tag:theconversation.com,2011:/id/topics/abolition-68120/articlesAbolition – The Conversation2023-10-13T16:31:25Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2134192023-10-13T16:31:25Z2023-10-13T16:31:25ZCardinal Newman: pro-slavery views of prominent 19th-century cleric raise questions about his educational legacy<p>One of the comforting stories the British told themselves in the 19th and 20th centuries was that they were implacably opposed to slavery.</p>
<p>Britons had decided “that the disgrace of slavery should not be suffered to remain part of our national system”, or so Lord Stanley, the colonial secretary at the moment of abolition, maintained. It was a claim willingly accepted by later generations. The <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/slavery-abolition-act-1833">1833 Act</a> that abolished slavery in Britain’s Atlantic empire reflected the undivided national will.</p>
<p>But <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/439452/the-interest-by-michael-taylor/9781529110982">recent scholarship</a> casts doubt on that verdict. The West Indian planters, who held hundreds of thousands in bondage, were well-connected and influential. The freeing of their captive workers did not seem to them inevitable. Many abolitionists thought the same, despairing at the entrenched power of the slave masters. </p>
<p>When slavery went, it went because a series of political crises in Britain splintered the pro-slavery Tory coalition that had dominated politics for decades. It ended too because <a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674984301">resistance by the enslaved</a> in the Caribbean convinced legislators in London that slavery was no longer sustainable. But not all commentators were persuaded that slavery had to go. </p>
<h2>Newman and the Oxford Movement</h2>
<p>One of them was <a href="https://www.universitychurch.ox.ac.uk/content/st-john-henry-newman">John Henry Newman</a> (1801-1890), fellow of Oriel College Oxford and the vicar of St Mary’s, Oxford’s university church. </p>
<p>Newman was one of the most significant churchmen of the age. Eventually received into the Roman Catholic church in 1845, he became the most influential English Catholic of the 19th century. He was made a cardinal in 1879, and in 2019 he was canonised. For that reason, Newman’s name is attached to dozens of Roman Catholic schools and colleges in Britain, as well as a university in the West Midlands.</p>
<p>But before his conversion, he was a leading figure in the Oxford Movement, a high church group that wanted to renew the institutional authority of Anglicanism by emphasising its rootedness in the early church. Appealing to scripture, the path favoured by Evangelical Anglicans, was dismissed as insufficient. </p>
<p>There were political consequences. Evangelicals of the time tended towards anti-slavery. The clergymen who made up the Oxford Movement did not. Indeed, notes prepared by John Henry Newman for a <a href="https://www.oxfordscholarlyeditions.com/display/10.1093/actrade/9780199200900.book.1/actrade-9780199200900-book-1">sermon at Oxford in 1835</a> reveal that he was profoundly hostile to the idea of emancipation.</p>
<h2>Preaching against emancipation</h2>
<p>Abolitionist rhetoric about human brotherhood was brushed aside. “It is a very easy thing,” Newman told his congregation, “to talk of loving all men”. But could his congregation, were they to be whisked from their cloistered lives in Oxford to the West Indies, do so in practice? Newman thought not:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It is said to be one of the most difficult tasks of our Ministers to persuade white men to receive the Holy Communion with blacks. I do not say such reluctance is a light sin – it is a serious one – yet perhaps we should feel strongly tempted to it if we lived in the countries where they are to be found. I do not doubt we should.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>An aversion to communing with black people was, Newman suggested, quite understandable. It would require white people to hurdle an insurmountable racial barrier.</p>
<p>Having established, in his own mind at least, that racial repulsion was instinctual, Newman turned to the matter of slavery. As was usual with clerical defenders of slavery, Newman reached for the epistles of St Paul. Taking <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Letter-of-Paul-to-the-Corinthians">Paul’s</a> first letter to the Corinthians as his text, the vicar of St Mary’s came to this conclusion:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Now we find in these words a doctrine stated, very startlingly and unpalatable to men of this day, but which is most clear and certain and contained in other parts of Scripture – viz that slavery is a condition of life ordained by God…</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Contemporary abolitionists who drew upon the gospel when criticising slavery did so without warrant. They were guilty of uttering “idle and false words”. Warming to his theme, Newman went on to rail against reformers more generally. Their talk of “liberty, equality, rights, privileges, and the like” was offensive to God.</p>
<h2>Assessing Newman</h2>
<p>Historical figures, it is often said, need to be assessed by the standards of their own time. Yet John Henry Newman’s venomous sermon, coming little more than a year after the end of slavery in the British sugar islands, reminds us that the “standards of the time” were plural. </p>
<p>Many Britons of the 1830s gloried in abolition, but there were many others who were content with slavery and racial subjugation. And there were some, like Newman, who were willing to say so in provocative ways.</p>
<p>Newman’s words from 1835 have been forgotten, but John Henry Newman has not. Students and educators at those institutions that bear his name might want to consider whether it should continue to be so attached.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/213419/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Chris Evans does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Many Catholic schools in Britain retain the name John Henry Newman, despite his opposition to abolishing slavery.Chris Evans, Professor of History, University of South WalesLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2062592023-06-01T15:37:24Z2023-06-01T15:37:24ZListen: Trans scholar and activist explains why trans rights are under attack<iframe height="200px" width="100%" frameborder="no" scrolling="no" seamless="" src="https://player.simplecast.com/e2ecabe1-cf01-433c-bd7e-7aac7f1d241a?dark=true"></iframe>
<p>This year we’ve seen an aggressive push to implement anti-trans legislation across the United States. There are currently more than <a href="https://translegislation.com/">400 active anti-trans</a> bills across the country. </p>
<p>Some of the legislation <a href="https://time.com/6265755/gender-affirm-care-bans-u-s/">denies gender-affirming care to youth</a> – and criminalizes those health-care providers that attempt to do so. Other bills <a href="https://apnews.com/article/transgender-nonbinary-hormone-puberty-missouri-lawmakers-5a8922430ffab9e43cf9b7ce254bff9f#:%7E:text=Charlie%20Riedel%2C%20File">block trans students from participating in sports</a> and still others have banned books with trans content. </p>
<p>These bills have at least two things in common. They all aim to make being trans harder in an already hostile society and they are being spearheaded by the far-right. </p>
<p>Where does anti-trans sentiment come from? </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/529186/original/file-20230530-23-atrb5u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/529186/original/file-20230530-23-atrb5u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529186/original/file-20230530-23-atrb5u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529186/original/file-20230530-23-atrb5u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529186/original/file-20230530-23-atrb5u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529186/original/file-20230530-23-atrb5u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529186/original/file-20230530-23-atrb5u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Black Lives Matter activists organize a sit-in at Yonge Street and College Street during the Trans Pride March, in Toronto, 2016. (THE CANADIAN PRESS/Eduardo Lima)</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/society/transphobia-white-supremacy/">enforcement of a gender binary</a> likely has much to do with the preservation of white power. And, <a href="https://www.advocate.com/commentary/2022/5/20/through-line-critical-race-dont-say-gay-great-replacement">violence</a> against trans people continues as a result. </p>
<h2>Is Canada better?</h2>
<p>What do things look like in Canada? Are we a safe haven or are we following some of the same trends?</p>
<p>Recently, a <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/us-transgender-asylum-petition-1.6779692">petition</a> signed by <a href="https://petitions.ourcommons.ca/en/Petition/Details?Petition=e-4268">over 160,000 people</a> asked the Canadian government to extend asylum to trans and gender non-conforming people from nations in the West, previously considered safe. </p>
<p>To get a better understanding of trans histories in Canada, <a href="https://dont-call-me-resilient.simplecast.com/episodes/listen-to-an-american-canadian-trans-scholar-and-activist-explain-why-trans-rights-are-under-attack">we are joined by Syrus Marcus Ware</a>, an artist, activist and assistant professor at the School of the Arts at McMaster University. He is a co-curator of Blockorama/Blackness Yes! and a co-editor of <a href="https://uofrpress.ca/Books/U/Until-We-Are-Free"><em>Until We Are Free: Reflections on Black Lives Matter in Canada</em></a>.</p>
<p>We discuss the history of anti-trans and queer actions in Canada. We also speak about backlash and ways to move forward.</p>
<h2>Listen and Follow</h2>
<p>You can listen to or follow <em><a href="https://dont-call-me-resilient.simplecast.com/episodes/listen-to-an-american-canadian-trans-scholar-and-activist-explain-why-trans-rights-are-under-attack">Don’t Call Me Resilient</a></em> on <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/dont-call-me-resilient/id1549798876">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5zaW1wbGVjYXN0LmNvbS9qZFg0Ql9DOA">Google Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/37tK4zmjWvq2Sh6jLIpzp7">Spotify</a> or <a href="https://dont-call-me-resilient.simplecast.com">wherever you listen to your favourite podcasts</a>. </p>
<p><a href="mailto:DCMR@theconversation.com">We’d love to hear from you</a>, including any ideas for future episodes. Join The Conversation on <a href="https://twitter.com/ConversationCA">Twitter</a>, <a href="https://www.facebook.com/TheConversationCanada">Facebook</a>, <a href="https://www.instagram.com/theconversationdotcom/">Instagram</a> and <a href="https://www.tiktok.com/@theconversation">TikTok</a> and use #DontCallMeResilient.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A person with a rainbow on their shirt holds up a hand with a pointed finger and a sign in the other hand. They appear to be yelling." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/529465/original/file-20230531-24-q99it2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/529465/original/file-20230531-24-q99it2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529465/original/file-20230531-24-q99it2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529465/original/file-20230531-24-q99it2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529465/original/file-20230531-24-q99it2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529465/original/file-20230531-24-q99it2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529465/original/file-20230531-24-q99it2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Brenna Thompson protests this month against an abortion ban and restrictions on gender-affirming care for children in Lincoln, Neb.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Justin Wan/Lincoln Journal Star via AP/KOLN-TV OUT</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Resources</h2>
<p><a href="https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-3814961">All Power to All People? Black LGBTTI2QQ Activism, Remembrance, and Archiving in Toronto</a> (<em>Transgender Studies Quarterly</em>) by Syrus Marcus Ware </p>
<p><a href="https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2023/05/30/pride-flag-wont-fly-at-york-catholic-schools-after-board-votes-against-the-motion.html">‘A travesty’: Outrage swells over York Catholic board’s rejection of Pride flag</a> (<em>Toronto Star</em>) </p>
<p><a href="https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/2022/10/05/supreme-court-cant-ignore-equality-rights-claims-of-refugees.html">Supreme Court can’t ignore equality rights claims of refugees</a> (<em>Toronto Star</em>) </p>
<p><a href="https://xtramagazine.com/power/toronto-bathhouse-raids-40-years-194590">Everything you need to know about the Toronto bathhouse raids</a> (<em>Xtra</em>) </p>
<p><a href="https://xtramagazine.com/power/what-the-national-inquiry-into-missing-and-murdered-indigenous-women-and-girls-means-for-two-spirit-canadians-158992">What the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls means for Two-Spirit people</a> (<em>Xtra</em>) </p>
<p><a href="https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-2009-015">Settler Homonationalism: Theorizing Settler Colonialism within Queer Modernities</a> (<em>Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies</em>) by Scott Lauria Morgensen </p>
<p><a href="https://blockorama.ca/">Blockorama/Blackness Yes!</a></p>
<h2>From the archives - in The Conversation</h2>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/transgender-hate-crimes-are-on-the-rise-even-in-canada-121541">Transgender hate crimes are on the rise even in Canada</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/cuts-to-telehealth-in-ontario-mean-fewer-trans-and-non-binary-people-will-have-access-to-life-saving-health-care-198502">Cuts to telehealth in Ontario mean fewer trans and non-binary people will have access to life-saving health care</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/i-went-to-cpac-to-take-maga-supporters-pulse-china-and-transgender-people-are-among-the-top-demons-they-say-are-ruining-the-country-201442">I went to CPAC to take MAGA supporters' pulse – China and transgender people are among the top 'demons' they say are ruining the country</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/right-to-party-20-years-of-black-queer-love-and-resilience-80040">Right to party: 20 years of Black Queer love and resilience</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/206259/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
This year, there are more than 400 active anti-trans bills across the U.S. What do things look like in Canada? Are we a safe haven or are we following those same trends?Vinita Srivastava, Host + Producer, Don't Call Me ResilientBoké Saisi, Associate Producer, Don't Call Me ResilientLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2016772023-03-20T14:08:47Z2023-03-20T14:08:47ZKenya’s police are violent, unaccountable and make most citizens feel less safe – should they be abolished?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/515187/original/file-20230314-1506-fjivlu.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Kenyans protest against police extrajudicial killings in Nairobi in December 2022. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Tony Karumba/AFP via Getty Images</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>A world without the police is inconceivable to many people. The police are viewed as part of modern society’s foundation, ensuring democracy and keeping people safe. </p>
<p>In practice, however, police around the world sometimes repress <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/dec/29/fbi-coordinated-crackdown-occupy">social movements</a>, stifle <a href="https://sociologytwynham.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/policing-the-crisis.pdf">democracy</a>, and exacerbate social and racial <a href="https://theintercept.com/2020/06/10/ruth-wilson-gilmore-makes-the-case-for-abolition/">injustice</a>. Across the African continent, they often use force to prop up repressive regimes. And in Kenya in particular, <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-art-of-bribery-a-closeup-look-at-how-traffic-officers-operate-on-kenyas-roads-185551">extortion</a> and <a href="https://www.matharesocialjustice.org/who-is-next/">extrajudicial killings</a> by the police are <a href="http://parliament.go.ke/sites/default/files/2021-11/Report%20on%20Inquiry%20into%20Extrajudicial%20Killings%20and%20Enforced%20Disappearance%20in%20Kenya_.pdf">rampant</a>. </p>
<p>Kenya is unusual for its extensive attempts to reform the police. Reform efforts began in earnest in 2008, when the police were found to be <a href="https://digitalcommons.law.seattleu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1004&context=tjrc-gov">complicit in post-election violence</a>. And yet, after 15 years and <a href="https://nation.africa/kenya/news/kenya-police-reforms-to-cost-sh81-4bn--746284">billions of shillings spent</a>, the police reform project has <a href="https://www.theelephant.info/features/2017/06/01/set-up-to-fail-police-reforms-in-kenya/">largely failed</a>. </p>
<p>The Kenyan police remain repressive, unaccountable and effectively unreformable. Many citizens complain about how the police treat them <a href="https://theworld.org/stories/2016-05-23/police-officers-treat-nairobi-neighborhood-atm-machine-residents-say">like ATMs</a> – a source of cash. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the police <a href="https://www.citizen.digital/news/kenya-police-have-killed-15-people-injured-31-in-covid-19-curfew-enforcement-ipoa-334522">killed tens of Kenyans</a> while enforcing curfew measures. </p>
<p>Given such failures, we posed the question: are the Kenya police <a href="https://www.akpress.org/areprisonsobsolete.html">obsolete</a>? </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/kenya-police-killings-point-to-systemic-rot-and-a-failed-justice-system-193468">Kenya: police killings point to systemic rot and a failed justice system</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>We’ve conducted hundreds of interviews, discussion groups and over a decade of ethnographic research into how <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1463499617729295">counter-terrorist policing</a> and <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1463499617729229">securitisation</a> have shaped <a href="https://www.african-cities.org/safety-and-security/">Nairobi</a>. And in turn, how local residents <a href="https://www.sapiens.org/culture/police-violence-kenya/">respond to police violence</a> and build their own <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-018-0078-8">practices of care</a>, mutual aid and <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0042098018789059">security</a>. </p>
<p>We have come to the conclusion that the police make most people feel less safe. Many residents told us they don’t depend on the police for their safety: they keep each other safe. Given the impasse of police reform – and citizen responses to this – there is a strong argument to be made for the abolition of the Kenyan police altogether. </p>
<h2>Policing at an impasse</h2>
<p>Modern police institutions made their first appearances on the African continent as part of colonisation and the expansion of European capitalist interests.</p>
<p>In Kenya, the roots of policing lie in early colonial “<a href="https://www.ohioswallow.com/book/unhappy+valley">conquest</a>”. The Imperial British East African Company developed security forces to protect its expanding economic interests in the 1890s, and the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/place/Kenya/The-East-Africa-Protectorate#ref419085">Kenya-Uganda Railroad</a> developed its own police force in 1902. </p>
<p>After Kenya’s independence in 1963, the police were “Africanised” but retained much of their <a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9781137558305_4">colonial character</a>. Under <a href="https://theconversation.com/daniel-arap-moi-the-making-of-a-kenyan-big-man-127177">Daniel arap Moi’s authoritarian regime</a> (1978-2002), the police continued to play a key role in repressing dissent. </p>
<p>There have been calls to reform the Kenyan police for decades. But the <a href="https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2009/10/un-human-rights-team-issues-report-post-election-violence-kenya">2007-08 post-election violence</a>, in which police were complicit in widespread ethnic violence, accelerated attempts at reform.</p>
<p>Over the past 15 years, police reform has been enshrined in the <a href="https://www.klrc.go.ke/index.php/constitution-of-kenya/158-chapter-fourteen-national-security/part-4-the-national-police-service/413-244-objects-and-functions-of-the-national-police-service">2010 constitution</a> and actualised in numerous acts of parliament. It’s been supported internationally with <a href="https://www.unodc.org/documents/evaluation/Briefs/2018/KENZ04_Final_Evaluation_Brief_June_2018.pdf">funding and technical expertise</a> from the UN, the US and the EU, among others. It prompted the <a href="https://www.nationalpolice.go.ke/pages/search.html">reorganisation of the police service</a> and the establishment of <a href="https://www.ipoa.go.ke/#">civil oversight mechanisms</a>. </p>
<p>Yet, despite all of these efforts, the Kenyan police <a href="https://theconversation.com/kenya-police-killings-point-to-systemic-rot-and-a-failed-justice-system-193468">remain corrupt, violent and unaccountable</a>. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/kenya-has-tried-to-reform-its-police-force-but-its-left-gaps-for-abuse-176044">Kenya has tried to reform its police force, but it's left gaps for abuse</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Civilian oversight over the police has proved ineffectual. The Independent Policing Oversight Agency has managed to bring only <a href="http://www.parliament.go.ke/sites/default/files/2022-03/Report%20of%20Independent%20Policing%20Oversight%20Authority%20on%20Performance%20for%20January%20%E2%80%93%20June%202021.pdf">12 cases of police violence to conviction</a> out of more than 20,000 complaints received between 2012 and 2021. That is only one out of every 1,667 complaints. The under-resourced agency simply can’t grapple with the immense volume of reported police abuses.</p>
<h2>The case for abolition</h2>
<p>Police reform <a href="https://www.theelephant.info/features/2017/06/01/set-up-to-fail-police-reforms-in-kenya/">has failed</a>. Is it time to consider abolition?</p>
<p>Abolition is not about simply tearing things down, but rather asking what should exist in place of outdated and violent systems that no longer serve people. Abolition is a <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/mariame-kaba-interview-til-we-free-us/">creative</a> and <a href="https://theintercept.com/2020/06/10/ruth-wilson-gilmore-makes-the-case-for-abolition/">constructive project</a> with deep <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwYik8nn63U">philosophical roots</a>. </p>
<p>So why abolish the Kenya police?</p>
<ol>
<li><p>The police are functionally obsolete for most Kenyans. In many low-income neighbourhoods, <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0042098018789059">our research shows</a> that people avoid calling the police to respond to crises or crimes. For many, experience shows that the police can <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-64509793">make matters worse</a>.</p></li>
<li><p>The police often exacerbate insecurity, violence and <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-art-of-bribery-a-closeup-look-at-how-traffic-officers-operate-on-kenyas-roads-185551">corruption</a>. To provide for their own safety, residents increasingly <a href="https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/publishing/journal-british-academy/10s3/to-retreat-or-to-confront-grassroots-activists-navigating-everyday-torture-in-kenya/">organise themselves into networks</a> of friends, family and neighbours for basic safety. For instance, women in Mathare, Nairobi, <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0042098018789059">organise their own security practices</a>, which include conflict resolution, de-escalation of violence and <a href="https://www.matharesocialjustice.org/mothers-of-victims-and-survivors-network-from-victims-to-community-defenders/">support for survivors</a>.</p></li>
<li><p>In more affluent neighbourhoods, residents increasingly rely on private companies to provide <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1463499617729295">security in their compounds</a>. Police are seen as one among <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0263775820923374">many security services</a> available for hire. In our research, the few positive experiences with the Kenyan police were reported (predominantly) by such affluent residents.</p></li>
<li><p>The remaining function of the police is “<a href="https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Enforcing+Order:+An+Ethnography+of+Urban+Policing-p-9780745664804">enforcing order</a>” and protecting the state against society. Officers uphold and protect a rarefied governing class and political elite against the population. </p></li>
</ol>
<p>Police abolition, therefore, would mean dismantling ineffective and repressive institutions and replacing them with <a href="https://www.akpress.org/we-do-this-til-we-free-us.html">systems of actual safety</a>, systems that enable society to thrive.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/many-kenyans-have-embraced-vigilante-cops-an-ineffective-police-force-is-to-blame-196449">Many Kenyans have embraced vigilante cops – an ineffective police force is to blame</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>What should replace the police?</h2>
