This video is going to look and sound a little different from my usual content because this
topic is serious, complex, and infuriating.
It’s also incredibly long, as you’ve probably noticed, but it is necessary to understand
the full picture.
As we’re going through this story, I want you to keep this one simple question in the
back of your mind – When was the last slave freed in America?
1865, at the end of the Civil War.
Everyone knows that, that’s probably the second easiest elementary school history question
I could possibly think of.
Well…
Well, okay, if you want to get technical about it, it was after the 13th Amendment, which
was a few months after the war ended.
Eh…
Is this some kind of trick question where you’re going to claim something abstract
like shift work is actually a continuation of slavery?
No [sighs], traditional chattel slavery.
[Snaps fingers] Juneteenth, final answer.
[Exasperated sigh] …Still wrong.
Is this going to be another hour-long Knowing Better video about how something we thought
ended a century ago actually didn’t?
[Click of old TV turning on]
[Intro music]
This video was brought to you by CuriosityStream and Nebula.
You’re telling me they invented a picture frame that can show whatever image you want
on it?
Will you get back in the closet, man?
This really isn’t a topic for light-hearted characters.
You’re talking about the Civil War and you don’t need your Civil War character?
We’re actually going to be talking about a whole lot more than just the Civil War.
But that’s irrelevant, nobody cares about you, most people don’t even know your name.
And besides, if I use you, everyone’s just going to say Atun-Shei did it better.
Checkmate, Lincolnites…
You’re right.
[Door slam] Okay well, like the majority of my audience,
I’m an American…
always have been.
I went through elementary, middle, and high school, then I went on to college to become
a Social Studies teacher, and then, I taught US History in two different states at the
middle and high school level.
Am I giving you my credentials in order to brag?
No, quite the opposite actually.
I was taught what I’m going to be calling “the Standard American History Myth.”
Throughout all my years of education, including college twice, the story had barely changed
between the 1990s and the 2010s.
And then I taught that same myth to the next generation of students.
Since I’m going to be spending the rest of this video dismantling this story, and
at least some of my audience isn’t American, it’s probably a good idea to make sure we’re
all on the same page.
As you can see, I have a brand new… ish TV, so I can show you video clips whenever
I want.
Now, I found this video from an online university that sums up what most of us have been taught
and therefore believe about American history… lemme just…
[TV static] US History in four minutes or less.
America was founded when a group of Protestant Christians, fleeing religious persecution
in Europe, made the harrowing journey across the Atlantic Ocean and landed at Plymouth
Rock.
These Pilgrims had a feast with the Indians to celebrate their cooperation and that became
the holiday of Thanksgiving.
Over the next few decades, several other British colonies were founded on the American continent
and in 1776 they all declared their independence from the King over the issue of taxation without
representation.
After the Revolutionary War had been won, the founding fathers wrote the Constitution,
a freedom-loving liberty document which guaranteed that all men were created equal.
There’s one glaring hypocrisy with that statement, though – the fact that slavery
existed in America.
How could the founding fathers believe in equality while many of them were also slaveowners?
Well, many of them knew that this peculiar institution was morally wrong and thought
that the practice would naturally die out on its own, but just to be sure, they put
a clause in the Constitution saying that the importation of new slaves would end in 1808.
None of the founding fathers could have predicted the cotton gin though, which suddenly made
slavery much more profitable and all but guaranteed it would continue for another century.
Throughout the 1800s, abolitionists like Frederick Douglass fought to end the practice and in
1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected on that very platform.
In order to protect their rights as states and keep their taxes from increasing, several
Southern states decided to break away from the Union and form their own country known
as the Confederacy.
From 1861 to 1865, America fought the bloodiest war in its history and in the end, the Union
was preserved, and 4 million black people were freed from bondage.
It's a common misconception that Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves, but the Emancipation Proclamation
only applied to areas in active rebellion, meaning the Confederate States.
There was no way to enforce that without invading and the Northern slave states were unaffected,
so this didn’t really do much.
In reality, it wasn’t the Great Emancipator, but the 13th Amendment, ratified eight months
after his assassination, that abolished slavery.
Reconstruction lasted from 1865 to 1877 and was marked by a period of relative peace since
federal troops were stationed in the South to guarantee the rights of the recently freed
slaves.
After Reconstruction ended though, things got pretty dark pretty fast.
Within a decade, Black Codes had been passed in every Southern state and many of them required
literacy tests and poll taxes to vote.
