Past still present for African Americans

When Confederate forces fired the first shots at Fort Sumter on April 12, 150 years ago, triggering the American Civil War, almost four million African Americans were slaves.

Four years and 625,000 military deaths later - the worst carnage in US history - the South lay waste and the slaves were free.

In 1868, the 14th Amendment guaranteed their equality. But the road to freedom remained long, hard and violent. Blacks were marginalised by "Jim Crow" segregation laws throughout the old Confederacy and racism elsewhere.

Change came when the 1950s Civil Rights movement, the Supreme Court ruling Brown v Board of Education - that forced schools to desegregate after 1954 - and riots in the 1960s, challenged the white status quo.

Today, Barack Obama is America's first black President. His wife, Michelle, is the first black First Lady. African Americans serve as Attorney General and UN ambassador.

All of which is cited as proof the day yearned for in the Sam Cooke song, A Change is Gonna Come, and fought for by Martin Luther King jnr, as well as civil rights leaders such as Rosa Parks and Malcolm X, has arrived.

Blacks, goes the new national mythology, have found the Promised Land.

Change has also come to Dixie. Atlanta, Georgia, has the second biggest black population in the US, overtaking Chicago, itself a Great Migration magnet. Many African Americans have returned to the "New South". The wealthiest black communities are in Maryland, Georgia and Virginia.

The Brookings Institution says this reverse migration is driven in part by chances to exploit black networks, while younger blacks have no first-hand experience of the racism pervasive in the Jim Crow era.

But this upbeat narrative glosses over persistent economic and political inequalities and is threatened by a criminal justice system that blacks believe unfairly targets them.

Efforts to bury the past are controversial. Last week, Senator Robert Ford grasped a Confederate flag and addressed fellow blacks from the South Carolina Senate.

"Before the war you was a slave, after the war you was free and in 2012, you can do anything you want to." Come April 12, he added, blacks would see a lot of Confederate flags.

He urged them not to be "mean spirited". Instead, they should commemorate the war's sesquicentenary by fostering understanding to prevent misinformation spewing racism.

It was a hard sell. The National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, the largest US civil rights group, has spent the past decade battling South Carolina's flaunting of the Confederate flag, seen by many as a hate symbol. Once unfurled atop the statehouse, the Stars and Bars now fly on the front lawn.

Ford was arrested 73 times during the civil rights era, but his stance drew condemnation.

"I'm disappointed and disgusted," said the Reverend Joseph Darby, a NAACP leader. "I think that Senator Ford is woefully deluded. I think he has better things to do than be a Confederate apologist."

Harsh words like this are an indication that beyond the black high-flyers - Oprah Winfrey, Tiger Woods, Will Smith and other showbiz, business and political success stories - is a whole, often marginalised, world of hurt and poverty.

Historians still debate whether slavery was the driving issue in the war between the states - it was also a struggle between two economic systems; the industrialised north and the agrarian south that used slave labour - but less overt racism infects national life, from ugly battles over affirmative action, public healthcare and whether the descendants of slaves should receive financial reparation.

Obama's decision this week, following pressure from the Tea Party, to cut healthcare for the poor and elderly, is expected to intensify hardship for poor blacks.

On April 4, the anniversary of King's assassination in Memphis in 1968, the NAACP organised nationwide rallies to "defend the civil rights that are being attacked every day".

This may be news to whites but in many black communities the fight to defend hard won victories is a daily struggle.

A few years ago, I found myself standing amid 5000 African-Americans in Los Angeles' Greater Bethamy Community Church, down on the hardscrabble flats of Compton, most famous for gangsta rappers NWA, Niggaz With Attitude.

The congregation featured many muscular, tattooed young men with shaven heads, former gangbangers who had come to listen to Bishop Noel Jones, brother to pop singer Grace.

Black lawyers and pastors were talking up reparations lawsuits, but this prospect seemed remote in Compton. "You should spent six months down here," a woman who had spent nine years on the streets as a prostitute and addict told me. "You would see things you wouldn't believe."

With the recession, blacks are more likely to be unemployed than whites and twice as likely to lose their homes. They have lower life expectancies and - like other poor minorities - are more prone to diabetes, obesity and Aids.

It is a ghettoised world explored in the hit television series, The Wire, where the illegal drug trade offers a way out of poverty for blacks in Baltimore, an old slave port.

"If there is no struggle, there is no progress," Obama announced in February, quoting Frederick Douglass, the former slave who became an abolitionist and civil rights champion.

For while many blacks struggle to find work and raise families, they face a threat - mass penal incarceration - that condemns many to a second-class existence likened to a new form of slavery.

Incarceration rates are high.

Last week, the NAACP released a report, "Misplaced Priorities", advocating prison funds be shifted into education. The billions spent on prisons, says the report, are "sending our youth a clear message that we value incarceration over education".

In some states, says Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, as many as 90 per cent of offenders jailed on drug crimes are black.

This outcast bloc constitutes an "undercaste" denied the right to vote, serve on juries, and access public housing, education and other benefits. More black males are disenfranchised, because they are felons, than in 1870.

Incarceration has ravaged black families, with many children raised by solo mothers. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that mass incarceration of minorities, often for minor crimes, is quasi slavery.

Black America

25.8pc
One in four of the 38.9 million African Americans - the second largest racial group in the US - live in poverty, according to the US Census Bureau.

38.2pc
Of prison inmates are black, according to the US Bureau of Justice. African Americans made up 12.9 per cent of the US population in 2009.