The Color Line

Teaching Activity PDF. By Bill Bigelow. 6 pages.
A lesson on the countless colonial laws enacted to create division and inequality based on race. This helps students understand the origins of racism in the United States and who benefits.

The death of Crispus Attucks, remembered as the “first martyr” of the American Revolutionary War, during the March 1770 Boston Massacre. Although colonial law sought to prevent interracial relationships, Attucks’ mixed African and Wampanoag parentage illustrates the failure of colonial laws to fully discourage them. Photo credit: Bettman/CORBIS

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Colonial laws prohibiting blacks and whites from marrying one another suggest that some blacks and whites did marry. Laws imposing penalties on white indentured servants and enslaved blacks who ran away together likewise suggest that whites and blacks did run away together. Laws making it a crime for Indians and blacks to meet together in groups of four or more indicate that, at some point, these gatherings must have occurred. As Benjamin Franklin is said to have remarked in the Constitutional Convention, “One doesn’t make laws to prevent the sheep from planning insurrection,” because this has never occurred, nor will it occur.

The social elites of early America sought to manufacture racial divisions. Men of property and privilege were in the minority; they needed mechanisms to divide people who, in concert, might threaten the status quo. Individuals’ different skin colors were not sufficient to keep these people apart if they came to see their interests in common. Which is not to say that racism was merely a ruling class plot, but as Howard Zinn points out in chapters 2 and 3 of A People’s History of the United States, and as students see in this lesson, some people did indeed set out consciously to promote divisions based on race.

Published by Rethinking Schools.

Key words: race, racism, racial, interracial marriage, miscegenation, slaves, slavery, Taino Indians, rebellion.