This is the beginning of Jim Crow, an era where black people had to sit at the back
of the bus and drink out of separate water fountains, they even had separate schools
for white kids and black kids.
That lasted until 1954 when the Supreme Court decided to desegregate public schools with
the Brown v. Board of Education decision.
This began the Civil Rights movement, which gave rise to leaders like Martin Luther King
who said we should judge each other not by the color of our skin, but by the content
of our character.
With the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Jim Crow and segregation were over,
and America had finally swept away the last vestiges of racism in the country.
We even elected a black man as president – twice.
So, the next time someone tells you that America is a racist country with racism in our DNA,
hopefully now, you’ll know better.
I’m Knowless Better, author of “You Learned Everything You Need to Know About History
in Elementary School” for Better University.
Thank you for watching, to help keep Knowing Better videos free, subscribe to our Patreon
page at patr– [TV static]
I don’t apologize for that, nor do you actually want an apology… that was hilarious.
You’re probably familiar with most of what was said in that video, you might’ve picked
out a small inaccuracy here or there, but for the most part, that was the story you
learned as a kid and the one you likely still believe.
I know that because that was the story I was taught – and the story I then taught to
others almost two decades later.
It’s also the story fake Youtube universities continue to push to this day.
Yes, that was a PragerU parody, just about every sentence was paraphrased from one of
their videos.
And they’re usually pushing the message that your kids are learning something different
and scary.
I was spared the life sapping, negative messages about America that are crippling a generation
of young people.
These ideas are poison.
As a Social Studies teacher, I can assure you that no K-12 student is being taught that
America is a racist country or was founded on racist ideals.
And they’re certainly not learning Critical Race Theory.
Because if you stray from that standard story, you’ll have an angry parent on the phone
by the afternoon and you’ll be talking to your superintendent by the end of the week.
Before you assume anything, that did not happen to me, I 100% believed that version of American
history the entire time I worked in a classroom.
And honestly, for years afterward.
But that general story, the standard myth that America was founded on freedom, slavery
ended after the Civil War, and segregation lasted until Martin Luther King, doesn’t
really explain the current state of racial inequality and leaves a lot more questions
than answers.
I mean, if black people have been free for 150 years, why is there still so much inequality?
Why haven’t they “caught up yet?”
You can come at this from multiple different angles.
Why do they perform worse in school?
Why do they make less money?
Why are they convicted of more crimes?
Why aren’t they elected to office at a rate more proportion– [TV static] The point is,
you’re never given an answer to these questions.
You’re left to make it up on your own; if America is the land of equality and some people
just can’t seem to do well, there must be something inherently different about that
group of people specifically that prevents them from succeeding.
Most Americans are never taught that maybe the system itself is rigged against them.
But even more than that, they never learn that the fundamental premise of that question
– that slavery ended 150 years ago – is incorrect.
I’m not talking about the prison industrial complex or unpaid internships; I’m talking
about ball-and-chain chattel slavery.
If the Standard American History Myth that we all grew up hearing is wrong…
When was the last slave freed in America?
[Intro music…
again] Okay, we don’t need a second title card,
I don’t know why it did that.
Before we can get to your first guess, the Civil War, it’s important to talk about
the political and societal situation leading into it and correct several misconceptions.
Firstly, America was not founded by the Pilgrims, nor were they fleeing any kind of religious
persecution, but clearing up that specific myth is a story for another time.
Jamestown, Virginia was the first permanent British colony in America, founded in 1607.
If you watched my Company Towns video, you’re familiar with this place.
It was a tobacco plantation that began to use to slave labor after a worker’s strike
in 1619.
This is why the 1619 Project marks this as the beginning of America… because it kind
of is.
The Mayflower didn’t happen until 1620, the Pilgrims had no intention of founding
a new country and the Thanksgiving part didn’t get added to the story until way later, but
again, another time.
For decades, the various colonies in America existed as somewhat mixed communities.
There were free white people, a few free black people, white indentured servants, black indentured
servants, and slaves who were either black or Native American.
That lasted until Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, when most of those groups rebelled against
the ruling class, because they wanted to expand further west.
This was a hundred years before independence, the colonies were ruled by the same aristocracy
that existed in Britain, and in response to the uprising, they decided the best way to
keep the rabble in line was to divide and conquer.
In the years that followed, Virginia passed a number of Slave Codes that stripped all
black people of any rights.
