A black character on a new time-travel show said that “there’s literally no place in American history that’ll be awesome for me”. Is he correct, or is there some point in American history where prejudice against black people hasn’t developed?

Yeah, there’s some truth to that. For every moment that one could go back to in the past which you could call a triumph or a moment of progress for black people, it’s impossible not to find also some horror that must be set against it. You cannot tell the story of the civil rights movement without the horrific racial violence that accompanied each and every step forward; the Harlem Renaissance came on the heels of the worst years for lynching and race riots America has ever seen; the story of Juneteenth cannot be told without telling the story of slavery. 

Even if you go all the way back to that early period before the Slave Codes began to formalize and institutionalize a racial divide in American society out of fear that the alliance between white indentured servants and black slaves that had resulted in Bacon’s Rebellion would come again, you’re still talking about what people would later call “slavery times.”