Steve Hageman took a group of William Woods University students back in time last week.
A professor of history at Washburn University in Kansas, Hageman spoke Thursday at the school's "Equality Matters" symposium Thursday. He explained how Jim Crow laws enacted after the Civil War have left a lasting influence on America's justice system.
Hageman prefaced the history lesson with some current statistics about the USA's incarceration rates.
Generally speaking, he said, 767 people per 100,000 are incarcerated in the American legal system. But those incarcerated don't represent a diverse population, he added.
"When talking about African-American men today, about 4,347 per 100,000 are incarcerated," he said.
The roots of this inequity began during the Reconstruction Period and on, a time known as Jim Crow, Hageman said.
"Segregation was a part of it, but it really was trying to maintain racial domination," he said. "It has been referred to as 'slavery by another name' because it was a criminalization of blackness, as well as a form of economic control and domination."
Hageman said Jim Crow used this domination to maintain the now free southern labor force.
"They had to maintain a docile labor force," he said. "There was a proliferation of new crimes in the South, which was really a criminalization of black male independence."
These new crimes allowed for the bolstering of prison labor forces, Hageman said.
"This is were you see chain gangs," he said. "Prison laborers were unpaid so convicts were used to build the infrastructure system of the South. They were even leased out to corporations. U.S. Steel used more than a thousand convict laborers. All of this was a conscious effort to create a system to imprison people and create a labor force."
After you start putting people into the system, it becomes even easier to justify the practice, Hageman said.
"You can start citing crime statistics," he said. "You use them to justify the system you just created."
A bad idea spreads
Discrimination against black males did not just stay in the South, Hageman said.
"These ideas began to penetrate society," he said. "They permeated popular culture. You see that in the film, 'Birth of a Nation.'"
With this new culture of fear surrounding African-American men, Hageman said society began to start policing the black male body.
"They were lynched just for challenging society," he added.
Lynching, Hageman said, was not some secret task regulated to dark forests. It was a public spectacle.
"The community would turn out to watch," he said. "Kids watched. They were being educated about the social norms. This was the boys' initiation into white manhood and an object lesson about upholding the system. Remember, this was less than 100 years ago."
Many economic disparities created a world where black men were valued less than white men, even white immigrants. Circumstances solidifying that attitude include the Great Depression, World War II era discrimination, white flight into suburban neighborhoods.
"After World War II, you start to see the rise of suburbs," he said. "They create this idea of owning a home as the 'American Dream.'"
Suburbs became bastions for white people, Hageman said, and they used several methods to maintain this racial homogeneity.
"They would sign covenants, stating that they wouldn't sell their house to black people," he said. "Those covenants were up held by the courts."
The snowball effect
Economic opportunity left urban areas, too, and tax bases started to decline, Hageman added.
"When an area's tax base starts to decline, schools suffer," he said. "You also see infrastructure start to decline as well. Even today, in Chicago, the medium income of some black neighboorho0ds is half that of white neighborhoods, while the unemployment is twice as high."
This new economic crisis led to a new masculinity crisis, and these compounding problems have led to urban decay and extreme inequality, Hageman said.
"You see neighborhoods that look completely bombed out," he said. "You can see it on Delmar Boulevard in Saint Louis."
Hageman said the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s did dismantle the legal structure of Jim Crow, but it didn't fix the economic insecurity of urban areas.
"This is actually what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was talking about most before he was killed," he said. "Politicians talked about waging 'War on Poverty,' but they were not addressing the causes of urban poverty."
Hageman said this was also the era of anti-crime bills and federal investment in police departments.
"There was no increase in crime rates to support them," he said. "But the departments had to show a need for the federal money. How do they do that? They stopped community policing and started arresting people. You see the merging of police into community spaces and black spaces. You also see the militarization of police and an increase in lethality."
The 1960s also saw the emergence of "law and order" conservatism, Hageman said.
"This talk of 'law and order' by politicians was really targeted at civil rights demonstrators, student protesters and anti-war protesters," he said. "Many candidates made it a central part of their platforms. Eventually, the crises blows up, and you have urban unrest and riots. That is when the 'law and order' message gets even louder, and it starts to look like society is falling apart."
The "War on Poverty" became a "War on Crime," Hageman added.
"You start to the criminalization of poverty," he said. "Their are more punitive measures. Politicians 'get tough on crime.' They draw on black criminality, and starts to reinforce it. You see three-strikes laws and mandatory minimum sentences."
Hageman said all these circumstances resulted in the extreme-separation of blacks and whites, which allowed for easy targeting of African-Americans.
"They were very easy to target," he said.
Economic insecurity can lead to crimes, Hageman said.
"Everything exacerbates the existing problems," he said. "People who go to prison have a hard time getting a job when they get out. This leads to economic problems, which leads to crime, which sends them back to prison."
Hageman said that while their has been bipartisan attempts to address this problem, it still exists within society.
"That's the history," he said. "Now we are living it."