<p>When confronted with the idea of “abolition” for the first time, many people often respond: “but who will keep us safe?” </p>
<p>In Nairobi, the answer is to be found in existing social practices. The problem is that there’s a lack of resources to support alternatives to punitive security. We call for defunding the police and investing these resources in such alternatives.</p>
<p><strong>1. Invest in communities.</strong> When we ask about local security problems, residents often answer that the lack of schools, food, land, quality housing, <a href="https://www.matharesocialjustice.org/category/maji-ni-haki-water-campaign/">water</a>, electricity, toilets, healthcare and safe places for kids to play are what cause “insecurity”. Reinvestment in community means funding such social infrastructure to allow people to thrive. This reduces <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/research/want-to-reduce-violence-invest-in-place/">crime and violence</a>. </p>
<p><strong>2. Invest in alternative safety mechanisms.</strong> This means strengthening dispute-resolution mechanisms that help resolve conflicts without violence. The government needs to support existing <a href="https://www.matharesocialjustice.org">social justice centres</a>, <a href="https://africa.unwomen.org/en/news-and-events/stories/2021/08/inside-kenyas-social-justice-centres">networks</a> and movements fighting for change. </p>
<p>When these forms of social reinvestment are pursued, the need for the police is greatly diminished.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/201677/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Wangui Kimari is the participatory action research coordinator for the Mathare Social Justice Centre (MSJC) </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Zoltán Glück received research funding from the Social Science Research Council, Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Fulbright IIE, and the African Cities Research Consortium. The views expressed in this article are solely the authors' and do not represent the positions of any of these funding organizations. </span></em></p>Alternatives to violent policing already exist in the daily practices of Nairobi residents who don’t depend on the police for safety.Wangui Kimari, Anthropologist, University of Cape TownZoltán Glück, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, American UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1870572022-08-11T12:14:18Z2022-08-11T12:14:18ZPoliticians seek to control classroom discussions about slavery in the US<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/478567/original/file-20220810-4757-e6ok2b.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C3994%2C2664&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A Texas law says slavery cannot be taught as part of the 'true founding' of the United States.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/members-of-the-house-select-committee-on-constitutional-news-photo/1233910770?adppopup=true">Tamir Kalifa/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Of all the subjects taught in the nation’s public schools, few have generated as much controversy of late as the <a href="https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1818816116">subjects of racism and slavery</a> in the United States.</p>
<p>The attention has come largely through a <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2022/01/05/gop-red-wave-critical-race-theory-526523">flood of legislative bills put forth primarily by Republicans</a> over the past year and a half. Commonly referred to as anti-critical race theory legislation, these bills are meant to <a href="https://www.chalkbeat.org/22525983/map-critical-race-theory-legislation-teaching-racism">restrict how teachers discuss race and racism in their classrooms</a>.</p>
<p>One of the more peculiar byproducts of this legislation came out of Texas, where, in June 2022, an advisory panel made up of nine educators recommended that slavery be referred to as “<a href="https://www.texastribune.org/2022/06/30/texas-slavery-involuntary-relocation/">involuntary relocation</a>.” </p>
<p>The measure <a href="https://www.complex.com/life/texas-education-slavery-involuntary-relocation">ultimately failed</a>.</p>
<p>As an educator who trains teachers on how to educate young students about the history of slavery in the United States, I see the Texas proposal as part of a disturbing trend of politicians seeking to hide the <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/cambridge-world-history-of-violence/violence-slavery-and-race-in-early-english-and-french-america/A70A9EB704B9377091F489FB185C596D">horrific and brutal nature of slavery</a> – and to keep it divorced from the nation’s birth and development.</p>
<p>The Texas proposal, for instance, grew out of work done under a <a href="https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/872/billtext/pdf/SB00003F.pdf#navpanes=0">Texas law</a> that says slavery and racism can’t be taught as part of the “true founding” of the United States. Rather, the law states, they must be taught as a “failure to live up to the authentic founding principles of the United States, which include liberty and equality.”</p>
<p>To better understand the nature of slavery and the role it played in America’s development, it helps to have some basic facts about how long slavery lasted in the territory now known as the United States and how many enslaved people it involved. I also believe in using authentic records to show students the reality of slavery.</p>
<h2>Before the Mayflower</h2>
<p>Slavery in what is now known as the United States is often traced back to the year 1619. That is when – as documented by <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Rolfe">Colonist John Rolfe</a> – a ship named the White Lion delivered <a href="https://www.nps.gov/jame/learn/historyculture/african-americans-at-jamestown.htm">20 or so enslaved Africans </a> to Virginia.</p>
<p>As for the notion that slavery was not part of the founding of the United States, that is easily refuted by the U.S. Constitution itself. Specifically, <a href="https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S9-C1-1/ALDE_00001086/">Article 1, Section 9, Clause 1</a> prevented Congress from prohibiting the “importation” of slaves until 1808 – nearly 20 years after the Constitution was ratified – although it didn’t use the word “slaves.” Instead, the Constitution used the phrase “such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit.”</p>
<p>Congress ultimately passed the “<a href="https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/slave-trade.html#:%7E:text=The%201808%20Act%20imposed%20heavy,its%20passengers%20sold%20into%20slavery.">Act Prohibiting the Importation of Slaves</a>,” which took effect in 1808. Although the act imposed heavy penalties on international traders, it did not end slavery itself nor the domestic sale of slaves. Not only did it drive trade underground, but many ships caught illegally trading were also brought into the United States and their “<a href="https://www.docsteach.org/documents/document/act-prohibit-importation-slaves">passengers</a>” sold into slavery.</p>
<p>The last known slave ship – the Clotilda – <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/clotilda-last-known-slave-ship-arrive-us-found-180972177/">arrived in Mobile, Alabama, in 1860</a>, more than half a century after Congress outlawed the importation of enslaved individuals.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/478572/original/file-20220810-11-fge28d.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A map of Africa showing slave trade routes" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/478572/original/file-20220810-11-fge28d.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/478572/original/file-20220810-11-fge28d.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=613&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478572/original/file-20220810-11-fge28d.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=613&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478572/original/file-20220810-11-fge28d.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=613&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478572/original/file-20220810-11-fge28d.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=770&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478572/original/file-20220810-11-fge28d.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=770&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478572/original/file-20220810-11-fge28d.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=770&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">An 1880 map shows where enslaved people originated from and in which directions they were forced out.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/map-showing-the-sources-of-slave-supply-and-routes-of-news-photo/3277873?adppopup=true">Hulton Archive/Stringer via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>According to the <a href="https://hutchinscenter.fas.harvard.edu/trans-atlantic-slave-trade-database">Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade database</a>, which derives it numbers from shipping records from 1525 to 1866, approximately 12.5 million enslaved Africans were transported to the Americas. About 10.7 million survived the Middle Passage and arrived in North America, the Caribbean and South America. Of these, only a small portion – <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cross/history/how-many-slaves-landed-in-the-us/">388,000</a> – arrived in North America.</p>
<p>Most enslaved people in the United States, then, entered slavery not through importation or “involuntary relocation,” but by birth.</p>
<p>From the arrival of those first 20 so enslaved Africans in 1619 until slavery was <a href="https://www.archives.gov/historical-docs/13th-amendment#:%7E:text=Passed%20by%20Congress%20on%20January,within%20the%20United%20States%2C%20or">abolished in 1865</a>, approximately <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/0144039X.2020.1755502">10 million slaves lived in the United States and contributed 410 billion hours of labor</a>. This is why slavery is a “<a href="https://equitablegrowth.org/working-papers/the-contribution-of-enslaved-workers-to-output-and-growth-in-the-antebellum-united-states/">crucial building block</a>” to understanding the U.S. economy from the nation’s founding up until the Civil War.</p>
<h2>The value of historical records</h2>
<p>As an educator who trains teachers on how to deal with the subject of slavery, I don’t see any value in politicians’ restricting what teachers can and can’t say about the role that slaveholders – <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/interactive/2022/congress-slaveowners-names-list/">at least 1,800 of whom were congressmen</a>, not to mention the <a href="https://www.whitehousehistory.org/slavery-in-the-presidents-neighborhood-faq#:%7E:text=A%3A%20According%20to%20surviving%20documentation%2C%20at%20least%20twelve%20presidents%20were,Andrew%20Johnson%2C%20and%20Ulysses%20S.">12 who were U.S. presidents</a> – played in the upholding of slavery in American society.</p>
<p>What I see value in is the use of historical records to educate schoolchildren about the harsh realities of slavery. There are three types of records that I recommend in particular.</p>
<h2>1. Census records</h2>
<p>Since enslaved people were counted in each census that took place from 1790 to 1860, census records enable students to learn a lot about who specifically owned slaves. Census records also enable students to see differences in slave ownership within states and throughout the nation.</p>
<p>The censuses also show the growth of the slave population over time – from
<a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/0144039X.2020.1755502">697,624</a> during the first census in 1790, shortly after the nation’s founding, to <a href="https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1860/population/1860a-02.pdf">3.95 million</a> during the 1860 census, <a href="https://www.loc.gov/classroom-materials/civil-war-the-nation-moves-towards-war-1850-to-1861/">as the nation stood at the verge of civil war</a>.</p>
<h2>2. Ads for runaway slaves</h2>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/478576/original/file-20220810-11-2f8cts.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="An advertisement for two men who ran away from slavery" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/478576/original/file-20220810-11-2f8cts.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/478576/original/file-20220810-11-2f8cts.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=821&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478576/original/file-20220810-11-2f8cts.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=821&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478576/original/file-20220810-11-2f8cts.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=821&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478576/original/file-20220810-11-2f8cts.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1031&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478576/original/file-20220810-11-2f8cts.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1031&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478576/original/file-20220810-11-2f8cts.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1031&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Advertisements for fugitive slaves offer a glimpse into their lives.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Few things speak to the horrors and harms of slavery like ads that slave owners took out for runaway slaves.</p>
<p>It’s not hard to find ads that describe fugitive slaves whose bodies were covered with various scars from beatings and marks from branding irons.</p>
<p>For instance, consider an <a href="https://dlas.uncg.edu/notices/notice/505">ad taken out on July 3, 1823</a>, in the<a href="https://www.loc.gov/item/sn83025819/"> Star, and North-Carolina State Gazette</a> by Alford Green, who offers $25 for a fugitive slave named Ned, whom he described as follows:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“… about 21 years old, his weight about 150, well made, spry and active tolorably fierce look, a little inclined to be yellow, his upper fore teeth a little defective, and, I expect, has some signs of the whip on his hips and thighs, as he was whipped in that way the day before he went off.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Advertisements for runaway slaves can be accessed via digital databases, such as <a href="https://app.freedomonthemove.org/">Freedom on the Move</a>, which contains more than 32,000 ads. Another database – the <a href="http://dlas.uncg.edu/notices/">North Carolina Runaway Slave Notices project</a> – contains 5,000 ads published in North Carolina newspapers from 1751 to 1865. The sheer number of these advertisements sheds light on how many enslaved Black people attempted to escape bondage.</p>
<h2>3. Personal narratives from the enslaved</h2>
<p>Though they are few in number, recordings of interviews with formerly enslaved people exist.</p>
<p>Some of the interviews are <a href="https://www.loc.gov/collections/slave-narratives-from-the-federal-writers-project-1936-to-1938/articles-and-essays/introduction-to-the-wpa-slave-narratives/limitations-of-the-slave-narrative-collection">problematic</a> for various reasons. For instance, some of the interviews were heavily edited by interviewers or did not include complete, word-for-word transcripts of the interviews.</p>
<p>Yet the interviews still provide a glimpse at the harshness of life in bondage. They also expose the fallacy of the argument that slaves – <a href="https://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/wise/wise.html">as one slave owner claimed in his memoir</a> – “loved ‘old Marster’ better than anybody in the world, and would not have freedom if he offered it to them.”</p>
<p>For instance, when Fountain Hughes – a <a href="https://www.monticello.org/getting-word/people/fountain-hughes">descendant of a slave owned by Thomas Jefferson</a> who spent his boyhood in slavery in Charlottesville, Virginia – was asked if he would rather be free or enslaved, he <a href="https://www.loc.gov/item/afc1950037_afs09990a/">told his interviewer</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“You know what I’d rather do? If I thought, had any idea, that I’d ever be a slave again, I’d take a gun and just end it all right away, because you’re nothing but a dog. You’re not a thing but a dog. A night never come that you had nothing to do. Time to cut tobacco? If they want you to cut all night long out in the field, you cut. And if they want you to hang all night long, you hang tobacco. It didn’t matter about you’re tired, being tired. You’re afraid to say you’re tired.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It’s ironic, then, that when it comes to teaching America’s schoolchildren about the horrors of American slavery and how entrenched it was in America’s political establishment, some politicians would prefer to shackle educators with restrictive laws. What they could do is grant educators the ability to teach freely about the role the slavery played in the forming of a nation that was founded – as the Texas law states - on principles of liberty and equality.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/187057/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Raphael E. Rogers does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Lawmakers are seeking to downplay the role that slavery played in the development of the United States, but history tells a different story.Raphael E. Rogers, Professor of Practice in Education, Clark UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1873852022-07-31T06:45:43Z2022-07-31T06:45:43ZJames Hutton Brew: Gold Coast abolitionist who exposed Britain’s anti-slavery hypocrisy<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/475416/original/file-20220721-1264-1ibcp5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The Cape Coast castle is a lasting legacy of the slave trade</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Adam Cohn/Flickr</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The literature and research on the abolition of slavery in places like Gold Coast (modern day Ghana) has tended to have a Eurocentric focus. Most has focused on colonial anti-slavery legislation and the abolitionist activities of Europeans. The contributions made by local Africans have been almost entirely ignored. When mentioned at all, Africans have been seen as resisting colonial efforts to abolish domestic slavery. </p>
<p>This focus is biased. Studying local Africans’ contributions to abolition provides a fuller understanding of its history.</p>
<p>In a recently published <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0144039X.2022.2095905">paper</a>, I analysed 19th-century newspapers to shed light on how Africans responded to colonial abolition of domestic slavery in Gold Coast. In particular, I looked at the role played by James Hutton Brew. </p>
<p>Brew was one of the local African intellectuals behind the Fante Confederacy in Cape Coast. The Fante Confederacy movement was one of the first attempts to institute self-governance in Gold Coast. The campaign involved traditional rulers of Fante communities working alongside educated natives in late 1860s and early 1870s.</p>
<p>Brew wrote the <a href="https://www.modernghana.com/news/123177/1/constitution-of-the-new-fante-confederacy.html">constitution of the Fante Confederacy</a> in 1871 and it remains a document of historical significance. He was also a pioneer in West African journalism. He founded the first print newspapers in Gold Coast, The Gold Coast Times (in 1874) and The Western Echo (in 1885). His newspapers nurtured <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/254266730_Literary_activism_in_colonial_Ghana_A_newspaper-novel_by_A_Native">many later activists</a> in Gold Coast, most notably <a href="https://www.blackpast.org/global-african-history/hayford-joseph-ephraim-casely-1866-1930/">J.E. Casely Hayford</a>. </p>
<p>As editor of The Gold Coast Times in 1874, the year in which Gold Coast became a <a href="http://countrystudies.us/ghana/8.htm">Crown colony</a> and the British <a href="https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/1874-06-29/debates/8bac0607-cc42-4f2b-b295-691183cff621/SlaveryOnTheGoldCoast">sought to abolish domestic slavery there</a>, Brew’s editorial writings showed that Africans were more concerned about the abolition of slavery in their communities than was the colonial government.</p>
<p>Brew and other African abolitionists also advocated practical solutions such as the distribution of land to former slaves. For their part, the British sought mainly to appease anti-slavery groups in Europe by creating a law to evince their commitment without enforcing it, or actually making an effort to free slaves. </p>
<p>Studying the contributions made by Africans to the abolition of domestic slavery helps to provide a more accurate and comprehensive history. This is important because the account of events given by the colonial regime, which forms the basis of conventional history, is part of a political project to justify colonisation. </p>
<h2>British emancipation in Gold Coast, 1874</h2>
<p>When Gold Coast became a Crown colony in <a href="http://countrystudies.us/ghana/8.htm">1874</a>, the British decided to abolish domestic slavery. However, they showed little commitment to the cause. The then British <a href="https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C11952">Secretary of State for the Colonies</a> and the Colonial Governor of Gold Coast, <a href="https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/strahan-sir-george-cumine-4651">George Strahan</a>, formally outlawed slave dealing and slave holding. But they failed to implement the law. And while they legally prohibited slave holding in Gold Coast, they expected slaves to continue serving their masters.</p>
<p>The colonial secretary and the governor predicted that slaves would not immediately leave their masters because of their established associations and fear of poverty. The governor anticipated that the few slaves who did leave would face difficulties in securing their livelihoods and would thus ultimately return to their masters. He hoped that witnessing this hardship would discourage other slaves from seeking their freedom. </p>
<p>Informing traditional rulers of the British decision to outlaw slavery, the governor told them that their <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0144039X.2022.2095905">slaves could continue to work</a> for them as before and that the colonial government did not wish to separate slaves from their masters.</p>
<p>Despite passing a law prohibiting slavery, the British colonial government did not want slaves to leave their masters. The freedom of slaves might incur a cost that the government was not ready to pay. Local slave owners could reasonably request compensation for the loss of their slaves. Slave holding was a form of property right in Gold Coast and the British had a <a href="https://dbpedia.org/page/Slave_Compensation_Act_1837">tradition of compensating slave owners</a> after abolishing slavery in other regions.</p>
<h2>Brew’s response</h2>
<p>Unlike the colonial administration, some local Africans, such as James Hutton Brew, discussed domestic slavery in depth, in line with a different vision of abolition in Gold Coast. </p>
<p>When the British colonial governor started discussing emancipation, Brew made his position known. In a note in the <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0144039X.2022.2095905?src=">Gold Coast Times on 20 October 1874</a>, he called on the governor to find </p>
<blockquote>
<p>a solution we trust will admit no misunderstanding and which will not leave scope for the existence of slavery in any shape, degree or form. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>In advocating total emancipation, Brew saw himself as following in the footsteps of the celebrated abolitionists of Britain’s anti-slavery movement. These included <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Wilberforce">William Wilberforce</a>, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Clarkson">Thomas Clarkson</a> and <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sir-Thomas-Fowell-Buxton-1st-Baronet">Thomas Fowell Buxton</a>. </p>
<p>Brew believed that it would be unfair to abolish slavery and then place the freed slaves at the mercy of their masters in the absence of substitute livelihoods. He feared that “slaves who have thus obtained their freedom will be pariahs of society”, unable to find homes or places to rest. He wrote:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>They will be driven from village to village, from plantation to plantation, until they find their emancipation an incubus on them, and some of them as they travel inland will find themselves {back in slavery}.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Brew urged the colonial government to “purchase land or acquire some territory by treaty with the kings and chiefs on which it could keep, maintain and support the slaves emancipated by it” (The Gold Coast Times, 30 November 1874, p. 53). </p>
<p>He saw distributing land to the freed slaves as a logical way to prevent them from remaining at the mercy of their former masters. He also called on the British to pay compensation to local slave owners, as it had done for white slave owners when slavery had been abolished <a href="https://dbpedia.org/page/Slave_Compensation_Act_1837">earlier that century</a>. </p>
