Whereas the first ship carrying enslaved Africans to what is now known as the United States of America arrived in 1619; Whereas that event more than 400 years ago was significant not only because it ushered in the institution of chattel slavery of African Americans, but also because it facilitated the systematic oppression of all people of color that has been a devastating and insufficiently understood and acknowledged aspect of our Nation’s history over those past 400-plus years, and that has left a legacy of that oppression that haunts our Nation to this day; Whereas the institution of chattel slavery in the United States subjugated African Americans for nearly 250 years, fractured our Nation, and made a mockery of its founding principle that all men are created equal ; Whereas the signing of the Constitution of the United States failed to end slavery and oppressions against African Americans and other people of color, thus embedding in society the belief in the myth of a hierarchy of human value based on superficial physical characteristics such as skin color and facial features, and resulting in purposeful and persistent racial inequities in education, health care, employment, Social Security and veteran benefits, land ownership, financial assistance, food security, wages, voting rights, and the justice system; Whereas that oppression denied opportunity and mobility to African Americans and other people of color within the United States, resulting in stolen labor worth billions of dollars while ultimately forestalling landmark contributions that African Americans and other people of color would make in science, arts, commerce, and public service; Whereas Reconstruction represented a significant but constrained moment of advances for Black rights as epitomized by the Freedman’s Bureau, which negotiated labor contracts for ex-enslaved people but failed to secure their own land for them