Slavery. A brief History from the religious racist perspective is included in full in this book of Short Stories.

The Three Rs (Press Release)

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I became aware of slavery early. Growing up in South Africa with four black servants. We had apartheid laws and Christianity to validate white superiority. Just like America but not as extreme.  Living as a student of racism and white privilege is an ongoing 45 year lesson for me in which I find out more every day. I recently learned about Section 1 of the  Thirteenth Amendment and wonder why I missed it before. The one that makes slavery legal in the US.

Slavery, for me at least, is a big thing. Having an informed position on  slavery, why it began and why it continues, is a minimum requirement for any informed conversation on human nature.

I became aware of the California fires when I moved to California. Some 8 million acres burn every year in the autumn months.  I have watched Cal Fire in action a few times. (Talk about a free airshow.)  Last year I saw prisoners fighting the fires and I thought. Great, that’s a good opportunity for them to rehabilitate and possibly train for a new career in the Fire department. But then I read more. The California fires provide a unique insight in California. And why education matters.

Every year at wildfire season, specially chosen prisoners,  3,400 inmates in 2018 from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, find themselves  working  24-hour shifts alongside salaried California firefighters who earn an annual mean wage of $74,000 plus benefits. The inmates earn just $2 per day with an additional $1 per hour when fighting an active fire.  An inmate also earns extra time off of their sentence for good behavior, typically two days off for each day served. But they can never go on to be professional firefighters because the law excludes ex cons.  These low-cost firefighters save California an estimated $80 million a year.
How close to slave labor is that?

But wait. This is just the best example of rehabilitation within the prison system. Head south for examples of  labor gangs forced to work in the commercial sector, for the profit of their bosses. For no payment at all and no credit to their term.

Here’s the thing if you know your constitution. Thirteenth Amendment. Section 1  :
“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
Incarcerated persons have no constitutional rights and can be forced to work as punishment for their crimes. In many cases they are. White overlords form prison labor gangs and become millionairess selling their service. Slave labor. Ironically or not, most of the prisoners forced into this slave labor are Black. And the ones exploiting this constitutional error are white.

The more you learn about slavery, the USA and inherent racism in Christian Conservative America, the more clear it becomes that we must END the constitutional  loop hole allowing slavery.
Amend the Thirteenth Amendment. reduce the numbers in prison and reform the approach to rehabilitation whilst in prison. It is a crime against all humanity. Over 2 million Americans in prison as I write? More than any society in History?

I propose  we should make this change – end slavery – end for profit prisons and end the gross violations of individuals of poor educational and material opportunity by dumping them into a prison system without a second thought. Slavery and mass incarceration in a for profit prison system are unconstitutional. They only exist because of right wing racists abusing an opportunity arising from a poor choice of words in one sentence written 350 years ago.

Some background?

In the Articles of Confederation, the nation’s first constitution, there is no mention of slavery. The states were represented in Congress by state, with each state picking its own representatives, so population, which became critical in the future House of Representatives, was not relevant. Also, because fugitive slaves, and the abolition movement, were almost unheard of as late as the 1780s, there is no mention of this issue in the Articles.  There was no great movement in America to abolish slavery in the 1780’s, when the Constitutional Convention met. While there were opponents of slavery on a philosophical level,  the abolition movement did not appear until the 1830’s, when the American Anti-Slavery Society was founded.

John Jay, great supporter of the Constitution after its creation and an author of The Federalist wrote in 1786, “It is much to be wished that slavery may be abolished. The honour of the States, as well as justice and humanity, in my opinion, loudly call upon them to emancipate these unhappy people. To contend for our own liberty, and to deny that blessing to others, involves an inconsistency not to be excused.“

Oliver Ellsworth, one of the signers of the Constitution wrote, a few months after the Convention adjourned, “All good men wish the entire abolition of slavery, as soon as it can take place with safety to the public, and for the lasting good of the present wretched race of slaves.“

Patrick Henry, the great Virginian patriot, refused to attend the Convention because he “smelt a rat,” was outspoken on the issue, despite his citizenship in a slave state. In 1773, he wrote, “I believe a time will come when an opportunity will be offered to abolish this lamentable evil. Everything we do is to improve it, if it happens in our day; if not, let us transmit to our descendants, together with our slaves, a pity for their unhappy lot and an abhorrence of slavery.”

Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, which, famously, declared that “all men are created equal,” wrote, “There must doubtless be an unhappy influence on the manners of our people produced by the existence of slavery among us. The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal. This quality is the germ of all education in him.” Like many Southerners, Jefferson held slaves, as many as 223 at some points in his life. His family sold his slaves after his death, in an effort to relieve the debt he left his estate in.

In a letter to the Marquis de Lafayette, George Washington wrote, “[Y]our late purchase of an estate in the colony of Cayenne, with a view to emancipating the slaves on it, is a generous and noble proof of your humanity. Would to God a like spirit would diffuse itself generally into the minds of the people of this country; but I despair of seeing it.” Washington and his wife held over 300 slaves. He wrote in his will that he’d wished to free his slaves, but that because of intermarriage between his and Martha’s slaves, he feared the break-up of families should only his slaves be freed. He directed that his slaves be freed upon her death. His will provided for the continued care of all slaves, paid for from his estate.

With the demise of the institution of slavery, 1865 in the USA,   it was the hope of many that blacks would  rise in their citizen status. Obstacles included bitterness the South felt about the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, and the Radical Republicans. The second was basic prejudice. Inherent racism. Ingrained by Biblical belief. For centuries, most blacks had been relegated to a sub-human status, and that feeling, even among many Northerners, was not going to go away with slavery. Once the Southern states regained control of their own governments again, following Reconstruction, the Black Codes were quickly enacted.

The 14th and 15th Amendments were actually national reactions to Black Codes enacted in the South just after the Civil War. Legally, constitutionally, blacks were equal. Many of the Black Code provisions were illegal under the new amendments, and black voters, and even legislators, gained power in the immediate aftermath. But to counter the freedoms gained, eventually new Black Codes were enacted, most of which aimed to deny blacks the vote by means that did not rely on race on their face, but which relied on race at their root. Organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan also rose, intimidating black voters from exercising their new suffrage rights. Poll taxes, literacy tests, and other tactics, both legal and extra-legal, were used to deny blacks the vote. With no voice in the government, the rate of black voters, and any sign of black legislators, quickly disappeared.

Following the Plessy v Ferguson decision in 1896, where the Supreme Court ruled that while blacks had equal right under the law, but that separation of the races was legal as long as facilities were equal, throughout the South, and elsewhere, more laws were enacted to keep blacks on one side and whites on the other. These laws, known as Jim Crow laws, affected every aspect of the lives of blacks.

The term “Jim Crow” comes from popular minstrel shows around the time of the Civil War. The Jim Crow character was a stereotypical black man. The term was picked up to describe laws which segregated whites and blacks in everyday personal life, and to describe laws aimed at denying blacks the vote. By 1910, each state that had been a part of the Confederacy had a complex and complete system of Jim Crow laws in place. This legal separation continued to be buttressed by extra-legal acts, such as widespread lynchings and other terrorist acts committed upon any one who spoke out, or, often, on random blacks for the sake of pure terror.

The unfairness of the “separate but equal” doctrine seems obvious to us today, and the effects of the Plessy case on the lives of ordinary blacks seems to be very direct and incontrovertible. But it took 60 years before the courts were ready to part with the Plessy case. In that time, MANY people were killed, millions were denied the right to vote, some blacks being born and dying without even having voted, and segregation dug its claws ever deeper into American society. Culminating in 2016 with the College system choice being won by the White Supremacist racist sector in a reaction to the uppity shame of the previous White House resident. Blacks in the White house, one built by slaves, was a bridge too far in a Country where a Black man who dared to ‘Have a dream‘ was shot dead by a White racist.

So many awful stories.

George Stinney Jr.was 14 in 1944. He  was convicted of beating two young white girls to death in the small town of Alcolu. His trial lasted three hours, and a jury of 12 white men took 10 minutes to find him guilty. he had to sit on a book on the electric chair, being so small.  He is often cited as the youngest person executed in the U.S. in the 20th century. At the time of the crime, 14 was the legal age of criminal responsibility in the state. His sister said he as with her at the time. George Stinney was pronounced innocent 7o years later, in 2014.

In 1958 Alabama law stated that “It shall be unlawful for white and colored persons to play together … in any game of cards, dice, dominoes, checkers, pool, billiards, softball, basketball, football, golf, track, and at swimming pools or in any athletic conference.“
Prejudice extended past the law into the jury box, too. According to the Jim Crow Guide, “three white youths who confessed to a Christmas Eve rape of a 17-year-old Negro girl at Decatur, Georgia, were nevertheless acquitted by the DeKalb County jury.”

The complete story appears in full in this book  The Three Rs (Press Release)

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