By 1705, there were basically no free or indentured black people in Virginia, they were no longer
considered citizens; they couldn’t own property, guns, or employ a white person.
This will be a recurring theme going forward, the laws in America were used to force black
people into an underclass.
Over the next two centuries, the rich white landowners of the South, including many of
the founding fathers, relied on slave labor to keep their economy going.
And at this point, slavery was still legal in every northern colony as well.
In 1769, Charles Stewart traveled with his slave, James Somerset, from Massachusetts
to England; they lived there for a few years until Somerset tried to escape and was imprisoned.
In 1772, his case was heard by Lord Mansfield, the Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, who
determined: The state of slavery is of such a nature that
it is incapable of being introduced on any reasons, moral or political, but only by positive
law.
… It is so odious, that nothing can be suffered to support it, but positive law.
Whatever inconveniences, therefore, may follow from the decision, I cannot say this case
is allowed or approved by the law of England; and therefore the black must be discharged.
Basically, what he just said is that slavery is an unnatural condition and can only exist
if there is a law specifically stating it can exist – that’s what he means by positive
law.
There was no such law in England, therefore slavery cannot exist there.
It’s unclear who came up with this famous line, but it was said that the air in England
was so pure that if an enslaved person were to breathe it in, they would instantly become
free.
This decision popularized the abolition and anti-slavery movements, which had quietly
existed for some time.
You know the next part, there’s some spilled tea, a few lanterns in a window, Mel Gibson,
and eventually recognition of our independence.
A few years after that, the founding fathers got together to write the Constitution.
There were fifty-five delegates, so there were disagreements on nearly every issue,
among the noteworthy, there were abolitionists like John Adams and slaveowners like Thomas
Jefferson.
As a result, the issue of slavery appears in the Constitution three times without ever
actually using the word “slavery.”
Article I, Section 2, Clause 3 states…
Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which
may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be
determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service
for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.
This is the Three-Fifths Compromise, which we all learn about in school.
Two things to note here, first, it doesn’t say that black people are only worth three-fifths
of a person, it just says that three-fifths of the total number shall be counted – which
is basically the same thing but worded slightly differently.
Secondly, indentured servants still counted towards the population, it was just Indians
and other persons who are not.
It wasn’t the racists of the South who wanted to count slave populations less than white
populations – it was the abolitionists in the North.
Not sure why it keeps cutting to stuff, these old CRTs are kinda buggy.
Anyway, she is right about that, but why?
The Three-Fifths Compromise was a way for southern states to increase their representation
in Congress and the Electoral College; if they had their way, they would’ve counted
all of the people that they themselves did not consider to be citizens.
That way, they could artificially inflate their national political power.
The North would’ve preferred to count none of them, because if they’re not voting and
they don’t have any rights… who exactly are you representing?
The second clause of the Constitution dealing with slavery is Article I, Section 9, Clause
1.
The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think
proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand
eight hundred and eight, but a Tax or duty may be imposed on such Importation, not exceeding
ten dollars for each Person.
I have misunderstood and taught this clause of the Constitution incorrectly for years.
Children, our founding fathers knew that slavery was evil and wrong… and they knew that it
would do terrible harm to the nation.
Our founders created a system they thought would have slavery end gradually.
Oh god, was that like, a kids’ video?
Nope, we’re not doing this, no more TV.
[Plug pulling from socket] Okay well, the founding fathers did not know
that slavery was evil and wrong, some of them actively participated in it and fought for
the various compromises we’re learning about right now.
They did not create a system that would have it end gradually.
This clause of the Constitution does not ban the importation of new slaves, go back and
read it; it basically says, “Congress shall make no law abridging the slave trade until
1808.”
Which is exactly what happened, they banned it that year.
But the point is, the institution and expansion of slavery was protected by the Constitution
for the first twenty years of its existence.
The founding fathers did not plan for it to end, that’s just how it happened to work
out.
The final mention of sl- … I’m actually going to need the TV if we’re going to keep
doing this…
We’ll just deal with the random clips, I guess.
The final mention of slavery can be found in Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3.
No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into
another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from
such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service
or Labour may be due.
This is the Fugitive Slave Clause, which states that if an enslaved person escapes to a free
state, the slaveowner can still hunt them down and return them to bondage.
Unlike in Britain, in America, breathing free air does not automatically make one free.
I just want to point out that the Constitution went out of its way to include a direct response
to the Somerset case, stating that those circumstances could never happen here.