<p>When the British proceeded with the emancipation law without making any provision for the freed slaves, Brew accused the colonial authority of not being truly concerned about them. According to Brew, the British wanted to claim to have abolished domestic slavery in the Gold Coast without following through.</p>
<p>Brew would later advise traditional rulers to write petitions to the queen, complaining about how the emancipation exercise had been conducted and requesting compensation. The colonial governor reacted by portraying men like Brew as “educated slave owners” looking to preserve their position by continuing slavery. </p>
<h2>After Brew</h2>
<p>After Brew, there were other clashes between African abolitionists and the British colonial government in Gold Coast. In 1889, for example, a trader in Accra named <a href="https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/book/slavery-and-its-legacy-in-ghana-and-the-diaspora/ch7-an-african-abolitionist-on-the-gold-coast-the-case-of-francis-p-fearon">Francis Fearon</a> wrote letters to anti-slavery campaigners in Britain revealing that the then colonial governor of Gold Coast, W.B. Griffith, was promoting domestic slavery. By this time, slavery had been legally abolished. </p>
<p>But the British colonial regime in Gold Coast refused to implement the law properly and sometimes even promoted domestic slavery for administrative convenience. Fearon and his network of African abolitionists fought against this.</p>
<p>My paper goes some way to addressing the fact that the role of people like Brew and other African abolitionists has not been properly acknowledged.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/187385/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The research on which this article is based received funding from European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon2020 Research and Innovation Programme (grant agreement No. 885418)</span></em></p>Studying local Africans’ contributions to the abolition of slavery provides a fuller understanding of its history.Michael E Odijie, Research associate, UCLLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1662332021-10-08T16:01:19Z2021-10-08T16:01:19ZJames McCune Smith: new discovery reveals how first African American doctor fought for women’s rights in Glasgow<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/421090/original/file-20210914-15-2i37hj.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=34%2C14%2C973%2C667&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Engraving of James McCune Smith by Patrick H. Reason.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.nyhistory.org/web/africanfreeschool/bios/james-mccune-smith.html">New York Historical Society</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>James McCune Smith was the first African American to receive a medical doctorate from a university. Born in 1813 to a poor South Carolina runaway slave who had escaped to New York City, he went on to attend Glasgow University during the 1830s. When he returned to America, he became a leading black physician, a tireless abolitionist, <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=FwvIir4VSX4C&printsec=frontcover&dq=black+hearts+of+men&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=black%20hearts%20of%20men&f=false">activist and journalist</a>.</p>
<p>McCune Smith led an amazing life. He exposed false medical data in the 1840 American census. He supported women’s suffrage alongside the noted feminist <a href="https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/susan-b-anthony">Susan B. Anthony</a>. And he wrote the introduction to Frederick Douglass’s sensational 1855 autobiographical slave narrative, <a href="https://archive.org/details/mybondagemyfreed00indoug">My Bondage and My Freedom</a>.</p>
<p>Now, for the first time, my research has revealed that McCune Smith was also the first African American known to be published in a British medical journal – and that he used this platform to reveal a cover-up by an ambitious medical professor who was experimenting on vulnerable women in Glasgow in the 1830s.</p>
<p>I am a historian of science and medicine. I study how people learned scientific skills and I am especially intrigued by the history of how scientists and physicians made discoveries and how that knowledge then circulated between the academy and the public.</p>
<p>One way to track this process is to compare what students learned in educational settings to how they used their scientific training to solve problems and make decisions later in life. My forthcoming book, <a href="https://www.academia.edu/3769533/Media_and_the_Mind_Art_Science_and_Notebooks_as_Paper_Machines_1700_1830_Chicago_University_of_Chicago_Press_2022_550_pp_60_figures">Media and the Mind</a>, for example, uses school and university notebooks to reconstruct how students historically learned to create, analyse and visualise scientific data in ways that helped them understand the human body and the natural world when they finished their education. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="Black and white photograph of a man." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/421555/original/file-20210916-17-1fmymfm.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/421555/original/file-20210916-17-1fmymfm.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=783&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/421555/original/file-20210916-17-1fmymfm.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=783&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/421555/original/file-20210916-17-1fmymfm.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=783&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/421555/original/file-20210916-17-1fmymfm.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=984&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/421555/original/file-20210916-17-1fmymfm.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=984&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/421555/original/file-20210916-17-1fmymfm.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=984&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Portrait of Frederick Douglass (1818-1895). Douglass, a former slave, was an American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer and statesman.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.alamy.com/portrait-of-frederick-douglass-1818-1895-c1879-douglass-a-former-slave-was-an-american-social-reformer-abolitionist-orator-writer-and-statesman-image369103564.html?pv=1&stamp=2&imageid=9734BCF8-26ED-47AA-9F2A-215197A21E9E&p=176541&n=3&orientation=0&pn=1&searchtype=0&IsFromSearch=1&srch=foo%3Dbar%26st%3D0%26sortby%3D2%26qt%3DFrederick%2520Douglas%26qt_raw%3DFrederick%2520Douglas%26qn%3D%26lic%3D3%26edrf%3D0%26mr%3D0%26pr%3D0%26aoa%3D1%26creative%3D%26videos%3D%26nu%3D%26ccc%3D%26bespoke%3D%26apalib%3D%26ag%3D0%26hc%3D0%26et%3D0x000000000000000000000%26vp%3D0%26loc%3D0%26ot%3D0%26imgt%3D0%26dtfr%3D%26dtto%3D%26size%3D0xFF%26blackwhite%3D%26cutout%3D%26archive%3D1%26name%3D%26groupid%3D%26pseudoid%3D818036%26userid%3D%26id%3D%26a%3D%26xstx%3D0%26cbstore%3D1%26resultview%3DsortbyPopular%26lightbox%3D%26gname%3D%26gtype%3D%26apalic%3D%26tbar%3D1%26pc%3D%26simid%3D%26cap%3D1%26customgeoip%3DGB%26vd%3D0%26cid%3D%26pe%3D%26so%3D%26lb%3D%26pl%3D0%26plno%3D%26fi%3D0%26langcode%3Den%26upl%3D0%26cufr%3D%26cuto%3D%26howler%3D%26cvrem%3D0%26cvtype%3D0%26cvloc%3D0%26cl%3D0%26upfr%3D%26upto%3D%26primcat%3D%26seccat%3D%26cvcategory%3D*%26restriction%3D%26random%3D%26ispremium%3D1%26flip%3D0%26contributorqt%3D%26plgalleryno%3D%26plpublic%3D0%26viewaspublic%3D0%26isplcurate%3D0%26imageurl%3D%26saveQry%3D%26editorial%3D%26t%3D0%26filters%3D0">IanDagnall Computing / Alamy Stock Photo</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Several years ago, I decided to investigate the history of how the testimony of hospital patients was transformed into scientific data by physicians. I eventually stumbled across the 1837 case of a young Glasgow doctor who sought to expose painful experimental drug trials that had been conducted on the impoverished women of a local hospital. </p>
<p>That doctor was James McCune Smith. He had written articles detailing how the women of a local charity hospital were being subjected to a painful experimental drug. It was a career changing moment for me because I had not encountered this kind of activism in my previous research on <a href="https://www.academia.edu/1112014/The_Language_of_Mineralogy_John_Walker_Chemistry_and_the_Edinburgh_Medical_School_1750_1800_London_Routledge_2008_hardback_2016_paperback_Full_text">medical education</a>. </p>
<h2>Early life</h2>
<p>Who was this doctor? What led him to speak out? Where did he learn to place his knowledge of science and medicine in the service of equality and justice? Upon closer examination, despite his many accomplishments, virtually nothing had been written about McCune Smith’s time in Glasgow or about his work as a practising physician in New York. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/frederick-douglass-the-ex-slave-and-transatlantic-celebrity-who-found-freedom-in-newcastle-90886">Frederick Douglass: the ex-slave and transatlantic celebrity who found freedom in Newcastle</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Like the children of many runaway slaves in New York, McCune Smith grew up in Five Points, Lower Manhattan, one of the poorest and most densely populated urban areas of America at that time. Though the state fully emancipated all former slaves <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=TZx6A_M0yjQC&vq=1827&dq=New+york+An+Act+Relative+to+Slaves+and+Servants,+1817&lr=&source=gbs_navlinks_s">in 1827</a>, when McCune Smith was a teenager, discriminatory educational policies, unsanitary living conditions, chronic illness and infectious diseases ensured that the prospects for a free African American teenager in the early part of the 19th century were limited. </p>
<p>Indeed, in an article entitled Freedom and Slavery for African-Americans, published in the New York Tribune in 1844, McCune Smith <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=zQUqIOmsdLkC&printsec=frontcover&dq=stauffer+black+hearts+of+men&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=new%20york%20tribune&f=false">observed</a> that only six of the 100 boys who attended school with him from 1826 to 1827 were “still now living”. He noted further that they were “all white”. </p>
<hr>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/288776/original/file-20190820-170910-8bv1s7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/288776/original/file-20190820-170910-8bv1s7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/288776/original/file-20190820-170910-8bv1s7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/288776/original/file-20190820-170910-8bv1s7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/288776/original/file-20190820-170910-8bv1s7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/288776/original/file-20190820-170910-8bv1s7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/288776/original/file-20190820-170910-8bv1s7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><strong><em>This story is part of Conversation Insights</em></strong>
<br><em>The Insights team generates <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/topics/insights-series-71218">long-form journalism</a> and is working with academics from different backgrounds who have been engaged in projects to tackle societal and scientific challenges.</em> </p>
<hr>
<p>Though technically “free”, the lives of African Americans in New York during the 1820s and 1830s were marred by the legacy of slavery and discrimination. Runaway slaves were <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ahfQDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=the+kidnapping+club&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwioivPjvuLyAhWDnVwKHQMjDx4Q6AEwAHoECAsQAg#v=onepage&q=the%20kidnapping%20club&f=false">openly hunted</a> in the city’s alleys, streets and wharves. McCune Smith reflected on these events <a href="https://archive.org/details/memorialdiscour00garn/page/n7/mode/2up">in an essay</a> that he wrote about the life of his school classmate, Henry Highland Garnet.</p>
<p>An abolitionist and Presbyterian minister, Garnet was the first African American to speak before Congress. McCune Smith recalled the trauma experienced by Garnet’s family in 1829 when they were tracked by slave-hunters. They barely escaped by jumping out of a two-story building and hiding in the house of a local grocer. When they returned to their home they found, in the <a href="https://archive.org/details/memorialdiscour00garn/page/24/mode/2up">words of McCune Smith</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The entire household furniture of the family was destroyed or stolen; and they were obliged to start anew in life empty-handed.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Despite many challenges, <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=U4A7lqZHPokC&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&dq=black+gotham&source=gbs_navlinks_s">New York’s African Americans</a> founded their own businesses, churches, political associations, printing presses and more. In addition to receiving support and encouragement from a community of relatives and friends, McCune Smith’s path to becoming a doctor was significantly aided by his education at the <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=dkaODwAAQBAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&dq=educated+for+freedom&source=gbs_navlinks_s">African Free School</a>. </p>
<p>Older students were taught penmanship, drawing, grammar, geography, astronomy, natural philosophy and navigation. When American universities denied his medical school applications, the free school community played a role in raising funds for him to attend Glasgow University.</p>
<h2>Progressive Glasgow</h2>
<p>After sailing from New York to Liverpool, McCune Smith arrived in Glasgow in 1832. Thanks to maritime trade, it was one of the largest cities in the country and the university’s medical school was one of the best in Europe. </p>
<p>Britain had prohibited the slave trade <a href="https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/tradeindustry/slavetrade/">in 1807</a> and it fully abolished slavery the year after his arrival in 1833. Though there were not many African Americans in Glasgow, <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=3RNwDwAAQBAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&dq=britain+abolition+slavery&source=gbs_navlinks_s">black writers</a> had been operating in Britain since the 1770s. Then, in 1809 Edinburgh University admitted <a href="http://uncover-ed.org/1809-william-fergusson/">William Fergusson</a> who was from Jamaica and was the university’s first student of African descent. </p>
<p>Though he took medical courses at the university, Fergusson did not stay to complete a medical doctorate. Instead, he received a license from the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh in 1813. He then practised as a surgeon in the British military and eventually became governor of the then-British colony of Sierra Leone. McCune Smith joined the ranks of these torchbearers and became the first African American known to graduate with a BA, MA and medical doctorate from Glasgow University.</p>
<p>By the time McCune Smith began his studies in Glasgow, opposition to slavery had moved beyond the walls of the university. There was a active abolitionist community and it founded the <a href="http://theses.gla.ac.uk/2641/">Glasgow Emancipation Society</a> in 1833. McCune Smith, still only an undergraduate, was one of the founding members. After he graduated, a number of black students attended the university over the course of the century.</p>
<p>Despite living in a foreign country, McCune Smith excelled at his studies and received several academic awards. The Glasgow medical faculty placed equal emphasis on scientific rigour and hands-on clinical experience. In addition to learning chemistry, anatomy and physiology from some of Britain’s leading doctors, he witnessed cutting-edge experiments and new medical technologies being demonstrated in his lectures. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A black and white image of a Glasgow street in the 1820s." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/421103/original/file-20210914-17-hc38o2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/421103/original/file-20210914-17-hc38o2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=418&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/421103/original/file-20210914-17-hc38o2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=418&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/421103/original/file-20210914-17-hc38o2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=418&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/421103/original/file-20210914-17-hc38o2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=526&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/421103/original/file-20210914-17-hc38o2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=526&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/421103/original/file-20210914-17-hc38o2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=526&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">An image of High Street, Glasgow, around 1821, looking south towards the Tolbooth Steeple at Glasgow Cross. The front of the Old College of the University of Glasgow is on the left side of the street, with the university tower looming above it.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.theglasgowstory.com/image/?inum=TGSA01107&t=2">Mitchell Library/Joseph Swan</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>He graduated with honours in 1837 and was immediately given a prestigious clinical residency in <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=mHMIAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA194&dq=coats+medical+institutions+glasgow&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwix_MrY2eLyAhUGV8AKHT_KCbkQ6AEwAHoECAMQAg#v=snippet&q=lock%20hospital&f=false">Glasgow’s Lock Hospital</a>. He worked there alongside the eminent Scottish obstetrician and gynaecologist, <a href="https://archive.org/details/memorialsoffacul00dunc/page/274/mode/2up?q=cumin">William Cumin</a>, treating women who had contracted venereal diseases.</p>
<h2>Missing records and racist medical theories</h2>
<p>The difficulty in pursuing a project of this nature is that many of the scientific papers and publications of black physicians have been lost to the sands of time. Unlike the many collections that university libraries have dedicated to preserving the legacy of white doctors who were alumni or donors, there is no “James McCune Smith Medical Collection” where scholars can go to study his medical career and scientific ideas. </p>
<p>No one has yet told the full story of how African Americans like McCune Smith became doctors or how they used their knowledge of medical science to fight injustice and prejudice. The hidden histories of these black physicians based in countries spread around the Atlantic Ocean led me to start my current research project on how they used their scientific training to counter the rise of <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Kn5IMQAACAAJ&dq=tropical+freedom&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&redir_esc=y">racist medical theories</a> – theories which erroneously suggested that black bodies were physically different from other bodies and could more easily withstand the stress, pain and labour of enslavement.</p>
<p>Though a number of McCune Smith’s <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=zQUqIOmsdLkC&printsec=frontcover&dq=mccune+smith&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=mccune%20smith&f=false">articles</a> were republished several years ago, the whereabouts of his personal medical library, clinical notebooks, patient records, office ledgers and article drafts are unknown. Likewise, his manuscript Glasgow diary and letters have been lost. Though aspects of his career have received attention from historians in <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/The_Black_Hearts_of_Men/FwvIir4VSX4C?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=black+hearts+of+men&printsec=frontcover">recent years</a>, a biography of his extraordinary life has not been written.</p>
<p>This was the situation when I discovered his efforts to expose the harmful drug trials that were being conducted on the women of the Glasgow Lock Hospital. The evidence consisted of two articles that he had published during the spring and summer of 1837 in the <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=TPQaAQAAMAAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&printsec=frontcover&pg=PA971&dq=%22m%27cune+smith%22+london+medical+gazette&hl=en&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=journal%201837&f=false">London Medical Gazette</a>, a weekly journal with articles about medicine and science. </p>
<p>I originally came upon these articles by reading page after page of medical journals housed in the <a href="https://www.nls.uk/">National Library of Scotland</a> in Edinburgh. When I found them, they immediately stood out because they took the testimony of poor female patients seriously. When I realised that McCune Smith was the first African American to graduate from a Scottish university, I could not believe what I had discovered.</p>
<h2>New discoveries</h2>
<p>Discovering McCune Smith’s articles was momentous because they are the first currently known to have been published by an African American medical doctor in any scientific journal. Scientists in the 19th century published articles for many reasons. Some wanted to popularise their research in a way that advanced their careers. Others hoped their research would benefit the general public. </p>
<p>The fascinating aspect about McCune Smith’s articles in relation to the historical emergence of the <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=tIRaDwAAQBAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&dq=alex+csiszar&source=gbs_navlinks_s">scientific journal</a> is that they were published to expose the unethical misapplication of scientific experiments. This means that they offer new insight into how he learned to combine the power of the press with his medical training to fight inequality and injustice in Britain prior to returning to New York.</p>
<p>The story they tell is extraordinary. The events occurred in the spring and summer of 1837 while McCune Smith was serving in the Glasgow Lock Hospital as a resident physician in gynaecology. The hospital was a charity institution set up by the city for impoverished women suffering from acute venereal diseases such as gonorrhoea and syphilis. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A page of text from a medical journal." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/423109/original/file-20210924-14-p0j994.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/423109/original/file-20210924-14-p0j994.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=952&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/423109/original/file-20210924-14-p0j994.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=952&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/423109/original/file-20210924-14-p0j994.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=952&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/423109/original/file-20210924-14-p0j994.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1197&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/423109/original/file-20210924-14-p0j994.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1197&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/423109/original/file-20210924-14-p0j994.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1197&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">McCune Smith’s article in the London Medical Gazette.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=TPQaAQAAMAAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&printsec=frontcover&pg=PA971&dq=%22m%27cune+smith%22+london+medical+gazette&hl=en&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=journal%201837&f=false">Google Books</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>After consulting the ward’s records and speaking with the patients, McCune Smith discovered that <a href="https://archive.org/details/memorialsoffacul00dunc/page/280/mode/2up?q=hannay">Alexander Hannay</a>, a senior doctor in the hospital, was treating women suffering from gonorrhoea with an experimental drug called <a href="https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/Silver-nitrate">silver nitrate</a>, a compound that a handful of doctors used as a topical treatment for <a href="https://archive.org/details/essayonuseofnitr00higg/page/n9/mode/2up">infected skin tissue</a> or to stop bleeding. But it was normally used in low concentrations mixed into a solution, with doctors emphasising that it should be applied with caution and as a last resort.</p>
<p>But Hannay was administering the drug in a solid form, which meant that it was highly concentrated and caused a terrible burning sensation. He fancied this usage to be innovative and was relatively unfazed when his patients repeatedly asked for less painful forms of treatment. After speaking with the women and further consulting the hospital’s records, McCune Smith realised that Hannay was effectively treating the women as guinea pigs – as non-consenting participants – in an experimental trial that involved a very painful drug. </p>
