1607: Settlement of Jamestown, the first permanent English colony in Virginia
1613: John Rolfe marries Pocahontas in the colony of Virginia.
1619: Twenty enslaved Africans, unloaded from a Dutch ship at a port near Jamestown, are sold to labor-short colonists.
1637: New England colonists massacre 500 Native Americans in Pequot War, the first massacre of indigenous people by English colonists.
1640: John Punch, an African indentured servant, runs away from his servitude with Victor, a Dutchman, and James Gregory, a Scotsman. They are caught. The colony of Virginia records that as punishment the Dutchman and the Scot are given 4 increased years of indentured servitude. John Punch is sentenced to servitude for the remainder of his natural life (lifetime servitude).
1660: Act XXII, Virginia House of Burgesses says that English servants who run away with any Negroes who are “incapable of making satisfaction by the addition of time” will serve also for the Negro’s escaped time in addition to their own. “Incapable of making satisfaction” is implicit knowledge of Negro lifetime servitude, which some scholars have interpreted to be a legal acknowledgment of slavery (Higgenbotham, 1978, p. 35).
1662: Virginia enacts a law stating that if an “Englishman” begets a child of a “Negro woman,” the child will take on the woman’s status, e.g., that of a slave; this law makes slavery hereditary.1676 Bacon’s Rebellion, a populist rebellion that organized poor people --white frontiersmen, slaves, indentured servants, and a tribe of Indians against the colony of Virginia. Bacon and the rebels win the first battle and the sitting government retreats to boats in the river. They win two more skirmishes before English reinforcements arrive and put down the rebellion.
1705: Virginia law passed requiring masters to provide white indentured servants 50 acres of land, 30 shillings, a musket, and 10 bushels of corn when they completed their servitude. This was often referred to as Freedom Dues.
1712: “Act for the better ordering and governing of Negroes and slaves” in South Carolina –“whereas, the plantations . . . of this province cannot be well managed . . . without the labor of Negroes and other slaves, [who] . . . are of barbarous, wild, savage natures, and such as renders them wholly unqualified to be governed by the laws . . . of this province; that such other laws and orders, should in this province be made . . . as may restrain the disorders, rapines and inhumanity, to which they are naturally prone and inclined. . . .
1776: The Declaration of Independence is signed, stating that “all men are created equal . . . with certain inalienable rights . . . Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” while excluding Africans, Native Americans, and all women.1785 Land Ordinance Act, 640 acres offered at $1 per acre to white people.
1787: In the U.S. Constitution, for the purposes of taxation and representation, Negro slaves were counted as 3/5 of a person, “adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three-fifths of all other persons.” Slaves who couldn’t vote were not going to be counted at all, but the Three-Fifths Compromise was agreed upon to give the South more seats in Congress and more electoral votes. The effect was that slaveholder interests largely dominated the government of the US until 1865.
1790: Naturalization Law of 1790 specified that only free white immigrants are eligible for naturalized citizenship. First generation immigrants from Asia, the Caribbean, Central and South American and Africa are expressly denied civil rights, the right to vote, and the right to own land. This Act is not completely wiped off the books until the McCarran Walter Act of 1952.
1790s: The slavery abolition movement starts to grow. Blumenbach and Buffonoffer “scientific” justification for a hierarchical classification of humankind (Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Australoid and Negroid) 311795 Treaty of Greenville, which Indian leaders are forced to sign, cedes most of the Ohio Valley to the U.S. government.1800 The Land Ordinance Act -minimum lot was halved to 320 Acres.
1807: Thomas Jefferson states the US should “pursue (the Indians) into extermination or drive them to new seats beyond our reach.”
1812: Thomas Jefferson states white people should drive every Indian in their path “with the beasts of the forests into the stony mountains.”
1830: An act prohibiting “the teaching of slaves to read” in North Carolina and other states – “whereas the teaching of slaves to read and write has a tendency to excite dissatisfaction in their minds and to produce insurrection and rebellion, to the manifest injury of the citizens of this state ...” such teaching was illegal and severely punished.
1830: Indian Removal Act authorized the president to “negotiate” and exchange lands . . . which actually meant. . . seize Indian land and remove Native Americans from their ancestral and sacred lands; the territory of
Oklahoma is set aside as “Indian Territory.”
1848: Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo signed between U.S. and Mexico, which promises to protect the lands, language, and culture of the Mexicans living in the ceded territory (future states of California, Texas, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, parts of Colorado and Wyoming). Congress substitutes a “Protocol” which requires Mexicans to prove in U.S. courts that they have ‘legitimate’ title to their own lands; the “Protocol” becomes the legal basis for the massive U.S. land theft from Mexicans in conquered territories.
1850: Foreign Miners Tax in California requires Chinese and Latin American gold miners to pay a special tax on their holdings not required of European American miners.
1854: California Law (People v. Hall) –“No black, or mulatto person, or Indian shall be allowed to give evidence for or against a white person.”
1862: Homestead Act allots 160 acres of western (i.e. Indian) land to “anyone” who could pay $1.25 an acre and cultivate it for 5 years; within 10 years, 85,000,000 acres of Indian lands had been sold to European homesteaders. The last person received land under the Homestead Act in 1988.
1863: Thirteenth Amendment. Slavery was abolished for all people except for those convicted of a crime. “Black Codes” immediately emerged to criminalize legal activity for African-Americans (loitering, breaking curfew, being unemployed, etc.). Created a new system of convict labor and leasing that allowed former slave owners to again have access to free labor from African Americans.