It's also important to remember that America didn’t exist in a vacuum, things were happening
in other countries too.
One such country was Haiti, a French colony in the Caribbean which used slave labor to
grow its sugar industry until the slaves decided they had enough.
They fought for twelve years and gained their independence in 1804.
After this successful slave revolt, two things happened: one, America seemed to decide that
no matter what, Haiti would be perpetually impoverished, and two, black people couldn’t
read anymore.
If they found out about Haiti, they might try that here.
Which is exactly what Nat Turner did in Virginia in 1831, so no more reading.
While some states, like South Carolina, banned black literacy during the colonial era, most
southern states didn’t enact similar laws until the 1820s and 30s, when the abolition
movement was really gaining steam.
As a result, we have very few first-hand accounts of slavery written by the actual slaves themselves
– most of their stories are lost to history.
Britain abolished slavery in its overseas territories in 1833 and while it’s fun to
play alternate history and wonder if that would’ve included America had the revolution
failed, there’s no way to know for sure.
But this did include Canada, which meant that the Underground Railroad finally had a real
destination.
When Frederick Douglass escaped to New York City in 1838, he was still subject to the
Fugitive Slave Clause and could be legally recaptured at any moment.
Rather than continue on to Canada, he decided to become one of the country’s most prominent
abolitionists.
So, you’re trying to work for change inside of the American system.
Precisely Layla, our system is wonderful, and the Constitution is a glorious liberty
document.
Oh no, I forgot we were on the kids’ one.
This is PragerU portraying Frederick Douglass as “one of the good ones” for working
within the system to get slavery abolished.
Which immediately falls apart when you remember that we had to fight a war.
I can’t take any more of the kids’ one, let me change the channel…
The movement’s leader, William Lloyd Garrison, burned the Constitution at his July Fourth
speeches.
In Garrison’s view, it legally protected slavery and was therefore, irredeemable.
But Douglass came to reject that.
He believed that the Constitution was fundamentally opposed to slavery.
Interpreted as it ought to be interpreted, Douglass said, the Constitution is a glorious
liberty document.
There’s that line again, glorious liberty document…
Personally, I find William Lloyd Garrison’s argument to be a bit more compelling, especially
considering those three clauses we just went over that exclusively protected slavery.
But that line actually comes from a speech Douglass gave in 1852 titled, What to the
Slave is the Fourth of July?
What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?
I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross
injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.
To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national
greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations
of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery;
your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity,
are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to
cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.
There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than
are the people of these United States, at this very hour.
[Machine whirrs as it pauses] Well that’s rather scathing, but [machine
whirrs] not the line I was looking for…
In that instrument I hold there is neither warrant, license, nor sanction of the hateful
thing; but, interpreted as it ought to be interpreted, the Constitution is a glorious
liberty document.
Read its preamble, consider its purposes.
Is slavery among them?
Let me ask…
If the Constitution were intended to be, by its framers and adopters, a slave-holding
instrument, why neither slavery, slaveholding, nor slave can anywhere be found in it.
I mean… just because it doesn’t use the word “slave” doesn’t mean…[static]
He’s basically making the Somerset argument, since the Constitution doesn’t include a
positive law allowing for the institution of slavery, it shouldn’t exist.
But it did, so…
Look, I’m just a former high school teacher turned Youtuber, what do I know?
What did the Supreme Court have to say on the matter?
They’re the ones who are supposed to interpret the Constitution and figure out the framer’s
original intent.
Throughout the 1840s and 50s, Dred Scott sued his owner for his freedom multiple times.
He stated that since he had been brought to the free state of Wisconsin, he was now legally
free; again, referencing the Somerset case.
The lower courts went back and forth on the matter until it reached the Supreme Court
in 1857.
I want you to stop for a moment and remember back to what you were taught about this case,
how was the decision framed to you?
Did they decide that he was free or that he was a slave?
Here’s the actual opinion from Chief Justice Taney.
In the opinion of the Court the legislation and histories of the times, and the language
used in the Declaration of Independence, show that neither the class of persons who had
been imported as slaves nor their descendants, whether they had become free or not, were
then acknowledged as a part of the people nor intended to be included in the general
words used in that memorable instrument.
They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and
altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations;
and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect;
and that the Negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.