<p>At that time, silver nitrate was a newly available substance and its long-term effects were relatively unknown. There were a handful of <a href="https://archive.org/details/essayonuseofnitr00higg/page/n9/mode/2up">military doctors</a> who used it experimentally to cauterise skin ulcers or wounds of soldiers that would not stop bleeding. But some medical books classified it as a <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=TPQaAQAAMAAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&printsec=frontcover&pg=PA971&dq=%22m%27cune+smith%22+london+medical+gazette&hl=en&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=journal%201837&f=false">poison</a>. Glasgow’s medical students, particularly those who studied with Prof William Cumin, avoided using it on internal organs due to its unknown effects. Instead, when it came to gynaecological cases involving ulcers or infections, students learned to use an <a href="https://archive.org/details/principlesofmidw00burnuoft/page/312/mode/2up?q=alum">alum solution</a> because its effects were generally considered to be effective and less painful.</p>
<p>Hannay went beyond using the silver nitrate on the skin. He applied it to the internal reproductive organs of women, at least one of whom was pregnant. McCune Smith’s article pointed out that the baby subsequently died through complications surrounding a miscarriage. It also intimates that a few women died after the application of silver nitrate. Since the drug’s effect on internal organs was unknown, he believed that that the deaths could not be treated as a separate occurrence.</p>
<p>In addition to being McCune Smith’s superior, Hannay was a medical professor at Glasgow’s newly established <a href="https://universitystory.gla.ac.uk/building/?id=35">Anderson University</a>. The easiest thing for McCune Smith to do was to say nothing. The plight of the Lock Hospital patients would not have been a major concern for many medical men at the time. The patients were impoverished women and most doctors assumed they were former prostitutes. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Image of an old Glasgow college building and tower." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/421551/original/file-20210916-25-1moyy5y.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/421551/original/file-20210916-25-1moyy5y.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=901&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/421551/original/file-20210916-25-1moyy5y.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=901&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/421551/original/file-20210916-25-1moyy5y.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=901&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/421551/original/file-20210916-25-1moyy5y.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1132&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/421551/original/file-20210916-25-1moyy5y.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1132&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/421551/original/file-20210916-25-1moyy5y.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1132&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Anderson University, Glasgow, in the 1830s.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://wellcomecollection.org/works/h8pckdyq/images?id=ykpgaavq">Wellcome Collection</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But McCune Smith’s perspective was different. Unlike his peers, he had spent his early years in New York City witnessing the pain and suffering caused by poverty, inequality and exploitation. So he decided to place his knowledge of medical science in the service of these women.</p>
<p>McCune Smith knew that there were other effective treatments for gonorrhoea. This allowed him to see that Hannay was more interested in bolstering his reputation with a pharmaceutical discovery than helping his patients. But his studies had given him another equally powerful tool – data analysis. His ability to use this tool can be seen in his London Medical Gazette articles. The gazette was a journal of some repute, serving the British medical community as well as physicians based in Europe and America. In his article, he wrote:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The materials of my paper on the subject of gonorrhoea of women were collected whilst I held the office of clerk to the Glasgow Lock Hospital.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>He made his case against the experiments by extracting figures from handwritten registers that recorded the condition of patients being treated in the hospital over an entire year. He had learned to collect, categorise, and analyse data in the clinical lectures that were required for graduation. This method was part of the new science of “vital statistics” that used medical data to predict or prevent disease in people, cities and even countries. Known as “<a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Ct_wofnMGlgC&dq=ultrich+troehler">medical statistics</a>” today, it was becoming more commonly used in journals that published articles on medical science. </p>
<h2>The cover-up</h2>
<p>McCune Smith’s articles showed that the drug trials were ineffective and presented an unwarranted risk. They also revealed that Hannay and his team of assistants had attempted to cover up data in the hospital records that damaged their claims about the drug’s efficacy and their position that its side effects were minimal. McCune Smith did not mince his words. He wrote: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>By this novel and ingenious mode of recording the Hospital transactions for 1836, [Prof Hannay’s team] keeps out of view the evidence of the severity of the treatment, and the amount of mortality, while, at the same time, the residence of the patients in the house seems shorted, the cost of each diminished, and the treatment made to appear more than usually successful.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Accordingly, he called for the trials to stop immediately. But McCune Smith was not happy to simply cite statistics. He wanted to give these women a voice too. To achieve this, he emphasised the extreme pain that they were experiencing. Their suffering had been played down by those conducting the experimental trials. Hannay even suggested that the women were dishonest and unreliable witnesses. </p>
<p>To counter this suggestion, McCune Smith quoted the women themselves, some of whom said that the drug felt like it was “burning their inside with caustic”. This was strong language. They were effectively saying that the drug felt like a flame being applied to their bodies.</p>
<h2>‘Hidden gem’ in library archive</h2>
<p>McCune Smith’s decision to use this kind of visceral language on behalf of impoverished women in a scientific article was rare at the time. Nor was it common in the lengthy, fact-laden lectures given at Glasgow’s medical school. So where did McCune Smith learn to write like this? Finding an answer to this question has been difficult because hardly any of McCune Smith’s manuscripts from his Glasgow years are known to have survived. But thanks to a recent discovery that I made with the rare books librarian Robert MacLean in the Archives and Special Collections of Glasgow University, a better picture is starting to emerge. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A library borrowing register." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/421563/original/file-20210916-27-lj9g5e.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/421563/original/file-20210916-27-lj9g5e.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=722&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/421563/original/file-20210916-27-lj9g5e.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=722&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/421563/original/file-20210916-27-lj9g5e.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=722&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/421563/original/file-20210916-27-lj9g5e.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=907&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/421563/original/file-20210916-27-lj9g5e.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=907&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/421563/original/file-20210916-27-lj9g5e.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=907&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">James McCune Smith’s name can be seen at the top of his library borrowing record.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Robert MacLean, with the permission of University of Glasgow Library ASC.</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Based on my previous research on <a href="https://www.academia.edu/11429336/The_Interactive_Notebook_How_Students_Learned_to_Keep_Notes_during_the_Scottish_Enlightenment_Book_History_19_2016_87_131">Scottish student notekeeping</a>, I knew that Glasgow University kept handwritten registers of books borrowed by students from its libraries during the 19th century. Luckily, it turned out that McCune Smith’s manuscript library borrowing record did, in fact, still exist. It was a gem that had remained hidden for the past two centuries in the dusty pages of Glasgow’s library registers.</p>
<p>The discovery was historic because it revealed that he definitely took the university’s moral philosophy class. The course was taught by <a href="https://era.ed.ac.uk/handle/1842/8941">James Mylne</a> and it encouraged students to judge the accuracy of statistical data when making moral decisions. The registers also showed that McCune Smith consulted the <a href="https://www.thelancet.com">Lancet</a>, the leading <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1498905/">medical journal</a> of research and reform that promoted the same kind of public health activism evinced in his 1837 Gazette articles.</p>
<p>Finding the student reading record for any historical figure is like striking gold. In McCune Smith’s case it was doubly exciting because so little is known about his intellectual development. In addition to literature relevant to his studies, he checked out several 1835 issues of the Lancet which regularly identified links between pain and maltreatment. </p>
<p>It is likely these accounts inspired him to use a similar approach in his gazette articles. But even the Lancet’s references to pain and cruelty barely addressed the plights of impoverished women, let alone those who had been regularly subjected to experimental drugs. In this respect McCune Smith’s concern for the Lock Hospital patients surpassed the reform agenda promoted by Britain’s most progressive medical journal.</p>
<h2>Legacy</h2>
<p>Further investigations have revealed that there were many other black physicians who lived in America in the decades after McCune Smith became a doctor. As revealed in research by the Massachusetts Historical Society, there was, for example, <a href="http://www.masshist.org/beehiveblog/2020/11/a-visit-with-dr-degrasse-the-medical-account-book-of-bostons-first-black-physician/">John van Surly DeGrasse</a>. He studied at Bowdoin College in Maine, received a medical doctorate in the 1840s, set up a practice in Boston and became the first African American member of the Massachusetts Medical Association. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/421564/original/file-20210916-23-163oo43.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/421564/original/file-20210916-23-163oo43.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=950&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/421564/original/file-20210916-23-163oo43.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=950&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/421564/original/file-20210916-23-163oo43.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=950&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/421564/original/file-20210916-23-163oo43.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1194&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/421564/original/file-20210916-23-163oo43.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1194&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/421564/original/file-20210916-23-163oo43.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1194&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">John Van Surly DeGrasse was one of only two African American physicians who received a commission in the army.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/bindingwounds/exhibition.html">Massachusetts African American Museum and the Massachusetts Historical Society</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>There was also <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/26298851">Alexander Thomas Augusta</a>, who, despite Virginia laws that banned free blacks from learning to read, was educated by a minister, moved to Toronto and graduated from Trinity College’s medical school in 1856. Notably, both Augusta and DeGrasse served in the union army as physicians with the rank of major during the American Civil War.</p>
<p>After McCune Smith returned to America in the autumn of 1837, he served as a professional role model for African Americans who studied medicine from the 1840s onward. By the time younger black physicians such as DeGrasse and Augusta began their studies, McCune Smith had already opened a practice that served patients from both sides of the colour line and had published several scientific articles. For the rest of his career his name was a frequent byline in articles about health and society published by the <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Y80OAAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=african+american+press&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwid283ZkuXyAhWOXsAKHQqxB04Q6AEwAnoECAMQAg#v=onepage&q=african%20american%20press&f=false">African American press</a>, as well as larger newspapers with mixed readership, like the New York Tribune. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Old portait image of a Black man who served during the American Civil War." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/421565/original/file-20210916-15-csxpml.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/421565/original/file-20210916-15-csxpml.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=788&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/421565/original/file-20210916-15-csxpml.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=788&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/421565/original/file-20210916-15-csxpml.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=788&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/421565/original/file-20210916-15-csxpml.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=991&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/421565/original/file-20210916-15-csxpml.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=991&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/421565/original/file-20210916-15-csxpml.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=991&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Alexander Augusta became the first African American commissioned medical officer in the United States Army when he was appointed surgeon with the Union Army in April 1863.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/bindingwounds/inuniform.html">Oblate Sisters of Providence Archives</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>An excellent example of McCune Smith’s later medical activism is the collection of <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=zQUqIOmsdLkC&printsec=frontcover&dq=stauffer+black+hearts+of+men&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=new%20york%20tribune&f=false">articles</a> that he published during the 1840s about the national census. The main issue was that slavery advocates had noticed that the mortality rates of African Americans in northern asylums were higher than those of black people in the southern states. This led them to conclude, erroneously, that freedom somehow damaged their mental and physical health.</p>
<p>Rather than engage with their desire to co-opt convenient data, McCune Smith used his knowledge of medical statistics to skillfully undermine their attempts to find scientific data that fit their discriminatory world view. He conducted his own investigation and proved that the original collection of the figures on site in the northern asylums had been flawed and that, as a result, the data was incorrect and could not be used to accurately determine the health of black asylum patients. </p>
<p>McCune Smith did not stop there. He turned the tables on slavery advocates by transforming the new accurate mortality statistics into a tool that could be used to fight inequality. His 1844 New York Tribune <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=zQUqIOmsdLkC&printsec=frontcover&dq=stauffer+black+hearts+of+men&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=new%20york%20tribune&f=false">article</a> about the census concluded:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>These facts prove that within 15 years after it became a Free State, a portion of the Free Black Population of New York have improved the ratio of their mortality 13.28% – a fact without parallel in the history of any People.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Put simply, the correct data revealed that the health of African Americans unburdened by the deprivation and forced labour of slavery thrived once they left the south and lived lives as free citizens in the north. </p>
<p>McCune Smith’s publications are a significant early chapter in the history of how black activists have worked tirelessly over the past two centuries to disentangle erroneous interpretations of scientific data from discriminatory claims about poverty, gender and race. They provide crucial historical insight into the relationships between race, science and technology that exist <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=G6-hDwAAQBAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&printsec=frontcover&dq=race+after+technology&hl=en&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=race%20after%20technology&f=false">today</a>.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/honouring-the-slaves-experimented-on-by-the-father-of-gynaecology-148273">Honouring the slaves experimented on by the 'father of gynaecology'</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>In many respects McCune Smith’s desire to locate and publicise correct data about asylum patients built on the approach that he had developed in his articles about the mistreatment of women in Glasgow’s Lock Hospital. He continued to publish articles throughout his career that challenged those who sought to use science to justify discrimination and inequality. In 1859 he even went so far as to challenge former President Thomas Jefferson’s discriminatory racial assumptions when he <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=zQUqIOmsdLkC&printsec=frontcover&dq=stauffer+black+hearts+of+men&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=snippet&q=will%20forever%20prevent&f=false">wrote</a>: “His arrangement of these views is so mixed and confused, that we must depart from it.”</p>
<p>McCune Smith’s <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=FwvIir4VSX4C&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&dq=stauffer+black+hearts+of+men&source=gbs_navlinks_s">activism</a> showed aspiring African Americans that becoming a professional black physician could be more than simply treating patients. For him, being an expert in medical science also included using his training to fight injustice and inequality. </p>
<p>His publications are an indispensable chapter in the American history of science and medicine. But they are an important part of British history too. Because it was in Britain where he first published articles that placed his knowledge of medicine in the service of equality and justice. It was the libraries of Glasgow University – which now has a building <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-45776580">named in his honour</a> – and the wards of the Lock Hospital which fed his towering intellect and fired his passion for medical knowledge, as well as the pursuit of justice for the powerless and oppressed.</p>
<hr>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/313478/original/file-20200204-41481-1n8vco4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/313478/original/file-20200204-41481-1n8vco4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=112&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/313478/original/file-20200204-41481-1n8vco4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=112&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/313478/original/file-20200204-41481-1n8vco4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=112&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/313478/original/file-20200204-41481-1n8vco4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=140&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/313478/original/file-20200204-41481-1n8vco4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=140&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/313478/original/file-20200204-41481-1n8vco4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=140&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><em>For you: more from our <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/topics/insights-series-71218?utm_source=TCUK&utm_medium=linkback&utm_campaign=TCUKengagement&utm_content=InsightsUK">Insights series</a>:</em></p>
<ul>
<li><p><em><a href="https://theconversation.com/cant-face-running-have-a-hot-bath-or-a-sauna-research-shows-they-offer-some-similar-benefits-158552?utm_source=TCUK&utm_medium=linkback&utm_campaign=TCUKengagement&utm_content=InsightsUK">Can’t face running? Have a hot bath or a sauna – research shows they offer some similar benefits</a></em></p></li>
<li><p><em><a href="https://theconversation.com/a-culture-of-silence-and-stigma-around-emotions-dominates-policing-officer-diaries-reveal-152657?utm_source=TCUK&utm_medium=linkback&utm_campaign=TCUKengagement&utm_content=InsightsUK">A culture of silence and stigma around emotions dominates policing, officer diaries reveal</a></em></p></li>
<li><p><em><a href="https://theconversation.com/the-double-lives-of-gay-men-in-chinas-hainan-province-153945?utm_source=TCUK&utm_medium=linkback&utm_campaign=TCUKengagement&utm_content=InsightsUK">The double lives of gay men in China’s Hainan province</a></em></p></li>
</ul>
<p><em>To hear about new Insights articles, join the hundreds of thousands of people who value The Conversation’s evidence-based news. <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/newsletters/the-daily-newsletter-2?utm_source=TCUK&utm_medium=linkback&utm_campaign=TCUKengagement&utm_content=InsightsUK"><strong>Subscribe to our newsletter</strong></a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/166233/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Matthew Daniel Eddy does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>James McCune Smith was the first African American to receive a medical doctorate from a university. He dedicated his life to fighting injustice.Matthew Daniel Eddy, Professor and Chair in the History and Philosophy of Science, Durham UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1654422021-10-05T12:25:36Z2021-10-05T12:25:36ZThe brutal trade in enslaved people within the US has been largely whitewashed out of history<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/424260/original/file-20211001-23-1qfgihp.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=109%2C59%2C6389%2C4660&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A trade card with printed black type for the domestic slave traders Hill, Ware and Chrisp.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.si.edu/object/trade-card-great-negro-mart-memphis-tennessee:nmaahc_2014.63.17">Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>For my <a href="https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/joshua-d-rothman/the-ledger-and-the-chain/9781541616615/">book, “The Ledger and the Chain</a>,” I visited more than 30 archives in over a dozen states, from Louisiana to Connecticut. Along the way, I uncovered mountains of material that exposed the depravity of the men who ran the largest domestic slave trading operation in American history and revealed the fortitude of the enslaved people they trafficked as merchandise. </p>
<p>But I also learned that many Americans do not realize that a domestic slave trade existed in the U.S. at all. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/423887/original/file-20210929-28-apix4x.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A domestic slave trader's newspaper ad from 1844 says 'CASH FOR NEGROES.'" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/423887/original/file-20210929-28-apix4x.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/423887/original/file-20210929-28-apix4x.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=339&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/423887/original/file-20210929-28-apix4x.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=339&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/423887/original/file-20210929-28-apix4x.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=339&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/423887/original/file-20210929-28-apix4x.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=427&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/423887/original/file-20210929-28-apix4x.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=427&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/423887/original/file-20210929-28-apix4x.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=427&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Slave trader Joseph Bruin placed this advertisement in the Alexandria Gazette on March 20, 1844.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.alexandriava.gov/uploadedFiles/historic/info/archaeology/1315DukeStBuildingHistorySkolnik2021.pdf">City of Alexandria, Virginia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Mentioning my research to others repeatedly provoked questions about Africa, not America. They obviously assumed that a scholar working on the slave trade must be working on the trade that brought millions of Africans to the Western Hemisphere via <a href="https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/slave-ships-and-the-middle-passage/">the terrifying Atlantic Ocean crossing known as the Middle Passage</a>. </p>
