Three Phases in United States History Created The Context for the Murder of George Floyd

Three phases in United States history created the context for the murder of George Floyd.

 

The first was the failure of Reconstruction, culminating in the Compromise of 1877, an agreement by Republicans and Democrats to resolve the impasse in the presidential election of 1876;  Democratic leaders signaled to Republicans that they would concede contested votes in Florida and a few other states if the resulting administration would withdraw federal troops from southern states.  These troops had been protecting African Americans as they exercised their constitutional rights of citizenship as formulated in the 13^th, 14^th, and 15^th Amendments.  The deal was cut, the troops were withdrawn, and the way was clear for whites (albeit not entirely the same individuals who had held power prior to the Civil War) to take reassert full control.

The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, therefore, was inspired not foremost by a desire to prevent military forces from assuming police powers;  rather, the motivation was to gain a presidency and curtail African American citizenship rights.  Ironically the Insurrection Act of 1807, which conversely gave legal presidential and therefore federal executive authority to order use of federal troops in times of compelling domestic national emergency, was also motivated by a desire to control nonwhite populations:  A slave revolt of 1800 led in Richmond, Virginia, by Gabriel Posser;  Native American resistance to westward expansion in the aftermath of the Louisiana Purchase (1803) and the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1804-1805);  and the end of the international slave trade in 1807 seemed to be events capable of encouraging African and Native Americans to foment armed opposition to United States government policy and a westerly expanding white population.             

 

The Compromise of 1877 inaugurated a long phase in United States history in which Jim Crow laws, white vigilante violence, and the oppressive constraints of the sharecropping system induced African American migration to an urban North that offered better economic opportunities and less blatant violence but also via restricted housing covenants confined African Americans to particular residential areas, along with Jews and immigrant populations deemed socially undesirable.

 

The second and overlapping phase began at Teachers College of Columbia University in the 1920s.  Identified with John Dewey but more clearly ideologically led by figures such as William Heard Kilpatrick and Harold Rugg, so-called “progressive” education was ranged against knowledge-focused curriculum.  The “progressive” view held that subject area knowledge is not important;  rather, education professors would come to assert that classroom activity should be driven by “child-centered” student interest and the practical needs of everyday living, so that the study of history, literature, and higher mathematics was not needed except for a very few college preparatory students.  In the racist manner of the times, the image of the college-bound student did not include African Americans and southern and eastern European immigrant populations.  Most “progressives,” educational and political, of the early 20^th century were racist and anti-immigrant;  many were frankly eugenicists.            

 

From the 1920s forward the ideology of “progressive” educators spread from the influential Teachers College of Columbia University to other teacher training programs.  Full integration of the ideology into the school districts of the United States, though, took several decades;  many parents and teachers well-trained in their subject areas resisted the anti-knowledge creed of education professors, as did African Americans and immigrant populations seeking to ascend the social hierarchy on the basis of substantive education.  But the “progressive” approach was in sync with the zeitgeist of the 1960s and by the 1970s was on the way to dominance among teachers and school administrators devising curriculum for locally centralized districts.  

 

The third phase dated from that very period of the 1960s and 1970s and continues to this day.  This phase is defined by a situation in which whites who had already started to flee the central cities were now joined by middle class African Americans, Jews, and others whose civil rights and fair housing opportunities had been given firm legal underpinning in congressional legislation of the mid-1960s and early 1970s.  Martin Luther King, organizing a Poor People’s March at the time of his death, knew that his herculean efforts had opened the way for those with the wherewithal to realize the middle class dream but left behind a restive population of increasingly impoverished communities living at the urban core.  Residential housing covenants had created racially isolated communities;  now those communities became more impoverished with the tendency of the middle class to flee to the suburbs.

 

During this third phase of 1964-2020 there has been a confluence of these three historical trends:

 

Conditions in the Jim Crow South induced the Northern Migration and racist white leadership in communities of the North perpetrated or condoned the creation of racially segregated communities.  A racist educational ideology that appropriated the “progressive” label denied to all students a knowledge-intensive public school education;  this created a situation in which even putatively well-educated people were only trained in their vocational fields and in which those whose only education came at the K-12 level had little education of any sort.  The resulting American society has little historical knowledge, little understanding of government or the United States Constitution, meager grasp of how the American economy functions, and increasingly votes on the basis of emotion and what feels right or beneficial for those who operate within their familial and personal universes.  And those mired in poverty at the urban core remain in conditions of cyclical poverty and frequently on a life trajectory that sends more African American males to prison than to college and leaves too many others dead on the streets.

 

A poorly educated general public gave us Donald Trump, whose support remains strong in 28 states and in large segments of even blue or lean-blue states, such as the northern and southern regions of Minnesota.  Terrible systems of public education send forth people who become, among many other vocational practitioners, police officers, who lack the knowledge of history and psychology necessary to interpret properly the actions of those who are, or appear to be, breaking the law.  Many in the crowds now out in the streets protesting the injustice they understand at a rudimentary level have little comprehension of the deeper injustice and the historical trends that have produced intractable tensions between police and African Americans and others of nonwhite epidermal hue.  And those nonwhites who are disproportionately abused by police officers operate on a low knowledge base bequeathed to them by their K-12 experiences.  They understand little of the specific historical trends that have produced their life circumstances;  and they have been given few analytical skills and information bases necessary to transform the current conditions of their lives.

 

The societal results of the three historical phases of focus may be witnessed throughout the United States.  They have operated in the insidiously racist past of Minneapolis.  They are manifest in the current condition of the city.  They have produced the wretched quality of education in the Minneapolis Public Schools.

 

The confluence of the three historical trends established the context wherein the malicious murder of George Floyd could take place.  Justice in this particular case needs to be served.  The processes and procedures of the Minneapolis police union and department must be reformed.

 

But justice in the present case and reform of the police union and department will not avert recurrence of abuses in the absence of a better informed citizenry, broadly educated professionals, and knowledgeable public servants.

 

In the absence of knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education our best efforts at institutional reform will be vitiated.

 

Thus must we overhaul curriculum and teacher quality at the Minneapolis Public Schools, giving rise to a community comprised of culturally enriched, civically prepared, and professionally satisfied citizens---   providing a model for the creation of better communities throughout the nation.

 

Our streets will be safer and our communities stronger when police and citizen stand face to face on a mutual foundation of knowledge.