And upon a full and careful consideration of the subject, the Court is of opinion that,
upon the facts stated in the plea in abatement, Dred Scott was not a citizen of Missouri within
the meaning of the Constitution of the United States and not entitled as such to sue in
its courts.
So again, was Dred Scott a free man or a slave?
The answer was neither, he’s not a citizen, so who cares?
Black people had no rights to which the white man was bound to respect, the Declaration
of Independence was not referring to them, they were not created equal.
They are not, have never been, and will never be citizens of the United States.
This was the highest court in the land saying that the country’s foundational documents
never meant to include black people and it’s phrased as if this was just common sense at
the time.
In effect, this was the government telling Douglass he was wrong, the Constitution is
not a glorious liberty document – at least not for people like him.
Just a few years earlier, they passed the Fugitive Slave Act, so not only could slave
catchers come get you if you were in the North, but northerners had to turn you in if they
knew you were a runaway.
This forced people in the North, including abolitionists, to participate in the slave
trade under pain of prosecution.
Around this time, we began to see a shift in the way slaves were used, while the majority
of them were still in agriculture, usually cotton, sugar, or tobacco, other industries
began experimenting with slave labor.
In 1850, the Bibb Steam Mill Company, a sawmill in Alabama, owned 27 slaves and leased others
from surrounding farms.
This is important, because this is the beginning of Industrial Slavery, when corporations owned
people, rather than just some rich guy on a plantation.
Railroads soon got into the mix and by the beginning of the Civil War, they collectively
owned about 20,000 slaves.
So alright, the Civil War, which began after Lincoln’s election because the southern
states were worried that he was going to possibly end slavery or at the very least, stop it
from expanding west.
It’s a real bummer that I have to take time out to explain this, but it’s important.
Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid,
its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man;
that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.
This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this
great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.
That was the Vice President of the Confederacy saying that this is the first government to
be founded on the idea that black people are subservient to white people.
And I mean, arguably not, right?
Like, the United States was [TV static].
Anyway, the point is, whether they were first or not, the Confederacy was founded specifically
to defend the institution of slavery and every state that seceded made sure to mention that
as they left.
At first, Abraham Lincoln had no real intention of freeing the slaves – this war was about
preserving the Union.
My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save
or to destroy slavery.
If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save
it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and
leaving others alone, I would also do that.
Now, don’t get it twisted, Abraham Lincoln was definitely against slavery, but keeping
the United States united was more important to him when he wrote that.
But for the Confederacy, this war was entirely about slavery from start to finish.
The evidence is so clear and overwhelming that it’s almost impossible for anyone to
argue otherwise…
Here, I’ll prove it to you.
The evidence is clear and overwhelming.
Slavery was, by a wide margin, the single most important cause of the Civil War.
Did you think you’d ever actually agree with PragerU?
When the various southern states seceded, any factories that were owned by northerners
were confiscated and transferred into southern hands and those new owners quickly staffed
those mills and furnaces with slave labor.
Since all the white men were off fighting, the Civil War caused a dramatic increase in
the use of Industrial Slavery.
As soon as the war began, forty slaves were put into the Sewanee Mines and the Empire
State Iron and Coal Company put an ad in a local newspaper looking to “hire or buy
100 able-bodied hands.”
Within a few years, the Shelby Iron Works owned between 350 and 400 slaves.
And to cap it all off, in 1863, the Confederate government bought the Brierfield Ironworks
in Alabama, which included nine black men listed on the inventory under livestock.
Just to reiterate that, that’s the Confederate government itself owning slaves.
Within a few months of the outbreak of the war, the North passed the Confiscation Act
of 1861, stating that any escaped slaves who made it to the North were to be considered
captured enemy property or “contraband of war.”
While still not viewing them as people, this was at least the end of the Fugitive Slave
Act.
As the war began to turn in the North’s favor, Lincoln entertained the idea of abolishing
slavery, but didn’t think that the United States could continue to exist as a mixed-race
society.
So, he proposed re-colonizing the former slaves to Central America, to a place called Linconia.
If that sounds familiar, it’s because this is the exact same thing President Monroe tried
to do with Liberia, this was just a new take on an old idea.
This is where Frederick Douglass has the most impact.
He convinced Lincoln out of the recolonization plan and into the Emancipation Proclamation,
which as stated earlier, wasn’t really enforceable and didn’t really do much in terms of freeing
anyone.
But it did allow the Union army to enlist black people.
Douglass thought that if the United States saw black men fighting for their own freedom,
there was no way they could deny their citizenship going forward.