<p>They did not appear to know that by the time slavery ended in 1865, <a href="https://eji.org/news/history-racial-injustice-domestic-slave-trade/">more than 1 million enslaved people</a> had been forcibly moved across state lines in their own country, or that hundreds of thousands more had been bought and sold within individual states.</p>
<p>Americans continue to misunderstand how slavery worked and how vast was its reach – even as the histories of race and slavery are <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2021/08/17/how-should-we-address-the-uss-history-of-slavery-and-racism-heres-what-americans-think/">central to ongoing public conversations</a>.</p>
<h2>Indifference to suffering</h2>
<p>Enslaved people were bought and sold within the boundaries of what is now the United States dating back to the Colonial era. But the domestic slave trade accelerated dramatically in the decades after 1808. </p>
<p>That year, <a href="https://www.docsteach.org/documents/document/act-prohibit-importation-slaves">Congress outlawed the importation of enslaved people from overseas</a>, and it did so at a moment when demand for enslaved laborers was booming in expanding cotton and sugar plantation regions of the lower South. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/423690/original/file-20210928-19-71frqn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Two vintage posters from the 1840s advertising slave trader services in Kentucky." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/423690/original/file-20210928-19-71frqn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/423690/original/file-20210928-19-71frqn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=831&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/423690/original/file-20210928-19-71frqn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=831&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/423690/original/file-20210928-19-71frqn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=831&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/423690/original/file-20210928-19-71frqn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1044&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/423690/original/file-20210928-19-71frqn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1044&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/423690/original/file-20210928-19-71frqn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1044&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Two posters advertising the services of slave traders L.C. Robards, top, and Silas Marshall and Bro, bottom, Lexington, Ky.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/two-posters-advertising-the-services-of-slave-traders-the-news-photo/532452166?adppopup=true">Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Growing numbers of professional slave traders stepped forward to satisfy that demand. They purchased enslaved people primarily in upper South states like Maryland and Virginia, where <a href="https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/tobacco-in-colonial-virginia/">a declining tobacco economy</a> left many slaveholders with a surplus of laborers. Traders then <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/slavery-trail-of-tears-180956968/">forced those enslaved people to migrate hundreds of miles</a> over land and by ship, selling them in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and other states where traders hoped to turn a profit.</p>
<p>The domestic slave trade was a brutal and violent business. Enslaved people lived in constant fear that they or their loved ones would be sold. </p>
<p><a href="https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/andersonw/andersonw.html">William Anderson, who was enslaved in Virginia</a>, remembered seeing “hundreds of slaves pass by for the Southern market, chained and handcuffed together.” Years after he fled the South, Anderson wrote of “wives taken from husbands and husbands from wives, never to see each other again – small and large children separated from their parents,” and he never forgot the sounds of their sorrow. “O, I have seen them and heard them howl like dogs or wolves,” he recalled, “when being under the painful obligation of parting to meet no more.” </p>
<p>Slave traders were largely indifferent to the suffering they caused. Asked in the 1830s whether he broke up slave families in the course of his operations, <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Slavery_and_the_Internal_Slave_Trade_in/ou4xAQAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22his+business+is+to+purchase,+and+he+must+take+such+as+are+in+the+market.%22&pg=PA46&printsec=frontcover">one trader admitted that he did so “very often,”</a> because “his business is to purchase, and he must take such as are in the market.” </p>
<h2>‘So wicked’</h2>
<p>Domestic slave traders initially worked mostly out of taverns and hotels. Over time, an increasing number of them established offices, showrooms and prisons where they held enslaved people whom they intended to sell. </p>
<p>By the 1830s, the domestic slave trade was ubiquitous in the slave states. Newspaper advertisements blared “<a href="https://www.alexandriava.gov/uploadedFiles/historic/info/archaeology/1315DukeStBuildingHistorySkolnik2021.pdf">Cash for Negroes.</a>” Storefront signs announced that “dealers in slaves” were inside. At ports and along roads, travelers <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/slavery-trail-of-tears-180956968/">reported seeing scores of enslaved people in chains</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/423691/original/file-20210928-32-1trp50t.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A handwritten letter announcing the opening of a slave trading company at a hotel in Richmond, Virginia." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/423691/original/file-20210928-32-1trp50t.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/423691/original/file-20210928-32-1trp50t.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=753&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/423691/original/file-20210928-32-1trp50t.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=753&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/423691/original/file-20210928-32-1trp50t.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=753&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/423691/original/file-20210928-32-1trp50t.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=946&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/423691/original/file-20210928-32-1trp50t.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=946&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/423691/original/file-20210928-32-1trp50t.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=946&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">An 1852 letter from James B. Hargrove quotes the market prices for enslaved men, women and children.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://encyclopediavirginia.org/12137hpr-ceedfabb1958e9a/">Library of Virginia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Meanwhile, <a href="http://commonplace.online/article/toxic-debt-liar-loans/">the money the trade generated</a> and the credit that financed it circulated throughout the country and across the Atlantic, as even European banks and merchants looked to share in the gains.</p>
<p>The more visible the trade became, the more antislavery activists made it a core of their appeals. When abolitionist editor Benjamin Lundy, for example, <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/44392735?seq=8#metadata_info_tab_contents">asked white Americans in the 1820s</a> how long they could look at the slave trade and “permit so disgraceful, so inhuman, and so wicked a practice to continue in our country, which has been emphatically termed THE HOME OF THE FREE,” he was one among a rising chorus. </p>
<p>But abolitionists made little headway. The domestic slave trade ended only when slavery ended in 1865.</p>
<h2>Propaganda obscures history</h2>
<p>Vital to the American economy, important to American politics and central to the experience of enslaved people, the domestic slave trade was an atrocity carried out on a massive scale. As British traveler Joseph Sturge noted, by the 1840s, the entire slaveholding portion of the United States could be characterized by division “<a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/11454/11454-h/11454-h.htm">into the ‘slave-breeding’ and ‘slave-consuming’ States</a>.” </p>
<p>Yet popular historical knowledge of the domestic trade remains hazy, thanks largely to purposeful forgetting and to a propaganda campaign that began before the Civil War and continued long past its conclusion. </p>
<p>White Southerners made denial about the slave trade an important tenet in their defense of slavery. They claimed that slave sales were rare, that they detested the slave trade and that traders were outcasts disdained by respectable people.</p>
<p>Kentucky minister Nathan Lewis Rice’s assertion in 1845 that “<a href="https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=pst.000055471916&view=1up&seq=34&q1=disgust">the slave-trader is looked upon by decent men in the slave-holding States with disgust</a>” was such a common sentiment that even white Northerners sometimes parroted it. Nehemiah Adams, for example, a Massachusetts resident who visited the South in 1854, came away from his time in the region believing that “<a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/South_Side_View_of_Slavery/tuj9nuJGwM0C?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22negro+traders+are+the+abhorrence+of+all+flesh%22&pg=PA78&printsec=frontcover">Negro traders are the abhorrence of all flesh</a>.” </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/423684/original/file-20210928-20-4wasky.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Four slave traders with guns guarding enslaved people they were transporting south from Virginia." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/423684/original/file-20210928-20-4wasky.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/423684/original/file-20210928-20-4wasky.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=670&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/423684/original/file-20210928-20-4wasky.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=670&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/423684/original/file-20210928-20-4wasky.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=670&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/423684/original/file-20210928-20-4wasky.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=841&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/423684/original/file-20210928-20-4wasky.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=841&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/423684/original/file-20210928-20-4wasky.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=841&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Franklin and Armfield slave trading company partner John Armfield watching over enslaved men and women chained together who he and several employees were moving south from Virginia.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.virginiamemory.com/online-exhibitions/exhibits/show/to-be-sold/item/387">John Murray/Library of Virginia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Such claims were almost entirely lies. But downplaying the slave trade became a standard element of the racist mythology embedded in <a href="https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/lost-cause-definition-and-origins">the defense of the Confederacy known as the Lost Cause</a>, whose purveyors minimized slavery’s significance as they discounted its role in bringing about the Civil War.</p>
<p>And while the Confederacy may have lost on the battlefield, its supporters arguably triumphed in the cultural struggle to define the war and its meaning. Well into the 20th century, significant numbers of white Americans throughout the country accepted and embraced the notion that slavery had been relatively benign.</p>
<p>As they did so, the devastations of the domestic slave trade became buried beneath <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/06/12/gone-with-wind-is-also-confederate-monument-film-instead-stone/">comforting fantasies of moonlight and magnolias evoked by movies like “Gone With the Wind.</a>”</p>
<p>Recent years have seen <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-confederate-statue-debate-3-essential-reads-82729">monuments to the Confederacy coming down</a> in cities and towns across the country. But the struggle over how Americans remember and talk about slavery, now perhaps more heated and controversial than ever, arguably remains stuck in terms that are legacies of the Lost Cause. </p>
<p>Slavery still conjures images of Southern farms and plantations. But the institution was grounded in the sales of nearly 2 million human beings in the domestic slave trade, the profits from which nurtured the economy of the entire country.</p>
<p>Until that history makes its way more deeply into our popular memory, it will be impossible to come to terms with slavery and its significance for the American past and present.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/165442/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>I do not currently receive any external funding, but fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, Virginia Humanities, and numerous other institutions did help fund the research that produced the scholarship reflected in this piece.</span></em></p>By the time slavery ended, over 1 million enslaved people had been forcibly moved in the domestic slave trade across state lines. Hundreds of thousands more were bought and sold within states.Joshua D. Rothman, Professor of History, University of AlabamaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1547212021-02-26T21:55:32Z2021-02-26T21:55:32ZHow Black people in the 19th century used photography as a tool for social change<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/386116/original/file-20210224-21-161orsb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C1%2C1225%2C761&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Jubilee singers at Fisk University, in Nashville, Tennessee, pose for
promotional photograph, circa 1871.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://quod.lib.umich.edu/w/wcl1ic/x-178/WCL000251?from=index;lasttype=boolean;lastview=thumbnail;med=1;resnum=141;size=20;sort=relevance;start=141;view=entry;rgn1=ic_all;q1=African+American;evl=undefined">William L. Clements Library</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Frederick Douglass is perhaps best known as an abolitionist and intellectual. But he was also the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/in-sight/wp/2016/03/15/douglass/?arc404=true">most photographed American of the 19th century</a>. And he encouraged the use of photography to <a href="https://www.whatitmeanstobeamerican.org/identities/why-abolitionist-frederick-douglass-loved-the-photograph/">promote social change for Black equality</a>.</p>
<p>In that spirit, this article – using images from the David V. Tinder Collection of Michigan Photography at the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan – examines different ways Black Americans from the 19th century used photography as a tool for self-empowerment and social change. </p>
<h2>Black studio portraits</h2>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/386149/original/file-20210224-23-1t14oek.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Cabinet card portraits of African Americans" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/386149/original/file-20210224-23-1t14oek.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/386149/original/file-20210224-23-1t14oek.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=434&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/386149/original/file-20210224-23-1t14oek.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=434&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/386149/original/file-20210224-23-1t14oek.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=434&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/386149/original/file-20210224-23-1t14oek.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=546&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/386149/original/file-20210224-23-1t14oek.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=546&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/386149/original/file-20210224-23-1t14oek.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=546&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Cabinet card portraits of African Americans from the David V. Tinder Collection of Michigan Photography. Left: Man with Pipe, circa 1887. Right: Woman in Silk Dress, circa 1888.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">William L. Clements Library</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Speaking about how accessible photography had become during his time, Douglass once <a href="https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-frederick-douglass-photographed-american-19th-century">stated</a>: “What was once the special and exclusive luxury of the rich and great is now the privilege of all. The humblest servant girl may now possess a picture of herself such as the wealth of kings could not purchase fifty years ago.” </p>
<p>To pose for a photograph became <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/turn-of-century-african-americans-camera-tool-empowerment-180971757/">an empowering act for African Americans</a>. It served as a way to counteract <a href="https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_2001-0930-23">racist caricatures</a> that distort facial features and mocked Black society. African Americans in urban and rural settings participated in photography to demonstrate dignity in the Black experience.</p>
<p>The first successful form of photography was the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/technology/daguerreotype">daguerreotype</a>, an image printed on polished silver-plated copper. The invention of <a href="https://blog.scienceandmediamuseum.org.uk/find-out-when-a-photo-was-taken-identify-a-carte-de-visite/">carte de visite</a> photographs, followed by <a href="https://blog.scienceandmediamuseum.org.uk/find-out-when-a-photo-was-taken-identify-a-cabinet-card/">cabinet cards</a>, changed the culture of photography because the process allowed photographers to print images on paper. Cartes de visite are portraits the size of a business card with several copies <a href="https://www.gallery.ca/photo-blog/collecting-cards-cartes-de-visite">printed on a single sheet</a>. The change from printing images on metal to printing on paper made them <a href="https://www.familytree.com/blog/cost-of-that-19th-century-photo/#:%7E:text=One%20would%20run%20between%2025,the%20was%20at%20that%20time.">more affordable to produce</a>, and anyone could commission a portrait.</p>
<h2><strong>Collecting kinship: Arabella Chapman albums</strong></h2>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/386121/original/file-20210224-23-18k8yz.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Arabella Chapman" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/386121/original/file-20210224-23-18k8yz.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/386121/original/file-20210224-23-18k8yz.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=788&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/386121/original/file-20210224-23-18k8yz.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=788&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/386121/original/file-20210224-23-18k8yz.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=788&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/386121/original/file-20210224-23-18k8yz.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=991&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/386121/original/file-20210224-23-18k8yz.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=991&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/386121/original/file-20210224-23-18k8yz.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=991&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Arabella Chapman poses for a portrait from her public carte de visite album, circa 1878 - 1880s.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">William L. Clements Library</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>During Victorian times, it was <a href="https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-victorian-brits-obsessed-trading-tiny-photo-portraits">fashionable for people to exchange cartes de visite</a> with loved ones and collect them from visitors.<br>
<a href="https://www.albany.edu/arce/ChapmanXX.html">Arabella Chapman</a>, an African American music teacher from Albany, New York, assembled two cartes de visite photo albums. The first was a private album of family pictures, while the other featured friends and political figures for public viewing. The creation of each book allowed Chapman to store and share her photographs as intimate keepsakes. </p>
<h2><strong>Innovative entrepreneurs: The Goodridge Brothers</strong></h2>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/386125/original/file-20210224-17-4ay548.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="The Goodridge Brothers, Backview of the Washington Street fire," src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/386125/original/file-20210224-17-4ay548.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/386125/original/file-20210224-17-4ay548.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=346&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/386125/original/file-20210224-17-4ay548.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=346&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/386125/original/file-20210224-17-4ay548.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=346&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/386125/original/file-20210224-17-4ay548.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=435&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/386125/original/file-20210224-17-4ay548.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=435&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/386125/original/file-20210224-17-4ay548.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=435&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Children stare at the burned remains from the Washington Street fire, circa 1870s. David V. Tinder Collection of Michigan Photography.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">William L. Clements Library</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>When photography became a viable business, African Americans started their own photography studios in different locations across the country. <a href="https://www.svsu.edu/newsroom/news/2016/october/preservingthegoodridgebrothersphotos/preservingthegoodridgebrothersphotos.html">The Goodridge Brothers</a> established one of the earliest Black photography studios in 1847. The business, opened first in York, Pennsylvania, moved to Saginaw, Michigan in 1863.</p>
<p>The brothers – Glenalvin, Wallace and William – were known for producing studio portraits using a variety of <a href="https://www.nms.ac.uk/explore-our-collections/stories/science-and-technology/victorian-photography/victorian-photography/victorian-photographic-techniques/">photographic techniques</a>. They also produced documentary photography printed on <a href="https://www.reframingphotography.com/page/stereo-cards">stereo cards</a> to create 3D images. </p>
<p>Saginaw, Michigan, was an expanding settlement, and the brothers photographed new buildings in the town. They also documented natural disasters in the area. Photographers would capture 3D images of fires, floods and other destructive occurrences to record the impact of the event before the town rebuilt the area. </p>
<h2>Documenting communities: Harvey C. Jackson</h2>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/386132/original/file-20210224-17-16zsin3.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Burning the mortgage of the Phyllis Wheatley Home" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/386132/original/file-20210224-17-16zsin3.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/386132/original/file-20210224-17-16zsin3.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=473&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/386132/original/file-20210224-17-16zsin3.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=473&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/386132/original/file-20210224-17-16zsin3.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=473&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/386132/original/file-20210224-17-16zsin3.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=594&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/386132/original/file-20210224-17-16zsin3.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=594&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/386132/original/file-20210224-17-16zsin3.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=594&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Burning the Mortgage of the Phyllis Wheatley Home in Detroit, Michigan, on Jan. 4, 1915. By Harvey C. Jackson.
