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A 1912 study found that of the 604 Fourteenth Amendment cases decided by the Supreme Court, more than half involved corporations and largely protected their power, including by striking down attempts to end child labor and establish a minimum wage.
in multiple Southern states, more than eight in ten mortgage-secured loans used enslaved people as full or partial collateral.
Years after abolishing the African slave trade in 1807, Britain, and much of Europe along with it, was bankrolling slavery in the United States.
Panic of 1837.46
bonds were backed by taxpayers, leaving states on the hook for the enslavers’ debt.
Capitalists leveraged slavery and its racial legacy to divide workers—free from unfree, white from Black—diluting their collective power.
Income inequality decreases when unionization increases, as a result of organized labor fighting for better pay for the rank and file and keeping employer power in check.
a defining feature of American capitalism is the country’s relatively low level of labor power. In
The United States remains the sole advanced democracy missing a Labor Party, one dedicated, at least in original conception, to representing the interests of the working classes.
According to the pro-slavery New York Herald, if four million enslaved Black workers were emancipated, they would flock to Northern cities and “the labor of the white man will be depreciated.”78
Given the choice between parity with Black people—by inviting them into unified unions—and poverty, white workers chose poverty, spoiling the development of a multiracial mass labor movement in America.
In Houston County, Georgia, for example, between 1850 and 1860, the number of households headed by overseers doubled, but the share of overseers who owned land declined dramatically, from 26 to 8 percent.
Witnessing the horrors of slavery drilled into poor white workers that things could be worse, and American freedom became broadly defined as the opposite of bondage.
It was a definition of freedom far too easily satisfied, a freedom ready with justifications and rationalizations as to why some were allowed to live like gods while others were cast into misery and poverty, a freedom ready with the quick answer: “Hey, this is a capitalist society, a capitalist system, and capitalist rules.”
America has evolved into one of the world’s most inequitable societies. Today, the richest 10 percent of Americans own over 75 percent of the country’s wealth, with the top 1 percent owning well over a third.
capitalism that ignores the fact that slavery didn’t just deny Black freedom but built white fortunes, originating the Black-white wealth gap that annually grows wider—one reason is that American capitalism was founded on the lowest road there is.
It was always about the contours of our national community: who belongs and who doesn’t; who counts and who shouldn’t; who can wield power and who must be subject to it.
By 1820 most South Carolinians were enslaved Africans.
historian Manisha Sinha notes in The Counterrevolution of Slavery,
it was the first Southern state where a majority of the white population...
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Individual states, Calhoun thought, should be able to veto federal laws if they believed the federal government had favored one state or section over another.
Goldwater wrote in The Conscience of a Conservative, “to preserve their rightful powers over education.”
The larger implication is clear enough: a majority made up of liberals and nonwhites isn’t a real majority.
Donald Trump’s false claims of electoral fraud in the wake of the 2020 presidential election were an expression of the idea that only certain majorities are real majorities, that only some Americans deserve to hold power.
we must recognize that this struggle—to secure democracy against privilege on the one hand, and to secure privilege against democracy on the other—is the unresolvable conflict of American life.
The House of Representatives, in each session since 2007, has introduced the Birthright Citizenship Act, a law that would exclude the U.S.–born children of undocumented immigrants from birthright’s protections.
1822, just one year after Congress allowed a ban on Black migration to Missouri, the ACS established the West African colony of Liberia. Promising
legislators pressured free Black Americans into self-exile by enacting local statutes, termed Black laws, that restricted their work, movement, and public gatherings.
New York, for example, a new 1821 state constitution imposed a hefty $250 property qualification on Black voters while it eliminated property requirements for white voters.
Instead, the only route to national belonging was through organizing and advocacy.
Black dissidents who had given up on making a future in the United States. Terming themselves emigrationists, they promoted a movement through which Black Americans could choose alternative lives and citizenship in Canada or the Caribbean.
Delany’s 1852 book, The Condition, Elevation, Emigration and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, Politically Considered,
George Downing of Rhode Island,
state militias had a very specific purpose. They were key to crushing revolts by enslaved people and buttressing enforcement of the slave codes, laws that maintained the racial hierarchy by banning Black people’s access to firearms, literacy, and unfettered movement.
Some 179,000 Black men, 10 percent of the Union army, fought in the war. An additional 19,000 served in the navy.
President Andrew Johnson granted amnesty to many in the Confederate leadership.
Between 1865 and 1868, white people murdered more than one thousand African Americans in one area of Texas.
mid-1870s President Ulysses S. Grant painfully acknowledged that the slew of murders meant that white people clearly had “the right to Kill negroes…without fear of punishment, and without loss of caste or reputation.”
Lela Bond Phillips writes in The Lena Baker Story,
Dressed in their “uniforms” of leather jackets and berets, the Panthers openly carried rifles and .45s while monitoring Oakland police officers making arrests. As an act of community self-defense, they policed the police.
In 2020, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights reported on the racial implications of Stand Your Ground laws: the criminal justice system is ten times more likely to rule a homicide justifiable if the shooter is white and victim is Black than the other way around.
when a white person kills an African American, it is 281 percent more likely to be ruled a “justifiable homicide” than a white-on-white killing.
this country contains 4 percent of the planet’s population but 20 percent of its prisoners.
researchers have repeatedly established that the race of the victim is the greatest predictor of who gets the death penalty in the United States.
In 2008, EJI established that all of the thirteen- and fourteen-year-old children in this country sentenced to life in prison without parole for non-homicide offenses were Black, Latino, or Native.5
Incarcerated people in most states have no right to counsel for post-conviction appeals,
For a nation that prides itself on being exceptionally committed to freedom, America has produced an endless list of harsh, extreme, and cruel sentences, across the fifty states, for minor and major crimes.
The 1664 General Assembly of Maryland decreed that all Negroes shall serve durante vita, hard labor “for life.”
Formal slavery may have ended in 1865, but the social, legal, economic, and political system built in the South to sustain slavery survived by evolving into new forms.
But unlike slavery, in which enslavers at least had a financial interest in keeping enslaved people alive and functional, convict leasing stripped imprisoned people of any protection and made them completely replaceable and easily discarded.