Two of his sons ended up enlisting in the 54th Massachusetts.
Upon hearing about the Emancipation Proclamation, Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederacy,
issued his own counter-proclamation.
Saying that any black soldiers they capture will be returned to a state of slavery, or
in practice, executed.
The Emancipation Proclamation went into effect on January 1, 1863, and by the time Lincoln
gave the Gettysburg Address eleven months later, the entire purpose of the war had shifted.
So many people had died that Lincoln began to wonder if preserving the Union was really
worth the human cost.
But if he could reframe this war as the fight to free four million black people who were
being held in chains… suddenly the death toll doesn’t matter as much.
The North was already starting to win at this point, but now they had a renewed sense of
purpose.
Imagine going from putting down a rebellion in a part of the country you don’t really
care about to ending slavery.
In terms of righteous causes, that’s even better than fighting for your own freedom.
In January 1865, when the Thirteenth Amendment was still being discussed in Congress, General
Sherman issued Special Field Order 15.
This divided up 400,000 acres of abandoned lands along the Georgia coast to be given
to the freedmen, which is what we were calling former slaves.
According to the order, each family was to get 40 Acres and a Mule and by June of that
year, over 40,000 parcels of land had been redistributed.
This is reparations, we actually did reparations… but don’t get excited.
In March 1865, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands was established, more
commonly known as the Freedmen’s Bureau.
Their primary job was to protect the rights of recently freed slaves and help them get
their 40 acres.
The Civil War ended on April 9th and when Abraham Lincoln suggested that black soldiers
who fought for the Union should get the vote, John Wilkes Booth decided to kill him.
As a result, on April 14, 1865, Andrew Johnson became President.
He was a southern Democrat who remained loyal to the Union during the war and Lincoln chose
him as VP as a sign of his willingness to reconcile.
Johnson also happened to be a raging white supremacist.
This is a country for white men, and by God, as long as I am President, it shall be a government
for white men.
Fuuuuu….
[Static] Within six months of his inauguration, he ordered the Freedmen’s Bureau to return
all of the 40-acre plots that had been distributed back to white ownership.
Put another way, he confiscated the land and undid reparations.
This was the beginning of Presidential Reconstruction, which was supposed to be a rapid, lenient
restoration of the Union with as few changes to the Constitution as possible.
Once the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified, he thought that should be the end of it.
Just to recap the timeline here, the war ended in April 1865, the last remnants of the Confederacy
surrendered on June Nineteenth, and the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified in December of that
year.
What do you think happened after that?
The freedmen just walked off into the sunset, end of movie, roll credits?
Obviously not, right?
The South still needed to harvest crops and they weren’t about to let four million laborers
just go free and do whatever.
Many of the freedmen ended up working on the same plantations that used to own them as
slaves.
The planter class had them sign labor contracts which often included slave-like conditions;
they agreed to be locked in a cell or chained up at night, not leave the property, obey
commands, speak in a servile manner, and accept whatever punishment was deemed necessary.
Why would anyone sign these?
Because black literacy had been illegal for decades, most of them couldn’t read.
By the end of the next year, most of these contracts were dissolved by the occupying
Union commanders because it was obvious that the South was just trying to bring back slavery.
It was clear to Congress at least, that much more needed to be done.
The Civil Rights Act of 1866 declared all persons born in the United States to be full-fledged
citizens, regardless of race or previous condition of servitude.
Johnson vetoed the bill and for the first time ever, Congress voted to override that
and push it through anyway.
If the wording of that act sounds familiar, that’s because it was eventually replaced
by the Fourteenth Amendment, which didn’t get ratified until 1868.
Andrew Johnson denounced the amendment as usurping state authority.
The Reconstruction Act of 1867 ended Johnson’s plan and began Radical Reconstruction, when
the former Confederate states were divided into five military districts, each commanded
by a general who enforced the law.
It also required new southern governments to ratify the 14th Amendment.
As you probably guessed, Andrew Johnson also vetoed this bill, and again, it was overridden
by Congress and as a result, 38,000 federal troops were stationed in the South, half of
whom were black.
And as a further result of this law, the Ku Klux Klan consolidated power and became much
more active.
The KKK was formed on Christmas Eve, 1865, but can trace its origins back to when the
Confederate government established militias known as Home Guards to patrol the countryside
looking for deserters and runaway slaves.