David V. Tinder Collection of Michigan Photography.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">William L. Clements Library</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The development of Black photography studios allowed communities greater control to style images that authentically reflected Black life. <a href="https://www.hourdetroit.com/the-way-it-was-articles/the-way-it-was-harvey-c-jackson-1910/">Harvey C. Jackson</a> established Detroit’s first Black-owned photography studio in 1915. He collaborated with communities to create cinematic scenes of important events. In one photo, Jackson documents a mortgage-burning celebration at the <a href="https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/phyllis-wheatley-womens-clubs-1895/">Phyllis Wheatley Home</a>, established in 1897. Its mission was to improve the status of Black women and the elderly by providing lodging and services.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.phillytrib.com/news/vine-memorial-baptist-holds-mortgage-burning-ceremony/article_f0874e1c-663d-5616-be36-ed28d340dc10.html">Mortgage-burning ceremonies</a> are a tradition churches observe to commemorate their last mortgage payment. Harvey Jackson documented this occasion with each person holding a string attached to the mortgage to connect each person in burning the document.</p>
<p>African Americans’ engagement with photography in the 19th century began a tradition for <a href="https://www.yesmagazine.org/social-justice/2020/08/04/black-photographers-document-movement/">Black photographers’ use of photography today</a> to promote social change. African Americans, whether they are in front or behind the camera, create empowering images that define the beauty and resilience contained within the Black experience. </p>
<p>[<em>Deep knowledge, daily.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters/the-daily-3?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=deepknowledge">Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter</a>.]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/154721/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Samantha Hill is affiliated with the Society of American Archivists</span></em></p>Cameras played a critical role in the quest for social equality for Black Americans in the post-slavery era.Samantha Hill, 2019 - 2021 Joyce Bock Fellow at the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan and current graduate student at U-M School of Information, University of MichiganLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1528672021-01-07T18:02:53Z2021-01-07T18:02:53ZUS Capitol protesters, egged on by Trump, are part of a long history of white supremacists hearing politicians’ words as encouragement<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/377628/original/file-20210107-16-rpdrh3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=30%2C20%2C6639%2C4376&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The Proud Boys outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, January 6, 2021. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/the-proud-boys-outside-the-us-capitol-in-washington-dc-on-news-photo/1230463103?adppopup=true">(Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/For The Washington Post via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>“President Trump and his Republican enablers in Congress incited a violent attack Wednesday against the government they lead,” <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/06/opinion/trump-capitol-dc-protests.html">The New York Times’ editorial board wrote</a> on Jan. 6, summing up much of the response to the incursion into the Capitol by rioting Trump supporters that day.</p>
<p>At a rally that morning, Donald Trump <a href="https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2021-01-06/news-analysis-trumps-violent-rhetoric-incites-supporters-capitol-takeover">had urged those supporters</a> to march on the Capitol, saying he would “never concede” and that they should show “the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.” </p>
<p>The Times was joined in laying the blame at Trump’s feet by many others, including <a href="https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2021/01/07/mitt-romney-riot-violence-reaction-capitol-certification-sot-vpx.cnn/video/playlists/congress-certifies-electoral-college-vote/">Republican Sen. Mitt Romney</a>, who said what happened at the Capitol was “an insurrection incited by the president of the United States.”</p>
<p>Among the protesters at the Capitol were members of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/01/proud-boys-white-supremacist-group-law-enforcement-agencies">white supremacy groups, including the Proud Boys</a>. Their participation in the Jan. 6 events, <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/07/us/insurrection-capitol-extremist-groups-invs/index.html">egged on by Trump</a>, reflects a long history in the U.S. of local, state and national political leaders encouraging white supremacist groups to challenge or overthrow democratic governments. </p>
<p>During Reconstruction, the post-Civil War period of forming interracial governments and reintegrating former Confederate states into the Union, white city and state leaders in the South tacitly encouraged violence against black voters by state militias and groups like the <a href="http://www.encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/h-2934">Ku Klux Klan</a>. They did it in a way that allowed those leaders to look innocent of any crimes. </p>
<p>Those groups used that chaos to end federal power in their states and reestablish white-dominated Southern state governments. </p>
<p>Today, <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-are-white-supremacists-protesting-to-reopen-the-us-economy-137044">white supremacists hope the political chaos they contribute to will lead to</a> <a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674286078">race war</a> <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-are-the-reopen-protesters-really-saying-137558">and the creation of their own white nation</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/335430/original/file-20200515-138629-j429aj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/335430/original/file-20200515-138629-j429aj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/335430/original/file-20200515-138629-j429aj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=748&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/335430/original/file-20200515-138629-j429aj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=748&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/335430/original/file-20200515-138629-j429aj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=748&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/335430/original/file-20200515-138629-j429aj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=940&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/335430/original/file-20200515-138629-j429aj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=940&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/335430/original/file-20200515-138629-j429aj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=940&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Cartoon by Thomas Nast in an 1868 Harper’s Weekly, ‘This is a white man’s government,’ skewering Southern white supremacists fighting Reconstruction laws.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.loc.gov/item/98513794/">Library of Congress</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Reconstruction violence</h2>
<p>Moments of changing social and political power in U.S. history have led to clashes – <a href="https://www.dukeupress.edu/this-nonviolent-stuffll-get-you-killed">often armed</a> – between white supremacists and interracial alliances over voting rights.</p>
<p>That history includes the period following the Civil War, when white supremacist organizations saw the postwar rule over Southern states of Radical Republicans and the federal government as illegitimate. They wanted to return to the prewar status quo of <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/14301/slavery-by-another-name-by-douglas-a-blackmon/">slavery by another name</a> and white supremacist rule.</p>
<p>As a historian of <a href="https://networks.h-net.org/node/4113/discussions/157750/register-kentucky-historical-society-vol-115-no-1-now-available">protests and Reconstruction</a>, I study how those paramilitary groups or self-proclaimed “regulators” consequently spread fear and terror among black and white Republican voters with the support of the anti-black Democratic Party in Southern states. </p>
<p>They targeted elections and vowed to “<a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=U7hpAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA2101&lpg=PA2101&dq=%E2%80%9Ccarry+the+election+peaceably+if+we+can,+forcibly+if+we+must.%E2%80%9D&source=bl&ots=vZU88x92mU&sig=ACfU3U34H7Xb-2aUHMGrMKULNiHBUi1D4w&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjxyZvYgKrpAhXRKs0KHXiiCuUQ6AEwBXoECAQQAQ#v=onepage&q=%E2%80%9Ccarry%20the%20election%20peaceably%20if%20we%20can%2C%20forcibly%20if%20we%20must.%E2%80%9D&f=false">carry the election peaceably if we can, forcibly if we must</a>.” </p>
<p>Still, many courageous black and white voters <a href="https://ldhi.library.cofc.edu/exhibits/show/after_slavery_educator/unit_nine_documents/document_4">fought back</a> by forming political organizations, daring to vote and <a href="https://www.facinghistory.org/reconstruction-era/black-south-carolinians-form-militia-protection-1874">assembling their own armed guards</a> to protect themselves.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/335429/original/file-20200515-138610-f56wxe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/335429/original/file-20200515-138610-f56wxe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/335429/original/file-20200515-138610-f56wxe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/335429/original/file-20200515-138610-f56wxe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/335429/original/file-20200515-138610-f56wxe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/335429/original/file-20200515-138610-f56wxe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/335429/original/file-20200515-138610-f56wxe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A leader of the Three Percenters militia movement, Matt Marshall, speaks at an anti-lockdown protest, April 19, 2020 in Olympia, Washington.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/matt-marshall-of-the-right-wing-group-washington-state-news-photo/1210404370?adppopup=true">Getty/Karen Ducey</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>‘Gentlemen of property and standing’</h2>
<p>Then, as today, white supremacists received encouraging signals from powerful leaders. </p>
<p>In the 19th century, “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Gentlemen-Property-Standing-Anti-Abolition-Jacksonian/dp/0195013514">gentlemen of property and standing</a>” often led or indirectly supported anti-abolition mobs, slave patrols, lynch mobs or Klan attacks. </p>
<p>Federal investigators in Kentucky in 1867 found that “<a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/572671/pdf">many men of wealth and position</a>” rode with the armed groups. One witness in the federal investigation testified that “many of the most respectable men in the county belong in the ‘Lynch’ party.” Future South Carolina Governor and U.S. Senator “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman reflected on his participation in the <a href="http://www.scencyclopedia.org/sce/entries/hamburg-massacre/">Hamburg massacre</a> of 1876, arguing that “<a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Ben_Tillman_and_the_Reconstruction_of_Wh/dOA4CQAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=having+the+whites+demonstrate+their+superiority+by+killing+as+many+as+was+justifiable&pg=PA67&printsec=frontcover">the leading men</a>” of the area wanted to teach black voters a lesson by “having the whites demonstrate their superiority by killing as many as was justifiable.” At least six black men were killed in the Hamburg attack on the black South Carolina militia by the <a href="http://www.scencyclopedia.org/sce/entries/red-shirts/">Red Shirts</a>, a white rifle club.</p>
<p>White supremacists knew that they would not face consequences for their violence. </p>
<p>An agent of the federal <a href="https://www.archives.gov/research/african-americans/freedmens-bureau">Freedmen’s Bureau</a> – set up by Congress in 1865 to help former slaves and poor whites in the South – stated that the “<a href="https://ldhi.library.cofc.edu/exhibits/show/after_slavery_educator/unit_nine_documents/document_3">desperadoes</a>” received encouragement and were “screened from the hands of justice by citizens of boasted connections.” </p>
<p>President Ulysses S. Grant <a href="https://www.loc.gov/resource/rbpe.2070020a/?sp=2&st=text">condemned</a> the Hamburg massacre, arguing that some claimed “the right to kill negroes and Republicans without fear of punishment and without loss of caste or reputation.” </p>
<p>Facing community pressure, and without the <a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674743984">presence of the U.S. Army</a> to enforce laws, local sheriffs and judges refused or were unable to enforce federal laws. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/335434/original/file-20200515-138644-1sdk9y9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/335434/original/file-20200515-138644-1sdk9y9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/335434/original/file-20200515-138644-1sdk9y9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=260&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/335434/original/file-20200515-138644-1sdk9y9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=260&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/335434/original/file-20200515-138644-1sdk9y9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=260&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/335434/original/file-20200515-138644-1sdk9y9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=327&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/335434/original/file-20200515-138644-1sdk9y9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=327&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/335434/original/file-20200515-138644-1sdk9y9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=327&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Armed rioters shown in the aftermath of the multiracial Wilmington, North Carolina, government being overthrown by white supremacists in 1898.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.loc.gov/photos/?q=Wilmington,+N.C.+race+riot">Library of Congress</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Witnesses were often afraid to challenge local leaders for fear of attack. The “<a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/572671/pdf">reign of terror</a>” was so complete that “men dare not report outrages and appear as witnesses.”</p>
<p>When the U.S. District Court in Kentucky brought charges against two men for lynching in 1871, prosecutors could not find witnesses willing to testify against the accused. The <a href="https://www.loc.gov/item/sn82015463/">Frankfort Commonwealth</a> newspaper wrote, “He would be hung by a [mob] inside of twenty-four hours, and the dominant sentiment … would say ‘served him right.’”</p>
<h2>State militias</h2>
<p>As Southern states threw off federal military occupation and elected their own white-dominated governments, they no longer had to rely solely on white terror organizations to enforce their agenda. </p>
<p>Instead, these self-described “<a href="https://www.ncpedia.org/redeemer-democrats">redeemers</a>” formed state-funded militias that served similar functions of intimidation and voter suppression with the support of prominent citizens. </p>
<p>At political rallies and elections throughout the South, official Democratic militias paraded through towns and <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/For_Slavery_and_Union/D917BgAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=democratic%20partisan%20militia">monitored polling stations</a> to threaten black and white Republican voters, proclaiming that “<a href="https://vtext.valdosta.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10428/1130/butler-joshua-w_almost-too-terrible-to-believe_history_thesis_2012.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y">this is our country and we intend to protect it or die</a>.” </p>
<p>In 1870 the <a href="https://www.loc.gov/item/sn84020086/">Louisville Commercial</a> newspaper argued, “We have, then, a militia for the State of Kentucky composed of members of one political party, and designed solely to operate against members of another political party. These militia are armed with State guns, are equipped from the State arsenal, and to a man are the enemies of the national government.” </p>
<p>By driving away Republican voters and claiming electoral victory, these Democratic leaders gained power through state-supported militia violence. </p>
<p>White militias and paramilitary groups also confiscated guns from black citizens who tried to protect themselves, claiming “<a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=xvIYAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA1057&lpg=PA1057&dq=%E2%80%9CWe+did+not+think+they+had+a+right+to+have+guns.%E2%80%9D&source=bl&ots=30R_twS8pK&sig=ACfU3U2HxA-pbH0zCkMHuGweuTsTwmODWg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwicxtWNgKXpAhWCaM0KHbwYAMsQ6AEwAHoECAMQAQ#v=onepage&q=%E2%80%9CWe%20did%20not%20think%20they%20had%20a%20right%20to%20have%20guns.%E2%80%9D&f=false">We did not think they had a right to have guns</a>.” </p>
<p>White terror groups and their allies in law enforcement were especially hostile to politically active black Union veterans who returned home with their military weapons. Local sheriffs confiscated weapons and armed bands raided homes to destroy their guns. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/335459/original/file-20200515-138654-ndapxj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/335459/original/file-20200515-138654-ndapxj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/335459/original/file-20200515-138654-ndapxj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=743&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/335459/original/file-20200515-138654-ndapxj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=743&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/335459/original/file-20200515-138654-ndapxj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=743&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/335459/original/file-20200515-138654-ndapxj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=933&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/335459/original/file-20200515-138654-ndapxj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=933&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/335459/original/file-20200515-138654-ndapxj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=933&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">In an 1874 Harper’s Weekly cartoon, ‘The Union as it was,’ Thomas Nast critiques violent white supremacist organizations for forcing African Americans into a position ‘worse than slavery.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.loc.gov/item/2001696840/">Library of Congress/Thomas Nast from Harpers Weekly</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Guerrilla race war</h2>
<p>During Reconstruction, paramilitary groups and official Democratic militias found support from county sheriffs up to state governors who encouraged violence while maintaining their own innocence.</p>
<p>Today, white supremacists appear to interpret politicians’ remarks as support for their cause of a <a href="https://gizmodo.com/report-over-100-militant-groups-have-been-promoting-se-1843051231">new civil war</a> to create a white-dominated government. </p>
<p>These groups <a href="https://www.techtransparencyproject.org/articles/extremists-are-using-facebook-to-organize-for-civil-war-amid-coronavirus">thrive on recent protests against stay-at-home orders</a>, especially the ones featuring <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/04/27/why-are-people-bringing-guns-anti-quarantine-protests-be-intimidating/">protesters with guns</a>, creating an <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/13/us/coronavirus-businesses-lockdown-guns.html">intimidating spectacle</a> for those who support local and state government authority. </p>
<p>Beyond “<a href="https://belonging.berkeley.edu/blog-revisiting-dog-whistle-politics">dog whistle</a>” politics, as in the past, these statements – and the actions encouraged by them – can lead to real <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/16/us/massachusetts-bomb-jewish-nursing-home.html">violence</a> and <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/senate-democrats-demand-action-cdc-doj-curb-covid-19-racism-n1201491">hate crimes</a> against any who threaten supremacists’ concept of a white nation.</p>
<p><em>Editor’s note: This is an updated version of an <a href="https://theconversation.com/theres-a-history-of-white-supremacists-interpreting-government-leaders-words-as-encouragement-137873">article originally published</a> May 18, 2020.</em></p>
<p>[<em>You need to understand the coronavirus pandemic, and we can help.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=upper-coronavirus-help">Read The Conversation’s newsletter</a>.]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/152867/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Shannon M. Smith does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The protests that ended in the storming of the US Capitol included members of white supremacy groups, the latest example of such groups being encouraged by politicians to challenge government.Shannon M. Smith, Associate Professor of History, College of Saint Benedict & Saint John's UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1414082020-07-06T16:08:47Z2020-07-06T16:08:47ZIf Canada is serious about confronting systemic racism, we must abolish prisons<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/344316/original/file-20200626-104480-bnyrvc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=32%2C50%2C947%2C450&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Segregation cells at Dorchester prison in New Brunswick. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Senate of Canada)</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/">CC BY-NC</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Global uprisings in response to anti-Black police brutality have prompted demands to defund policing and reinvest in communities. Public health professionals recognize the connections between racism and community well-being. But it is not just policing agencies that have a systemic racism problem, Canadian prisons do too.</p>
<p>Prisons are densely packed. Social distancing and adequate hygiene is impossible. Advocates suggest depopulating carceral facilities to reduce harm and save lives. </p>
<p>The Ontario government recently announced it would funnel <a href="https://news.ontario.ca/mcscs/en/2020/06/ontario-investing-in-frontline-corrections-workers.html">$500 million</a> into corrections — despite anticipating a <a href="https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-ontario-projects-205-billion-deficit-in-2020-21-as-it-spends/">$20.5 billion deficit</a> due to the COVID-19 pandemic. </p>
<p>The Saskatchewan government also recently announced it would spend <a href="https://www.saskatchewan.ca/government/news-and-media/2020/june/17/remand-centre-expansion">$120 million</a> to build a remand centre expansion at the Saskatoon Correctional Centre, while predicting a <a href="https://nationalpost.com/pmn/news-pmn/canada-news-pmn/newsalert-saskatchewan-says-covid-19-factor-in-2-4b-deficit-no-cuts-coming">$2.4 billion</a> deficit. </p>
<p>These developments are regressive. It is time to look at alternatives to imprisonment and set our sights towards <a href="https://justiceexchange.ca/abolition/abolition-in-canada-syllabus/">prison abolition</a>.</p>
<p>As soon as COVID-19 spread to North America, health professionals, scholars and activists <a href="https://www.thechronicleherald.ca/opinion/local-perspectives/martha-paynter-prisons-petri-dishes-for-coronavirus-418686/">expected widespread outbreaks in prisons</a>. Advocates pleaded for governments to release prisoners.</p>
<p>One province, Nova Scotia, heeded this call.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/343871/original/file-20200625-132982-7a0bg1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/343871/original/file-20200625-132982-7a0bg1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=368&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343871/original/file-20200625-132982-7a0bg1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=368&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343871/original/file-20200625-132982-7a0bg1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=368&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343871/original/file-20200625-132982-7a0bg1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=462&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343871/original/file-20200625-132982-7a0bg1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=462&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343871/original/file-20200625-132982-7a0bg1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=462&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A still from the documentary ‘Conviction’ (2019) depicting women prisoners in Nova Scotia.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Nova Scotia’s approach</h2>
<p>In <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/jail-population-cut-in-half-new-covid-19-measures-1.5541732">Nova Scotia,</a> the judiciary, corrections, crown and defense counsel, along with community organizations, collaborated to cut the provincial prison population in half. As of June 16, Nova Scotia’s jail for women had only eight prisoners. This resulted in only one case of COVID-19 in Nova Scotia’s prison system. </p>
<p>Prisons that did not heed the warnings of experts — like those in <a href="https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/canada-s-prison-ombudsman-calls-covid-isolation-extremely-concerning-1.4910922">Ontario, B.C. and Québec</a> — saw widespread <a href="http://tpcp-canada.blogspot.com/2020/05/confirmed-covid-19-cases-linked-to_29.html">outbreaks</a>.</p>
<p>We spoke with Coverdale Executive Director Ashley Avery, who reports the people they support are mostly arrested for public intoxication, homelessness and mental health crisis. These are areas where imprisonment should not be the answer. </p>
<p>Abolition is a creative project that replaces punishment, widely considered <a href="https://theconversation.com/prisons-are-not-the-answer-to-preventing-crime-123575">ineffective in reducing violence</a>. Instead, transformative approaches prioritize health and well-being. </p>
<p>Decarceration is the effort to limit the numbers of people who are detained behind bars, either through minimizing who is sent to carceral facilities in the first place or through creating avenues to release people already in custody. </p>
<p>Every decarcerated person requires housing, adequate income and health services.
