Historical Timeline and
Definitions
Understanding
Structural Racism
Structural racism
• a deep-rooted system in which history,
ideology, public policies, institutional
practices, and culture interact to maintain a
racial hierarchy that creates advantages
(privileges) associated with whiteness, and
disadvantages associated with color that
endure and adapt over time.
Structural Racism
• the preferential treatment, privilege, and
power that white people experience at the
expense of racially oppressed people.
Structural Racism
• is diffused and infused throughout our entire
social fabric, including our history, culture,
politics, and economics.
• the most profound and pervasive form of
racism; all other forms of racism (e.g.
institutional, interpersonal, internalized, etc.)
emerge from structural racism.
Historical timeline
• a visual representation of the history and
events related to structural racism–from the
past to the present.
• provides historical context for personal
experiences.
• enables you to tell your own story – on an
individual, community, state, national, or
international level.
Everyone has an opportunity to
contribute to the timeline
Invite each person to add his/her own
experiences
Pictures contribute to the reality of the
past and present
1500’s
• Encounters between Spanish, French, and
English settlers and Native Americans led to
conflict.
1600’s
• English colonists kept indentured servants
(both Europeans and Africans). Some servants
eventually earned their freedom.
1670’s
• Bacon’s Rebellion: an insurrection involving
white and black servants against wealthy
Virginia planters. Following the rebellion,
Africans were condemned to a life of
permanent slavery in the colonies.
• Thomas Jefferson, a Virginia slave owner and
former President, was influential in
promoting the idea that Whites are superior
to Africans.
1772
• John Newton wrote the words to the hymn,
“Amazing Grace,” in response to the horrors
he witnessed working on an English slave ship.
19th Century
1852
• Harriet Beecher Stowe’s widely read novel,
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, painted a more realistic
portrait of slavery and tried to humanize
slaves.
• African Americans, Native Americans, Mexican
Americans, and Chinese Americans were used
as slaves, for economic and political gain.
• African slavery provided free labor and
increased the political clout of slaveholding
states in the South.
• Belittling Native American cultures and
defining Native people as “savages” made it
easier to seize Native American land.
• Between 1889 and the early 1920s, there
were roughly 50 to 100 lynchings a year in the
U.S. While Blacks were mostly the victims,
Italian Americans, Asian Americans, and Jews
were also lynched.
20th Century
• In 1909, the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was
formed to abolish segregation and
discrimination in housing, education,
employment, voting, and transportation and
to secure constitutional rights for African
Americans.
1963
• Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his “I Have a
Dream Speech.
1964
• Nelson Mandela was sentenced to life in
prison in South Africa.
• The Civil Rights Act was passed in the U.S.