1882: Chinese Exclusion Act passed by Congress to keep Chinese immigrant workers from coming to the U.S., the first time a nationality had been barred expressly by name.
1886: Apache warrior Geronimo surrenders to the U.S. army, marking the defeat of Southwest Indian nations.
1887: Dawes Act terminates tribal ownership of lands by partitioning reservations and assigning each Indian a 160-acre allotment for farming. “Surplus” reservation land is opened up to homesteaders.
1887: Hayes Tilden Compromise removes federal troops from the South, leaving Blacks totally unprotected from white violence and setting the stage for 50 years of intense repression, denial of political, civil, and education rights that African Americans had struggled for and to some extent won during Reconstruction after the Civil War.
1893: Queen Liliuokalani of Hawaii is overthrown by U.S. planter colonists in a bloodless revolution. The Republic of Hawaii is established with Stanford Dole (Dole Pineapple) as president.
1896: Supreme Court declares in Plessy v. Ferguson that separate but “equal” facilities are constitutional.
1898: Treaty of Paris - After defeating Spain in the Spanish-American War, the US acquires Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. Cuba, which had already declared her independence from Spain, becomes a virtual colony of the U.S.
1910: The Flexner Report - Five of seven medical schools educating black doctors were closed, leaving only two medical schools, Meharry and Howard to provide medical education for American Blacks. - Although now Blacks have graduated from every medical school in the United States, the decades of exclusion have resulted in an insurmountable manpower and opportunity gap.
1917: Immigration Act of 1917 - Congress enacts another immigration act creating an Asiatic Barred Zone, a “line in the sand” in Asia effectively cutting off all immigration from India.
1922: Ozawa V. United States - Takao Ozawa, a Japanese-American, assimilated after 20 years of living in the US, filed for United States citizenship under the Naturalization Act of 1906which allowed only “free white persons” and "persons of African nativity or persons of African descent" to naturalize. Ozawa did not challenge the constitutionality of the racial restrictions. Instead, he claimed that Japanese people were properly classified as “free white persons ”. The Court invoked "science," in finding a Japanese man could not be defined as "Caucasian" (which the Court found synonymous with "White"). It was easy for the Court to deny the petition of such a non-Caucasian.
1923: Thind v. the United States - Based on Ozawa, Thind argues that he is Caucasian and therefore white. The Supreme Court unanimously decided that Bhagat Singh Thind, an Indian Sikhman who identified himself as a "high caste Hindu, of full Indian blood," was racially ineligible for naturalized citizenship in the United States. Asian Indians who had already been granted citizenship, had their citizenship revoked. In this case, the court said that while all whites are Caucasian, not all Caucasians are white. In this case, they eschew science and say a white man is who the “common white man” recognizes as a white man.
1924: Johnson-Reed Immigration Act sets restrictive quotas on immigrants from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. 1933 New Deal legislation for “Relief, Recovery and Reform” made available $120 billion (worth $1 trillion today) in loans—98% went to white people - Also created jobs programs (e.g., FERA, CCC, PWA, WPA) designed to put people to work and eradicate unemployment.
1933: Homeowners Loan Corporation created to help homeowners and stabilize banks, created detailed neighborhood maps that took into account the racial composition of a neighborhood or likelihood of racial infiltration, color-coded these, neighborhoods in red and labeled them “undesirable” resulting in a lack of investment in neighborhoods with POC and enormous investment in white neighborhoods.
1934: The Federal Housing Act manuals and practices codify the channeling of funds to white neighborhoods and collaborated with blockbusters. 1935 The Social Security Act. New Deal programs would not have survived the Southern voting block unless they were designed in a way that preserved racial patterns. SSA did not extend coverage to farm or domestic workers, disproportionately excluding blacks from its benefits.
1935: The Fair Labor Standards Act of the same year also did not cover agricultural or domestic workers. 1944 Supreme Court opinion upheld Roosevelt’s Executive Order authorizing relocation and detention of all people of Japanese ancestry, including U.S. citizens, in “war relocation centers” regardless of “loyalty” to the U.S. (during World War II).1944The GI Bill: $95 billion in educational, employment, and housing opportunities went mainly to returning white soldiers.2,255,00 veterans took advantage of the GI Bill which is now considered the biggest transfer of economic advantage to white people in the history of our nation.
1946: Hill-Burton Act. Also known as the Hospital Survey and Construction Act. Contained a “separate but equal” clause, recognizing that most participating Southern hospitals were reserved for whites only, and closed to black physicians and patients.
1947: Taft Hartley Act seriously restricts the right to organize and requires a loyalty oath aimed at the Congress of Industrial Organizations, which had organized large numbers of workers of color.
1945-60: Suburban sprawl and white-flight to the suburbs became popular as certain communities were officially red-lined and marked as undesirable, de-voiding inner cities of essential tax dollars used for schools, roads, parks, and other public necessities.
1963: Simkins v. Moses Cone Memorial Hospital held that “separate but equal” racial segregation in publicly funded hospitals was a violation of the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution.
1978: Proposition 13 (The People’s Initiative to Limit Property Taxation) created tax structures that greatly benefitted white homeowners. Because of the benefits, it bestows on the rich and powerful Prop 13 is now considered “untouchable” by CA politicians, even though it has been detrimental to the state economy.
1990: Congress passes a comprehensive new immigration law, which includes “employer sanctions” for knowingly hiring a worker without papers, discouraging employers from taking job applications from Asian Americans or Latinos.
2009: The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the Stimulus): $840 billion for schools, municipalities, infrastructure development, energy, etc. Another race-neutral act that has disproportionately benefited white people because of who is able to meet the qualifying
