In December 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified.  The amendment formally outlawed slavery and involuntary servitude in the United States.  This amendment, and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments that followed it, began a long road to freedom for black Americans.  Now, almost 150 years later, many black Americans are enslaved by a new kind of servitude under what we know today as the welfare state.

In the beginning, it really wasn’t their fault.  Facing discrimination everywhere, black Americans struggled for almost 100 years before American society began to finally take notice of the injustices mounted against them.  Following the Brown vs. Board of Education judgement by the Supreme Court, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1957, which helped strengthen voting rights for blacks.  Seven years later, the act was followed by the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  These acts basically leveraged the rights guaranteed by the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments.  Despite having legal protections against discrimination, black families still continued to suffer economically.  In the 1960s, the modern welfare state was born from President Lyndon Johnson’s “War On Poverty”.  In the end, the war on poverty turned into a war on the values of self-sufficiency and hard work…. Continue Reading