Some Did Choose to Return to Slavery Because They Chose Family Over Everything

[sheshe2]

Kanye is free from the constant threat of the lash and being forced to labor to enrich someone else, but he isn’t free from discriminatory laws designed to trap freed blacks and place them back in bondage. At any moment, just for being black and free, he can be arrested for “strolling about”—walking peacefully on the roads and minding his business; or for being “idle”—looking like he has no job; or for being “immoral”—whatever that meant to the white person reporting him and the police responding to the call.

If convicted of any of these infractions, he will once again become the chattel property of a random white man.

Prejudicial laws like these were common in the slave-owning South to snare freed blacks and force them back into slavery. Some states, like the state of Georgia, passed expulsion laws that required blacks who were manumitted to leave the state within a year of their emancipation.

Expulsion laws were a sinister ploy created by whites to reinforce white supremacy and eradicate the free black population perceived to be a threat by their very existence in a slaveholding society. They knew giving freed blacks 365 days to find a place to live, get a job and save enough money to retrieve their families was destined to fail because it takes many years for an enslaved person to save money to purchase their own freedom. So, Kanye’s dilemma was to move far away from his wife and children or voluntarily submit himself to re-enslavement and keep his family together.

Read More: https://www.theroot.com/some-did-choose-to-return-to-slavery-because-they-chose-1826037714

You may also wish to read Slavery by Another Name by Douglas Blackmon. Slavery was far from over after the Emancipation Proclimation.

[The Polack MSgt]

1. Thank you for this post.

It needs a wder audience, but at least DU is a start.

[GaryCnf]

2. K&R

And it was beginning with this practice that passing criminal laws targeting blacks became the new plantation system. Whether used as excuses to initiate police contacts, to imprison, or to disenfranchise in every sense of the word, the post civil war American criminal justice's primary purpose is the perpetuation of slavery.

[sheshe2]

3. Yes.

Slavery by Another Name is a 90-minute documentary that challenges one of Americans’ most cherished assumptions: the belief that slavery in this country ended with the Emancipation Proclamation. The film tells how even as chattel slavery came to an end in the South in 1865, thousands of African Americans were pulled back into forced labor with shocking force and brutality. It was a system in which men, often guilty of no crime at all, were arrested, compelled to work without pay, repeatedly bought and sold, and coerced to do the bidding of masters. Tolerated by both the North and South, forced labor lasted well into the 20th century.

For most Americans this is entirely new history. Slavery by Another Name gives voice to the largely forgotten victims and perpetrators of forced labor and features their descendants living today.

http://www.pbs.org/tpt/slavery-by-another-name/home/