For a founding father who usually took a sunny view of his nation’s prospects, it was a darkly pessimistic prophesy. In his Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson argued that if – as he hoped – America’s black slaves were one day set free, the result would be conflict and an inevitable descent into racial war.
And in the hours after Governor Jay Nixon imposed a night-time curfew on the Missouri town of Ferguson following the killing there of an unarmed teenager by a police officer earlier this month, it is indeed reasonable to wonder whether a form of war (sometimes hot, sometimes cold) has been waged against blacks in America from Jefferson’s time until our own.
It is hardly uncommon in the US for a young black man to die under questionable circumstances at the hands of the police. Many blacks have stories about young men they knew, or knew of, who were killed this way. When I was at school, a black teenage boy in my home town died in police custody. The officers spun a wildly implausible tale about what had happened to justify the teenager’s killing. Our tiny black community ached at its inability to achieve justice in a town still firmly gripped by the legacy of Jim Crow.