When the war ended, these Home Guards began a guerilla campaign against Union troops and
eventually turned to terrorism; entire families of freedmen were lynched.
The only way the former slaves were going to be guaranteed their safety and freedom
was with the presence of tens of thousands of federal troops.
During the election of 1868, they stood guard outside of every polling place in the South.
With the end of the Three-Fifths Compromise, southern representation in Congress was about
to dramatically increase, so they were required to allow all black men to vote.
Even though black people still couldn’t vote in most states in the North because the
Fifteenth Amendment wouldn’t be ratified until 1870.
Federal troops, stationed in the South, helped secure rights for the recently freed slaves.
Hundreds of black men were elected to southern state legislatures as Republicans and 22 black
Republicans served in the US Congress by 1900.
I want you to remember that she stopped counting in 1900; once you have that locked away, she
is right.
In 1870, 1500 black politicians began serving in state and federal office, almost all of
them were Republicans, because it was the party of Lincoln, obviously.
Hiram Revels was the first black US Senator, a Republican from Mississippi, believe it
or not.
That same year, the federal government declared the KKK to be a terrorist organization and
after a riot in South Carolina, President Ulysses S Grant declared martial law and suspended
habeas corpus for any suspected members.
This completely destroyed the Ku Klux Klan by 1872... you won’t believe what brought
them back, but we’ll get to that.
The presidential election of 1876 split the popular and electoral vote, a situation we’re
all too familiar with these days.
As a result, we ended up with the Compromise of 1877.
Southern Democrats, who now held a majority in Congress, would accept Republican Rutherford
B Hayes as President in return for the removal of federal troops from the South.
Have you noticed that all of our compromises just end up being concessions to the South?
This was the definitive end of Reconstruction, without federal troops or the Freedmen’s
Bureau around, white supremacist violence and intimidation was allowed to run wild.
But more importantly, southern governments were free to do whatever they wanted.
Immediately after the Civil War and throughout Reconstruction, every southern state enacted
what would later become known as Black Codes – we all learn about these in school, right?
But…
can you actually describe a Black Code?
My guess is, you probably have this confused with an early form of segregation; they weren’t
allowed in certain public spaces, interracial marriage was outlawed, that kind of stuff.
Or maybe you think this restricted voting or property rights.
With measures like Black Codes, laws that restricted the ability of blacks to own property
and run businesses.
And they imposed poll taxes and literacy tests used to subvert black citizens’ right to
vote.
Most of that stuff doesn’t come along until way later – so what is a Black Code?
These were a set of laws written in a colorblind fashion, making it a crime for everyone, but
in practice, they were only ever illegal for black people.
Which is probably why we don’t really learn about these in school.
This is somewhat uncomfortable to talk about because we think of the law as neutral, if
it says murder is illegal, it’s illegal for everyone.
But we’re not talking about violence or theft here.
The Black Codes were basically, made-up social crimes – most of which were victimless.
The most important and egregious one was vagrancy, which is the act of being unemployed, usually
defined as when “a laborer or servant loiters away his time.”
Do you see why so many of the recently freed slaves signed labor contracts with their former
owners?
Many states imposed fines on or made it illegal for black people to work in any industry other
than agriculture or domestic service.
So, congratulations, you’re free to do whatever you want… as long as it’s the thing you
were already doing as a slave.
It was also against the law to quit your job or break a labor contract, which was prosecuted
as fraud or “false pretenses” as they called it in many states.
As a white person, you couldn’t hire a freedman without proper discharge paperwork from their
previous employer.
This meant that as a black person in the South, you had to have a white person who could speak
for you as your employer – or at the very least former employer.
If you didn’t have that protection, you ran the risk of being arrested for vagrancy.
Since the road system in the South wasn’t very robust, if you wanted to get from one
place to another, the easiest way was to hop on a freight train, which was illegal without
a ticket.
The second easiest way was to walk alongside the track, which was trespassing.
Gambling, drinking, and even carrying a concealed weapon were crimes for black people only,
that could include anything from a gun to a knife to a razor.
Using obscene or offensive language or talking too loudly in the presence of a white woman
was illegal.
Remember this?
I’m going to tell them there’s an African-American man threatening my life.
This has been going on for over 150 years.
White women have always held a special power over black men.
Interracial sexual relations were illegal, but only if it was a black man with a white
woman, and even then, only the black man was punished.
They prosecuted that under miscegenation or adultery, depending on the circumstances.
