Nearly 400 years ago, that’s where Dr. Mindy Fullilove, Professor of Urban Policy and Health at the New School, started her talk. It was in 1619 that Africans first arrived in Jamestown to be sold into bondage. The upcoming 400th anniversary of that event, Fullilove explained, is an important one. It’s a chance to commemorate and explore the experiences of those 400 years.
Dr. Fullilove’s talk “<3/5th’s: Assessing the Costs of 400 Years of Inequality,” was the School of Public Health’s inaugural Black History Month Lecture. The idea, conceived by Master’s of Public Health students Nicole Aimua, Cat Nwachukwu, and Ewu Harrell, is to host an annual lecture focusing on public health topics specific to black populations.
It was fitting then, to start at the very beginning of America’s long struggle with inequality. Dr. Fullilove explained that not long after 1619, inequality became “the fundamental operating principle in American society.” Laws were enacted, such as the Virginia Slave Codes of 1705, that codified inequality and created a caste system. Later in that century, the Three-Fifths Compromise apportioned to the States 3/5ths of one person for each slave. The slave states thereby gained greater representation than they would otherwise have had. “Without those votes we would have had a different history,” Fullilove said. “These kinds of decisions, at the founding, are shaping the history of the Republic.”
Fullilove described this legally formulated inequality—a deep contradiction in a country where “all men are created equal”—as America’s fatal flaw. As she elucidated the Country’s 400-year history of oppression—of Africans, but also of women, of Native Americans, and of the poor—this flaw of inequality threaded itself through the Civil War, two World Wars, the Civil Rights Movement, and, despite progress, through the challenges we face today.