lisa sharon harper

Convict Leasing

Peonage caught millions of Black boys and men in the web of convict leasing by leveraging the freight-sized loophole in the Thirteenth Amendment, allowing enslavement in the case of imprisonment. Jim Crow politicians made an end run around the rising labor movement’s demands by resurrecting slavocracy and sweeping Black men and boys off the street …

Convict Leasing Read More »

Repentance will require people of European descent to face this truth

When the image of God was crushed, broken, twisted, distorted, covered, or erased, the ancient Hebrews originally hearing this text would have understood these acts against humanity to be acts of war against God. European conquest of land and people throughout the Enlightenment period was actually a period of European wrestling against God for control …

Repentance will require people of European descent to face this truth Read More »

South Carolina slave laws

South Carolina’s layered slave trades grew in complexity. The multiplying African population increased the terror of White settlers, who codified their fear into law through new race codes in 1740: “All negroes and Indians, (free Indians in amity with this government, and negroes, mulatoos, and mestizos, who are now free, excepted) mulattoes (African/European) or mestizos …

South Carolina slave laws Read More »