colonized (Blacks). In the United States, the colonizer/colonized relationship has been more apparent in the relationship between European Whites and the Native American population: the process of drawing sustenance from the host and weakening that population in the manner as a parasite. Even though the transplanted Blacks in North America did not serve as hosts in a foreign land, the reality of chattel slavery provided sustenance from which the colonizer relied. The key to the colonizers’ mastery of the colonized is to teach the colonized the colonizers’ language (Memmi, 1967). English became the official language of the United States. “The colonial situation manufactures colonialists, just as it manufactures the colonized” (Memmi, 1967, pp. 55–56). “The inevitable outcome of colonialism with regard to the attitude of the colonizer towards the colonized is racism: Racism is not an incidental, but a consubstantial part of colonialism” (Memmi, 1967, p. 74).