Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

by Michael Harriot

In colonial America, if you were convicted of a crime, you were fined, whipped, banished from the community, or—in the worst-case scenario—you were sent to the gallows for capital punishment. You know what a gallows is, right? I don’t know how much news you get in there, but a few historical reenactors recently built one in front of the U.S. Capitol building just before they stormed in. The good people in Charleston, South Carolina, came up with a better solution. They monetized slave-whipping. The city offered a menu and a price list to send belligerent or misbehaving Africans to the “sugar house”—a municipal building staffed with people who were authorized to inflict violence on enslaved Black people for a small fee. But trust me, cuzzo, these professional torturers didn’t use boxing gloves.1 When Southern cities like Savannah adopted this profitable system, they came up with an official-sounding name: the Department of Corrections.