In Nova Scotia, community groups (Coverdale Courtwork Society, Elizabeth Fry and John Howard) report it costs them $150 per person per day to keep a decarcerated person housed in a hotel with legal, health and other services. Compare this with <a href="https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/85-002-x/2017001/article/14700/tbl/tbl06-eng.htm">$255</a> per day to keep someone in a provincial jail. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/343880/original/file-20200625-132961-16ohg5g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C1139%2C2448%2C1304&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/343880/original/file-20200625-132961-16ohg5g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343880/original/file-20200625-132961-16ohg5g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343880/original/file-20200625-132961-16ohg5g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343880/original/file-20200625-132961-16ohg5g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343880/original/file-20200625-132961-16ohg5g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343880/original/file-20200625-132961-16ohg5g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Port Cartier prison cell in Québec, the first prison in Canada to report cases of COVID-19.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Correctional Investigator of Canada)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Prison expansion is a step backward</h2>
<p>The mass incarceration of racialized communities in Canada’s prisons reflects the country’s racial profiling and over-policing of Black and Indigenous people. Decarceration offers a direct way to address the systemic oppression Canada has imposed on Black and Indigenous peoples.</p>
<p>More than <a href="https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/85-002-x/2019001/article/00010-eng.htm">30 per cent</a> of Canadian prisoners are Indigenous (they are five per cent of the Canadian population), and <a href="https://www.hilltimes.com/2020/06/17/the-afterlife-of-slavery-defund-reform-canadas-prisons-advocates-say-after-watchdog-says-very-little-has-improved-for-black-inmates/252966">9.6 per cent</a> are Black (they are 3.5 per cent of the population). Indigenous women account for <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/indigenous-overrepresentation-prison-oci-statement-1.5434712">42 per cent of women</a> in federal custody. </p>
<p>Black people are <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/street-checks-halifax-police-scot-wortley-racial-profiling-1.5073300">six times</a> more likely to be street checked in Halifax, and more likely to be charged than white people for the same behaviour. </p>
<p>Indigenous confinement has been described as “<a href="https://www.oci-bec.gc.ca/cnt/comm/press/press20200121-eng.aspx">a national travesty</a>” by the Correctional Investigator of Canada and “<a href="https://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/canadas-prisons-are-the-new-residential-schools/">the new residential schools</a>” by criminologists. African American literary and cultural historian Saidiya Hartman calls it the “<a href="https://www.hilltimes.com/2020/06/17/the-afterlife-of-slavery-defund-reform-canadas-prisons-advocates-say-after-watchdog-says-very-little-has-improved-for-black-inmates/252966">afterlife of slavery</a>.” </p>
<h2>Very few releases</h2>
<p>Eight hundred people in the federal prison system <a href="http://tpcp-canada.blogspot.com/2020/05/confirmed-covid-19-cases-linked-to_29.html">tested positive</a> for COVID-19. Several prisons had massive COVID-19 outbreaks, and <a href="https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/a-second-inmate-in-a-canadian-federal-prison-has-died-of-covid-19-1.4926031">two people have died</a>. </p>
<p>While the federal government claimed it had <a href="https://www.aptnnews.ca/national-news/hundreds-of-inmates-quietly-released-from-federal-prisons-over-covid-19-fears-blair/">released hundreds</a>, in reality there is only evidence that it released <a href="https://ottawa.ctvnews.ca/ailing-federal-prisoner-to-be-released-after-heading-to-court-over-covid-19-fear-1.4900293">one person</a>.</p>
<p>Minimum security prisoners could have been released. Those close to parole could have had board appearances expedited. The elderly and unwell could have been released on compassionate grounds. <a href="https://www.thecoast.ca/COVID19Needtoknow/archives/2020/04/11/for-those-incarcerated-with-their-babies-covid-puts-two-generations-in-peril">Prisoners in Mother Child programs</a>, where young children live with their imprisoned mothers, could have been relocated to their communities. None of this happened.</p>
<p>The recent announcements about Ontario and Saskatchewan investing more dollars into prisons come amid pressing need for investments in health. Despite its promise, Nova Scotia’s decarceration initiative is at risk of <a href="https://atlantic.ctvnews.ca/n-s-inmates-worry-housing-during-covid-19-could-end-unless-funding-extended-1.4989446">imminent defunding</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/343870/original/file-20200624-132955-1y02mnv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/343870/original/file-20200624-132955-1y02mnv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343870/original/file-20200624-132955-1y02mnv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343870/original/file-20200624-132955-1y02mnv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343870/original/file-20200624-132955-1y02mnv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343870/original/file-20200624-132955-1y02mnv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343870/original/file-20200624-132955-1y02mnv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Protest outside of Ottawa Carleton prison.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Criminalization and Punishment Education Project)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Time for change</h2>
<p>The federal Black Caucus called for public investments in non-carceral <a href="https://www.chch.com/parliamentary-black-caucus-calls-for-action-on-systemic-racism/">community justice strategies</a>. Indigenous leaders in British Columbia called for the release of <a href="https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-indigenous-leaders-say-csc-needs-to-address-outbreak-at-mission/">as many people as possible</a>, with support plans for housing, financial aid and community safety. Sc’ianew First Nation (Beecher Bay) Chief Councillor Russ Chipps wants William Head prison closed and the <a href="https://www.timescolonist.com/news/local/close-william-head-prison-and-return-the-land-says-first-nation-chief-1.24153672">land returned to First Nations</a>.</p>
<p>Abolition may sound like a radical new idea, but people have been working toward it for decades. Black feminist theorists including Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Mariame Kaba helped put this vision into practice by providing language, <a href="http://criticalresistance.org/">organizations</a>, <a href="https://survivedandpunished.org/">initiatives</a> and <a href="https://transformharm.org/">resources</a>. </p>
<p>We can defund police and prisons instead of ticketing people for being outside, snitching on our neighbours, tearing down tents, criminalizing people in mental health and addictions crisis and profiling Black and Indigenous Peoples.</p>
<p>Prisons are too broken to reform. If Canada is serious about dealing with racism, then the abolition of both policing and prisons is the way forward.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/141408/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Martha Paynter receives funding from Pierre Elliot Trudeau Foundation and CIHR. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Linda Mussell receives funding from Pierre Elliot Trudeau Foundation and SSHRC.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Nataleah Hunter-Young receives funding from the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation and SSHRC. </span></em></p>It is not just policing agencies that have a systemic racism problem, Canadian prisons do tooMartha Paynter, PhD Candidate in Nursing, Dalhousie UniversityLinda Mussell, PhD Candidate, Political Studies, Queen's University, OntarioNataleah Hunter-Young, PhD Candidate, Communication and Culture, Toronto Metropolitan UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1378732020-05-18T13:01:07Z2020-05-18T13:01:07ZThere’s a history of white supremacists interpreting government leaders’ words as encouragement<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/377618/original/file-20210107-23-vom98g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=70%2C70%2C6569%2C4376&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The Proud Boys outside the US Capitol in Washington, DC on Wednesday, January 6, 2021. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/the-proud-boys-outside-the-us-capitol-in-washington-dc-on-news-photo/1230463103?adppopup=true">Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/For The Washington Post via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><a href="https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2020/03/26/white-supremacists-see-coronavirus-opportunity">White supremacist</a> and <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-are-white-supremacists-protesting-to-reopen-the-us-economy-137044">militia</a> organizations are <a href="https://www.npr.org/2020/04/16/835343965/-a-perfect-storm-extremists-look-for-ways-to-exploit-coronavirus-pandemic">exploiting</a> the government’s chaotic response to the coronavirus for recruitment efforts. </p>
<p>Whatever his intention, these groups interpret President Donald Trump’s tweets to <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/trump-s-liberate-tweets-extremists-see-call-arms-n1186561">“LIBERATE” states</a> and calling armed protesters “<a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/05/01/echoing-praise-charlottesville-neo-nazis-trump-calls-armed-anti-lockdown-fanatics">very good people</a>” as support for their cause.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.techtransparencyproject.org/articles/extremists-are-using-facebook-to-organize-for-civil-war-amid-coronavirus">Recent research by the Tech Transparency Project into social media accounts of white supremacists</a>, a nonprofit that researches “the influence of the major technology platforms” on politics, policy and people’s lives, found that “some members of private … Facebook groups reacted to the president’s rhetoric (about lockdown protests) with memes of celebration.” </p>
<p>The white supremacists’ response reflects the United States’ history of local, state and national political leaders encouraging white supremacist groups to challenge or overthrow democratic governments. </p>
<p>During Reconstruction, the post-Civil War period of forming interracial governments and reintegrating former Confederate states into the Union, white city and state leaders in the South tacitly encouraged violence against black voters by state militias and groups like the <a href="http://www.encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/h-2934">Ku Klux Klan</a>. They did it in a way that allowed those leaders to look innocent of any crimes. </p>
<p>Those groups used that chaos to end federal power in their states and reestablish white-dominated Southern state governments. </p>
<p>Today, <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-are-white-supremacists-protesting-to-reopen-the-us-economy-137044">white supremacists hope the political chaos they contribute to will lead to</a> <a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674286078">race war</a> <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-are-the-reopen-protesters-really-saying-137558">and the creation of their own white nation</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/335430/original/file-20200515-138629-j429aj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/335430/original/file-20200515-138629-j429aj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/335430/original/file-20200515-138629-j429aj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=748&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/335430/original/file-20200515-138629-j429aj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=748&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/335430/original/file-20200515-138629-j429aj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=748&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/335430/original/file-20200515-138629-j429aj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=940&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/335430/original/file-20200515-138629-j429aj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=940&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/335430/original/file-20200515-138629-j429aj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=940&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Cartoon by Thomas Nast in an 1868 Harper’s Weekly, ‘This is a white man’s government,’ skewering Southern white supremacists fighting Reconstruction laws.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.loc.gov/item/98513794/">Library of Congress</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Reconstruction violence</h2>
<p>Moments of changing social and political power in U.S. history have led to clashes – <a href="https://www.dukeupress.edu/this-nonviolent-stuffll-get-you-killed">often armed</a> – between white supremacists and interracial alliances over voting rights.</p>
<p>That history includes the period following the Civil War, when white supremacist organizations saw the postwar rule over Southern states of Radical Republicans and the federal government as illegitimate. They wanted to return to the prewar status quo of <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/14301/slavery-by-another-name-by-douglas-a-blackmon/">slavery by another name</a> and white supremacist rule.</p>
<p>As a historian of <a href="https://networks.h-net.org/node/4113/discussions/157750/register-kentucky-historical-society-vol-115-no-1-now-available">protests and Reconstruction</a>, I study how those paramilitary groups or self-proclaimed “regulators” consequently spread fear and terror among black and white Republican voters with the support of the anti-black Democratic Party in Southern states. </p>
<p>They targeted elections and vowed to “<a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=U7hpAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA2101&lpg=PA2101&dq=%E2%80%9Ccarry+the+election+peaceably+if+we+can,+forcibly+if+we+must.%E2%80%9D&source=bl&ots=vZU88x92mU&sig=ACfU3U34H7Xb-2aUHMGrMKULNiHBUi1D4w&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjxyZvYgKrpAhXRKs0KHXiiCuUQ6AEwBXoECAQQAQ#v=onepage&q=%E2%80%9Ccarry%20the%20election%20peaceably%20if%20we%20can%2C%20forcibly%20if%20we%20must.%E2%80%9D&f=false">carry the election peaceably if we can, forcibly if we must</a>.” </p>
<p>Still, many courageous black and white voters <a href="https://ldhi.library.cofc.edu/exhibits/show/after_slavery_educator/unit_nine_documents/document_4">fought back</a> by forming political organizations, daring to vote and <a href="https://www.facinghistory.org/reconstruction-era/black-south-carolinians-form-militia-protection-1874">assembling their own armed guards</a> to protect themselves.</p>
<h2>‘Gentlemen of property and standing’</h2>
<p>Then, as today, white supremacists received encouraging signals from powerful leaders. </p>
<p>In the 19th century, “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Gentlemen-Property-Standing-Anti-Abolition-Jacksonian/dp/0195013514">gentlemen of property and standing</a>” often led or indirectly supported anti-abolition mobs, slave patrols, lynch mobs or Klan attacks. </p>
<p>Federal investigators in Kentucky in 1867 found that “<a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/572671/pdf">many men of wealth and position</a>” rode with the armed groups. One witness in the federal investigation testified that “many of the most respectable men in the county belong in the ‘Lynch’ party.” Future South Carolina Governor and U.S. Senator “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman reflected on his participation in the <a href="http://www.scencyclopedia.org/sce/entries/hamburg-massacre/">Hamburg massacre</a> of 1876, arguing that “<a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Ben_Tillman_and_the_Reconstruction_of_Wh/dOA4CQAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=having+the+whites+demonstrate+their+superiority+by+killing+as+many+as+was+justifiable&pg=PA67&printsec=frontcover">the leading men</a>” of the area wanted to teach black voters a lesson by “having the whites demonstrate their superiority by killing as many as was justifiable.” At least six black men were killed in the Hamburg attack on the black South Carolina militia by the <a href="http://www.scencyclopedia.org/sce/entries/red-shirts/">Red Shirts</a>, a white rifle club.</p>
<p>White supremacists knew that they would not face consequences for their violence. </p>
<p>An agent of the federal <a href="https://www.archives.gov/research/african-americans/freedmens-bureau">Freedmen’s Bureau</a> – set up by Congress in 1865 to help former slaves and poor whites in the South – stated that the “<a href="https://ldhi.library.cofc.edu/exhibits/show/after_slavery_educator/unit_nine_documents/document_3">desperadoes</a>” received encouragement and were “screened from the hands of justice by citizens of boasted connections.” </p>
<p>President Ulysses S. Grant <a href="https://www.loc.gov/resource/rbpe.2070020a/?sp=2&st=text">condemned</a> the Hamburg massacre, arguing that some claimed “the right to kill negroes and Republicans without fear of punishment and without loss of caste or reputation.” </p>
<p>Facing community pressure, and without the <a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674743984">presence of the U.S. Army</a> to enforce laws, local sheriffs and judges refused or were unable to enforce federal laws. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/335434/original/file-20200515-138644-1sdk9y9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/335434/original/file-20200515-138644-1sdk9y9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/335434/original/file-20200515-138644-1sdk9y9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=260&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/335434/original/file-20200515-138644-1sdk9y9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=260&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/335434/original/file-20200515-138644-1sdk9y9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=260&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/335434/original/file-20200515-138644-1sdk9y9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=327&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/335434/original/file-20200515-138644-1sdk9y9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=327&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/335434/original/file-20200515-138644-1sdk9y9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=327&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Armed rioters shown in the aftermath of the multiracial Wilmington, North Carolina, government being overthrown by white supremacists in 1898.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.loc.gov/photos/?q=Wilmington,+N.C.+race+riot">Library of Congress</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Witnesses were often afraid to challenge local leaders for fear of attack. The “<a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/572671/pdf">reign of terror</a>” was so complete that “men dare not report outrages and appear as witnesses.”</p>
<p>When the U.S. District Court in Kentucky brought charges against two men for lynching in 1871, prosecutors could not find witnesses willing to testify against the accused. The <a href="https://www.loc.gov/item/sn82015463/">Frankfort Commonwealth</a> newspaper wrote, “He would be hung by a [mob] inside of twenty-four hours, and the dominant sentiment … would say ‘served him right.’”</p>
<h2>State militias</h2>
<p>As Southern states threw off federal military occupation and elected their own white-dominated governments, they no longer had to rely solely on white terror organizations to enforce their agenda. </p>
<p>Instead, these self-described “<a href="https://www.ncpedia.org/redeemer-democrats">redeemers</a>” formed state-funded militias that served similar functions of intimidation and voter suppression with the support of prominent citizens. </p>
<p>At political rallies and elections throughout the South, official Democratic militias paraded through towns and <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/For_Slavery_and_Union/D917BgAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=democratic%20partisan%20militia">monitored polling stations</a> to threaten black and white Republican voters, proclaiming that “<a href="https://vtext.valdosta.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10428/1130/butler-joshua-w_almost-too-terrible-to-believe_history_thesis_2012.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y">this is our country and we intend to protect it or die</a>.” </p>
<p>In 1870 the <a href="https://www.loc.gov/item/sn84020086/">Louisville Commercial</a> newspaper argued, “We have, then, a militia for the State of Kentucky composed of members of one political party, and designed solely to operate against members of another political party. These militia are armed with State guns, are equipped from the State arsenal, and to a man are the enemies of the national government.” </p>
<p>By driving away Republican voters and claiming electoral victory, these Democratic leaders gained power through state-supported militia violence. </p>
<p>White militias and paramilitary groups also confiscated guns from black citizens who tried to protect themselves, claiming “<a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=xvIYAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA1057&lpg=PA1057&dq=%E2%80%9CWe+did+not+think+they+had+a+right+to+have+guns.%E2%80%9D&source=bl&ots=30R_twS8pK&sig=ACfU3U2HxA-pbH0zCkMHuGweuTsTwmODWg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwicxtWNgKXpAhWCaM0KHbwYAMsQ6AEwAHoECAMQAQ#v=onepage&q=%E2%80%9CWe%20did%20not%20think%20they%20had%20a%20right%20to%20have%20guns.%E2%80%9D&f=false">We did not think they had a right to have guns</a>.” </p>
<p>White terror groups and their allies in law enforcement were especially hostile to politically active black Union veterans who returned home with their military weapons. Local sheriffs confiscated weapons and armed bands raided homes to destroy their guns. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/335459/original/file-20200515-138654-ndapxj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/335459/original/file-20200515-138654-ndapxj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/335459/original/file-20200515-138654-ndapxj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=743&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/335459/original/file-20200515-138654-ndapxj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=743&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/335459/original/file-20200515-138654-ndapxj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=743&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/335459/original/file-20200515-138654-ndapxj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=933&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/335459/original/file-20200515-138654-ndapxj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=933&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/335459/original/file-20200515-138654-ndapxj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=933&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">In an 1874 Harper’s Weekly cartoon, ‘The Union as it was,’ Thomas Nast critiques violent white supremacist organizations for forcing African Americans into a position ‘worse than slavery.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.loc.gov/item/2001696840/">Library of Congress/Thomas Nast from Harpers Weekly</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Guerrilla race war</h2>
<p>During Reconstruction, paramilitary groups and official Democratic militias found support from county sheriffs up to state governors who encouraged violence while maintaining their own innocence.</p>
<p>Today, white supremacists appear to interpret politicians’ remarks as support for their cause of a <a href="https://gizmodo.com/report-over-100-militant-groups-have-been-promoting-se-1843051231">new civil war</a> to create a white-dominated government. </p>
<p>These groups <a href="https://www.techtransparencyproject.org/articles/extremists-are-using-facebook-to-organize-for-civil-war-amid-coronavirus">thrive on recent protests against stay-at-home orders</a>, especially the ones featuring <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/04/27/why-are-people-bringing-guns-anti-quarantine-protests-be-intimidating/">protesters with guns</a>, creating an <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/13/us/coronavirus-businesses-lockdown-guns.html">intimidating spectacle</a> for those who support local and state government authority. </p>
<p>Beyond “<a href="https://belonging.berkeley.edu/blog-revisiting-dog-whistle-politics">dog whistle</a>” politics, as in the past, these statements – and the actions encouraged by them – can lead to real <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/16/us/massachusetts-bomb-jewish-nursing-home.html">violence</a> and <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/senate-democrats-demand-action-cdc-doj-curb-covid-19-racism-n1201491">hate crimes</a> against any who threaten supremacists’ concept of a white nation.</p>
<p>[<em>You need to understand the coronavirus pandemic, and we can help.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=upper-coronavirus-help">Read The Conversation’s newsletter</a>.]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/137873/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Shannon M. Smith does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>White supremacists’ protests against COVID-19 lockdowns reflect the US history of political leaders encouraging white supremacist groups to challenge or overthrow democratic governments.Shannon M. Smith, Associate Professor of History, College of Saint Benedict & Saint John's UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1263152019-11-15T13:28:36Z2019-11-15T13:28:36ZHaiti protests summon spirit of the Haitian Revolution to condemn a president tainted by scandal<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/301791/original/file-20191114-26202-1yymhsj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C13%2C4510%2C2984&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Jean Marcellis Destine, dressed as Haitian independence hero Jean-Jacques Dessalines, heads to a protest against President Jovenel Moïse in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Oct. 4, 2019. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Haiti-Protests/11d660c323c64a7fa26d140e9d3d9acb/4/0">AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>A radical, unlikely figure has emerged as the icon of Haiti’s months-long protests against President Jovenel Moïse, who stands <a href="https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/haiti/article231122978.html">accused of embezzling millions in public funds</a>.</p>
