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 …
In her 2020 masterpiece, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson explains limiting employment opportunities for all people of color to domestic service or farm work. Wilkerson adds that throughout the Jim Crow regime, African Americans, like Jews in Nazi Germany, were prohibited by law from walking on the sidewalk. They were compelled by …
Speaking with Bob Zellner, veteran organizer with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, I asked, “What drove White people to fight to the death to maintain White supremacy?” He shared with me his theory of the shrunken heart. “First of all, slavery was an act of war,” he said. “It had to be carried out every …
by Lisa Sharon Harper https://lisasharonharper.substack.com/p/american-justice?s=r&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=direct
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’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 …
But Black oblivion is not the only kind of oblivion within American colonial slavocracy. Mystery compounds mystery with the southeastern states’ prolific investment in the Native American slave trade. Long before the first enslaved Angolans landed in Virginia in 1619, southeastern indigenous nations were pitted against one another and encouraged to sell their tribal enemies …