<p>That figure is <a href="https://theconversation.com/meet-haitis-founding-father-whose-black-revolution-was-too-radical-for-thomas-jefferson-101963">Jean-Jacques Dessalines</a>, the black Haitian revolutionary who defeated the French to free Haiti from colonial rule in 1804. By summoning Dessalines, Haitian protesters implicitly contrast the achievements of that revolution – <a href="https://theconversation.com/meet-haitis-founding-father-whose-black-revolution-was-too-radical-for-thomas-jefferson-101963">freedom, universal citizenship and racial equality</a> – with the disappointments of the Moïse government.</p>
<p>Dessalines wrote a radical <a href="https://haitidoi.com/constitutions/1805-2/">constitution</a> that eliminated racial hierarchy, established equality before the law and instituted freedom of religion in Haiti.</p>
<p>One of Haiti’s opposition political parties is called “<a href="https://ageofrevolutions.com/2016/02/15/the-2015-16-haitian-elections-politicizing-dessalines-and-the-memory-of-the-haitian-revolution/">Pitit Dessalines</a>” – Children of Dessalines. </p>
<p>When demonstrations began last year, simple stenciled images of Dessalines wearing a military hat and holding a protest sign appeared on walls across the capital. This year, at several marches, men in revolutionary-era garb have ridden the streets of Port-au-Prince on horseback. They were waving Dessalines’ red-and-black version of the Haitian flag inscribed with the words “Viv Lib ou Mouri” – “Live Free or Die.”</p>
<h2>A commitment to equality</h2>
<p>I am writing a biography of Dessalines, who has long been overshadowed outside of Haiti by the formerly enslaved revolutionary leader <a href="https://www.blackpast.org/global-african-history/loverture-toussaint-1743-1803/">Toussaint Louverture</a>, who is often heralded as Haiti’s founding father despite dying before independence.</p>
<p>My research on the <a href="https://uncpress.org/book/9781469625621/haitian-connections-in-the-atlantic-world/">diplomacy and state-building practices</a> of Dessalines, conducted using archives from the Caribbean, North America and Europe, shows the Americas’ first black head of state to be a <a href="https://theconversation.com/meet-haitis-founding-father-whose-black-revolution-was-too-radical-for-thomas-jefferson-101963">groundbreaking enlightenment thinker and revolutionary leader</a>.</p>
<p>At the time of his birth, around 1758, Haiti – then a French Caribbean slavery-based colony called <a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674018266&content=reviews">Saint-Domingue</a> – was the most lucrative colony in the world. By the time of Dessalines’ 1806 assassination, it was the Americas’ first sovereign abolitionist state. </p>
<p>Though European and American powers refused to recognize the young nation, Dessalines steadfastly rebuffed any concession to world powers that might undermine Haiti’s hard-won independence. </p>
<p>In early 1804, Dessalines even <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5309/willmaryquar.69.3.0583?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">declined</a> to sign a treaty with the British governor of Jamaica that would have given Haiti diplomatic recognition. The reason: It would have limited Haitian sea travel and allowed the British to occupy a strategic fort. </p>
<p>A few months before, when Dessalines discovered that white Frenchmen were plotting to overthrow his government, he <a href="http://faculty.webster.edu/corbetre/haiti/history/earlyhaiti/1805-const.htm">ordered the execution</a> of all remaining French people in Haiti. Some women and children were targeted in these public executions. </p>
<p>White world leaders took note of Dessalines’ gruesome retaliation against the French, which may have contributed to Haiti’s <a href="https://uncpress.org/book/9781469625621/haitian-connections-in-the-atlantic-world/">diplomatic isolation</a> in the early 19th century. Haiti’s independence would go unrecognized until 1825, when France <a href="http://islandluminous.fiu.edu/part04-slide06.html">finally conceded</a> that it had lost the war. </p>
<p>To maintain Haitian autonomy, Dessalines’ constitution also declared that only <a href="https://www.upress.virginia.edu/title/4876">Haitian citizens</a> and the Haitian government could own land and property in Haiti. </p>
<p>But he also <a href="https://uncpress.org/book/9781469625621/haitian-connections-in-the-atlantic-world/">established a policy of offering refuge</a> in Haiti for the downtrodden and oppressed of the Americas. In the decades to come, Haiti would welcome <a href="https://theconversation.com/donald-trump-doesnt-understand-haiti-immigration-or-american-history-87982">13,000 African Americans who fled racial discrimination in the southern U.S.</a> and many <a href="https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/117/1/40/46487">others fleeing slavery in the Caribbean islands</a>.</p>
<p>Dessalines is the only Haitian revolutionary to have been incorporated into the <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-is-haitian-voodoo-119621">Haitian religion</a> as a spirit, named <a href="https://romantic-circles.org/praxis/circulations/HTML/praxis.2011.twa.html">Ogou Desalin</a>. Among Haitian spirits, the Ogou are known as warriors. Ogou Desalin is the warrior who defends liberty.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/301794/original/file-20191114-26243-1anftgg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/301794/original/file-20191114-26243-1anftgg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/301794/original/file-20191114-26243-1anftgg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301794/original/file-20191114-26243-1anftgg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301794/original/file-20191114-26243-1anftgg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301794/original/file-20191114-26243-1anftgg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301794/original/file-20191114-26243-1anftgg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301794/original/file-20191114-26243-1anftgg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">An anti-government protest called by the artist community in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Oct. 20, 2019.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Haiti-Political-Crisis/56d84ed9c34042f49656e83fb2f9e14b/64/0">AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Wanted: government accountability</h2>
<p>This legacy underpins Haitians’ desire for a new kind of independence – an existence free of predatory leaders and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/11/haiti-and-the-failed-promise-of-us-aid">reliance</a> on <a href="https://theconversation.com/in-haiti-climate-aid-comes-with-strings-attached-108652">international aid that comes with strings attached</a>. </p>
<p>After the 2010 earthquake, many Haitians hoped that the devastation would <a href="https://lenouvelliste.com/article/78780/agriculture-energie-sante-priorites-des-usa-pour-reconstruire-haiti">inspire positive change</a>. Instead, the influx of foreign aid and global investment in Haiti opened the door for the <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/can-haitis-corrupt-president-hold-on-to-power/">corruption</a> that has tainted Haiti’s last two leaders.</p>
<p>Moïse’s predecessor, Michel Martelly, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/08/world/americas/michel-martelly-haitis-president-departs-without-a-successor.html">departed office amid scandal</a> in February 2016 without a successor in place, leaving the country with a provisional government. Moïse, a businessman who was Martelly’s chosen successor, <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-38140316">became president in February 2017</a> with 56% of the vote. </p>
<p>To deter the fraud that had marred recent presidential elections in Haiti, <a href="https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/haiti/article93333377.html">monitors from the Organization of American States</a> supervised the vote. But many Haitians still doubted that Moise’s victory was <a href="https://www.caribbeanlifenews.com/stories/2016/12/2016-12-30-nk-haiti-electoral-process-cl.html">legitimate</a>. </p>
<p>By late 2017, Haitians had learned that <a href="https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/haiti/article231122978.html">Moïse was implicated</a> in an embezzlement scheme involving <a href="https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/haiti/article184740783.html">US$2 billion</a> meant to finance infrastructure development in the country. The pillaged funds came from an international organization called <a href="https://caricom.org/projects/detail/petrocaribe">PetroCaribe</a>, which sells Venezuelan gas and oil to Caribbean countries at reduced cost to free up money for development. Under Martelly and Moïse, Haiti’s extra money seems to have disappeared.</p>
<p>To make matters worse, <a href="https://theconversation.com/latin-america-shuts-out-desperate-venezuelans-but-colombias-border-remains-open-for-now-123307">Venezuela’s own political and economic crisis</a> has rendered the PetroCaribe program unable to meet Haiti’s oil and gas needs, creating an acute gas shortage. In mid-2018, Haiti’s government <a href="https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/haiti/article214722915.html">raised the cost of gas</a> by 38%.</p>
<p>Saying they are suffering the direct consequences of government corruption, angry Haitians <a href="https://www.npr.org/2019/06/11/731640235/protesters-demand-resignation-of-haitian-president-over-corruption-allegations">have demanded Moïse’s resignation</a>. The president, who has largely retreated from the public eye, <a href="https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/haiti/article235443547.html">refuses</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/299916/original/file-20191101-88428-dwxy91.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C39%2C2044%2C1168&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/299916/original/file-20191101-88428-dwxy91.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C39%2C2044%2C1168&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/299916/original/file-20191101-88428-dwxy91.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/299916/original/file-20191101-88428-dwxy91.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/299916/original/file-20191101-88428-dwxy91.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/299916/original/file-20191101-88428-dwxy91.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/299916/original/file-20191101-88428-dwxy91.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/299916/original/file-20191101-88428-dwxy91.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Graffiti in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, shows the revolutionary hero Jean-Jaques Dessalines holding a sign reading, ‘Where is the PetroCaribe Money?’ November 2018.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Nathan Dize</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Legacies of imperialism</h2>
<p>Dessalines’ track record as a leader <a href="https://ageofrevolutions.com/2016/02/15/the-2015-16-haitian-elections-politicizing-dessalines-and-the-memory-of-the-haitian-revolution/">was not perfect</a>, either. </p>
<p>Shortly after he overthrew French rule, Dessalines declared himself emperor of Haiti and <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03585522.1984.10408024">revived the plantation system</a> that revolutionaries had just burned to the ground. Field workers were called “cultivateurs,” and they received some pay or a share of their crop. However, they were bound to a specific plantation. </p>
<p>This form of coerced labor resembled the U.S. sharecropping system and others <a href="https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/title/problem-freedom">that arose across the Americas</a> after slavery ended. </p>
<p>Two centuries after his assassination in 1806, some still consider Dessalines a barbarous <a href="https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo16724367.html">despot</a>. To others, he is an uncompromising <a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/fondateur-devant-lhistoire/oclc/1892049">freedom fighter</a>. </p>
<p>Both of these conflicting portrayals reduce Dessalines to a one-dimensional character. The protesters inspired by his legacy aren’t necessarily ignoring Dessalines’ shortcomings. Instead, they are championing his unwavering determination to rid the country of foreign rule so that Haitians could live “<a href="https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C12756259">by ourselves and for ourselves</a>.”</p>
<p>[ <em>Get the best of The Conversation, every weekend.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters/weekly-highlights-61?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=weeklybest">Sign up for our weekly newsletter</a>. ]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/126315/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Julia Gaffield has received funding from the American Council of Learned Societies. </span></em></p>Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who freed Haiti from French colonial rule in 1804, is revered as a spirit in the Haitian religion. Now he’s become an icon of the uprising against President Jovanel Moïse.Julia Gaffield, Associate Professor of History, Georgia State UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1136342019-03-20T10:33:00Z2019-03-20T10:33:00ZDeath penalty moratorium in California – what it means for the state and for the nation<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/264788/original/file-20190320-60982-1f25yf6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Guards take apart the death penalty chamber at San Quentin State Prison on Wednesday, March 13, 2019</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/California-Death-Penalty-Moratorium/a6b3aa12060a4f40974fdb9786abda9b/14/0">California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation via AP</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Both celebration – and ire – followed <a href="https://www.sfchronicle.com/news/article/Gov-Newsom-orders-halt-to-California-s-death-13683693.php">Gov. Gavin Newsom’s announcement of a moratorium on the death penalty in California</a>.</p>
<p>California’s 737 death row inmates constitute <a href="https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/death-row-inmates-state-and-size-death-row-year">more than a quarter of the national number</a>. Keeping them on death row costs <a href="https://lao.ca.gov/handouts/crimjust/2016/Death-Penalty-Initiative-Statute-051716.pdf">US$150 million a year</a> more than sentencing them to life without parole.</p>
<p>California’s death penalty has been at an impasse for decades. The state has not put anyone to death since <a href="http://graphics.latimes.com/towergraphic-see-13-men-executed-california-1978/">Clarence Ray Allen</a>’s execution in 2006. </p>
<p>The state’s use of lethal injections was <a href="https://www.aclunc.org/article/california-lethal-injection-protocol">fiercely debated for years</a>. Twice – once in <a href="https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_34,_the_End_the_Death_Penalty_Initiative_(2012)">2012</a> and again in <a href="https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_62,_Repeal_of_the_Death_Penalty_(2016)">2016</a> – Californians voted on measures to repeal the death penalty, and rejected them. Newsom’s step, which in many ways echoes <a href="https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-gavin-newsom-gay-marriage-20180515-story.html">his historical move as then-San Francisco mayor to marry same-sex couples</a> in 2004, pushes the state in a new direction. </p>
<p>As a criminal justice scholar interested in <a href="https://www.history.com/news/charles-manson-was-sentenced-to-death-why-wasnt-he-executed">death and life sentences in California</a> and in <a href="https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520277311/cheap-on-crime">criminal justice policy generally</a>, I see Newsom’s order as a sign that the death penalty may soon end nationwide. </p>
<p>Let me explain.</p>
<h2>Losing public support</h2>
<p>While the United States Supreme Court found the death penalty <a href="https://www.oyez.org/cases/1975/74-6257">constitutional</a> in 1976, nationwide support for the death penalty is <a href="http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/09/29/support-for-death-penalty-lowest-in-more-than-four-decades/">at its lowest point since the 1960s</a>. With this moratorium, <a href="https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/states-and-without-death-penalty">California joins a growing list of states who moved away from putting people to death</a>. </p>
<p>Twenty states have abolished the death penalty – eight of them recently. Four more, including California, have placed a moratorium on its use.</p>
<p><iframe id="YdRDd" class="tc-infographic-datawrapper" src="https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/YdRDd/2/" height="400px" width="100%" style="border: none" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p>Most of these states were already refraining from executing anyone when they abolished the death penalty. In addition to this <a href="http://oxfordre.com/criminology/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264079.001.0001/acrefore-9780190264079-e-462">wave of abolitionism</a>, the death penalty is used less frequently in the 26 states that still have it, partly because drug companies increasingly refused to <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2018/08/13/drug-companies-dont-want-to-be-involved-in-executions-so-theyre-suing-to-keep-their-drugs-out/?utm_term=.f5c3e63dec7f">provide their drugs for use in executions</a>. </p>
<p>This shift matters because attempts to challenge the legality of the death penalty rely on the Eighth Amendment, which prohibits <a href="https://constitutioncenter.org/interactive-constitution/amendments/amendment-viii">cruel and unusual punishment</a>. What counts as cruel and unusual punishment, the Supreme Court ruled in 1958, changes over time with our <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0734016814531779?journalCode=cjra">evolving standards of decency</a>. </p>
<p>A good example of this evolution is the gradual change in approach toward extreme punishment for juveniles. </p>
<p>In 2004, the Supreme Court <a href="https://www.oyez.org/cases/2004/03-633">abolished the death penalty for juveniles</a>. Five years later, it abolished <a href="https://www.oyez.org/cases/2009/08-7412">life without parole for offenses other than homicide by juveniles</a>. It then <a href="https://www.oyez.org/cases/2011/10-9646">dismantled mandatory life without parole schemes for juveniles</a> – even those who had committed murder. Subsequently it <a href="https://www.oyez.org/cases/2015/14-280">declared these policies retroactive</a> – meaning that even people who were sentenced decades ago, when they were juveniles, can still benefit from these new rules.</p>
<p>The Supreme Court has also wavered over extreme punishment for adults. It ruled the death penalty <a href="https://www.oyez.org/cases/2007/07-343">unconstitutional for most non-homicide crimes</a> in 2007, and Justices Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg have recently <a href="http://knowledgecenter.csg.org/kc/content/justice-breyer-calls-supreme-court%E2%80%94again%E2%80%94-reconsider-constitutionality-death-penalty">expressed the view that the death penalty’s constitutionality should be reconsidered</a>. When examining “evolving standards of decency,” the Supreme Court looks at state policies. In this respect, Newsom’s announcement may be of huge importance. </p>
<h2>First mover</h2>
<p>California holds a unique position as a criminal justice pioneer. Because of the sheer size of its prison population, any policy change that increases – or decreases – incarceration in California can have dramatic effects nationwide.</p>
<p>In 1976, California moved from sentences set by the legislature to “<a href="https://www.kqed.org/lowdown/775/the-law-that-help-pack-californias-prisons">indeterminate sentences</a>” that allow judges to choose from a sentencing range. The state adopted the <a href="https://lao.ca.gov/2005/3_strikes/3_strikes_102005.htm">Three Strikes law in 1994</a>. These two changes were among the important factors leading to a <a href="https://theappeal.org/a-new-power-for-prosecutors-is-on-the-horizon-reducing-harsh-sentences/">nearly 900 percent spike</a> in the California prison population between 1976 and 2006.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/264787/original/file-20190320-60995-1hxqk9g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/264787/original/file-20190320-60995-1hxqk9g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/264787/original/file-20190320-60995-1hxqk9g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/264787/original/file-20190320-60995-1hxqk9g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/264787/original/file-20190320-60995-1hxqk9g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/264787/original/file-20190320-60995-1hxqk9g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/264787/original/file-20190320-60995-1hxqk9g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/264787/original/file-20190320-60995-1hxqk9g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Aswad Pop is one of 737 inmates affected by the moratorium on the death penalty in California.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/California-Death-Row/defd380a16414edeb0377e65ea8ec648/16/1">AP Photo/Eric Risberg</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>During the Great Recession, <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0002716215599938">California’s lawmakers began to doubt the state could afford such a large prison population</a>. The <a href="https://law.stanford.edu/stanford-criminal-justice-center-scjc/california-realignment/">Criminal Justice Realignment, a law passed in 2011</a>, resulted in a reduction of approximately 40,000 inmates in California’s prisons. In fact, it is estimated that California’s recession-era reforms have <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0002716215598973">accounted for much of the total nationwide decline</a> in prison population. </p>
<p>California is also <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Politics-Imprisonment-Democratic-Punishes-Offenders/dp/0195370023">unique in its political makeup</a>. The contrast between its vehemently progressive coast and deeply conservative center makes for big differences in policies from county to county – and for surprising support for punitive policies in a state that is widely seen as liberal.</p>
<p>It also means that <a href="https://www.ppic.org/content/pubs/atissue/AI_1013MBAI.pdf">legislating is often conducted by voter initiatives</a>, which are notoriously vulnerable to manipulation through misleading appeals to anger and fear. </p>
<p>California’s mercurial political climate and the size of its death row mean it might influence other states and, possibly, the Supreme Court in the future.</p>
<h2>What might happen next</h2>
<p>Several important questions loom. </p>
<p>First, would the more conservative makeup of the Supreme Court affect its willingness to reexamine the constitutionality of the death penalty? </p>
<p>Justice Kennedy, who was <a href="https://www.mcgeorge.edu/documents/Publications/10_Weisberg_ver_01_6-4-12_EIC_FINAL.pdf">especially sensitive to punishment questions</a> and <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/2018/07/justice-kennedy-he-swung-left-on-the-death-penalty-but-declined-to-swing-for-the-fences/">skeptical of the death penalty</a>, has retired. Justice <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/gorsuch-casts-death-penalty-vote-in-one-of-his-first-supreme-court-cases/2017/04/21/2d9bc5dc-26a8-11e7-a1b3-faff0034e2de_story.html?utm_term=.a6eecdb16dd4">Gorsuch</a> seems to support the death penalty. The jury is still out on <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/06/kavanaugh-seems-to-break-with-conservatives-in-death-penalty-case.html">Justice Kavanaugh’s position</a>. </p>
<p>Second, how might the moratorium impact the strategy of death penalty abolitionists in the state seeking to reform the two other types of extreme punishment – <a href="http://time.com/4998858/death-penalty-life-without-parole/">life with and without parole</a>? </p>
<p>On one hand, the distinction between the death penalty and life without parole, <a href="https://thenewpress.com/books/meaning-of-life">which was already tenuous</a>, becomes even more blurred now that no one on California’s death row will be executed. Because policy is made incrementally, it is arguably time for abolitionist states to take a hard look at their other draconian sentencing practices. </p>
<p>On the other hand, in many cases abolition and moratoria are palatable to people who are on the fence about the death penalty precisely because of the existence of an alternative punitive sentence.</p>
<p>Third, there is plenty of work to be done in California. The <a href="https://twitter.com/CAgovernor/status/1105917777494175744">powerful image of the death chamber being dismantled</a> is a reminder that behind the death penalty lies a giant machine of lengthy and expensive litigation, dilapidated housing conditions and arcane regulations, which must now be considered. With less need to fund representation in these <a href="https://www.aclu.org/other/inadequate-representation">expensive cases</a>, there might be room for other criminal justice reform.</p>
<p>Fourth, while Newsom’s announcement <a href="https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-death-penalty-victims-families-newsom-20190314-story.html">provoked anger and frustration in some victims, it brought relief to others</a>. In an abolitionist era, reformers should come up with solutions that treat victims with respect and award them solace and closure – albeit not necessarily through harsh punishment. </p>
<p>And finally, careful analysis of homicide rates in the next few years should be conducted in order to learn whether, as many have come to assume, <a href="https://www.ali.org/media/filer_public/3f/ae/3fae71f1-0b2b-4591-ae5c-5870ce5975c6/capital_punishment_web.pdf">capital punishment does not deter crime</a>. </p>
<p>The dismantlement of the death chamber is not the official end of the death penalty in California. But it could be the harbinger of abolition.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/113634/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Hadar Aviram does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>A law professor from the University of California, Hastings considers why a moratorium in California could be influential.Hadar Aviram, Professor of Criminal Justice and Corrections, University of California College of the Law, San FranciscoLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.