Many states also passed what were called Pig Laws, elevating what would have been a petty
crime to the level of a felony – stealing a pig worth $1 would get you five years in
prison.
The theft of an eight-cent fence post was enough to get you sentenced to hard labor.
And now we’re getting to the point, because as soon as these laws were in place, the South
began to use the Black Codes to transition away from slavery and towards convict labor.
You probably think I’m talking about chain gangs, but those don’t happen until much
later.
Before the Civil War, the judicial system was exclusively designed for white people.
If a black person committed a crime, I’m sorry to say, but it was viewed the same way
as your dog committing a crime.
They were chattel property, so punishment was left to the owner.
Even after the war, prisons were few and far between, only the worst crimes were punished
with jail time, most of the Black Codes just involved a fine or hard labor.
So, these laws weren’t designed to put black people behind bars, they were designed to
put them to work.
The first system I want to talk about is Convict Leasing, it’s one of those things that we
all learn about eventually – usually by watching The Shawshank Redemption.
Which, while being a good example, is also an extremely sanitized one.
To truly understand how this scheme played out, we have to let go of all of our modern
ideas of how the criminal justice system is supposed to work.
At this point in history, police departments barely existed and even then, only in major
cities.
Do you know what a notary public is?
They’re someone entrusted by the government to witness signatures on contracts; you can
find them in banks, post offices, grocery stores– Hell, some of you watching this
might even be a notary public.
Well, back in the day, Justices of the Peace functioned in the same way, they were innkeepers,
tailors, and even plantation owners who adjudicated crime at the county level.
Which was most crime at this point, it was rare for the state or federal government to
get involved.
County law enforcement was handled by an elected sheriff, but this was usually just an administrative
role, the actual work was done by appointed deputies, who could be storekeepers, grocers,
and again, plantation owners.
Can you figure out what’s about to happen here?
A sheriff’s deputy, a bounty hunter, or sometimes just a random white person, would
seize a black man walking along a railroad track and take him to the nearest justice
of the peace-slash-tavern owner.
The justice would invariably find him guilty of something.
They would impose a fine or sentence them to hard labor, which basically allowed the
government to sell the convict to the highest bidder.
In 1866, both Alabama and Texas leased hundreds of their prisoners to railroad companies.
Within a few years, Mississippi convicts were back working on cotton plantations and Tennessee
had sent theirs across the border and into the mines of Birmingham.
By the time Reconstruction ended, every southern state and county had a convict leasing program.
They didn’t really generate much revenue for the government, but they were seen as
a benefit because it saved them from having to pay for housing and food for the prisoners.
The main purpose of convict leasing was to keep the southern economy moving with a nearly-free
labor force.
Birmingham, Alabama was founded in 1871 as a steel manufacturing hub for the South, but
its origins trace back to when the Confederacy financed the first blast furnaces and put
slaves in the various coal mines.
This is a natural continuation of the Industrial Slavery we were talking about earlier.
After the war ended, companies like Tennessee Coal, Iron, and Rail switched from leasing
slaves from nearby farms to leasing convicts from the government.
On March 30, 1908, Green Cottenham was arrested for riding a freight train without a ticket.
When no evidence or witnesses could be produced to support that charge, the judge declared
him guilty of vagrancy.
He was sentenced to three months of hard labor, extended to six months and six days to cover
the court fees.
Shelby County, Alabama then leased him to the Tennessee, Coal, Iron, and Rail Company
which put him to work on Slope #12 of the Pratt Mines near Birmingham.
They paid the county twelve dollars a month for his labor – he died of disease five
months into his sentence.
Tennessee Coal, Iron, and Rail entered into its first convict leasing contract with the
State of Alabama in 1888, paying anywhere from $9 to $18 a month depending on the prisoner.
By 1900, there would be over a thousand convicts working the mines – less than seventy of
which were white.
It’s easy not to care about these people because they’re criminals, right?
If you don’t want to do hard labor, maybe don’t commit crimes.
But it’s worth asking what these people did that got them there...
In 1890, Alabama conducted a survey of all the convicts they sent into the Pratt Mines.
Among the felonies, there were eleven for false pretense – which is quitting your
job or breaking a labor contract, seven for bigamy, six for miscegenation – which is
interracial sexual relations, four for homosexuality, and two for illegal voting.
Among the misdemeanors, there were ninety-four for petty theft, forty-six for carrying a
concealed weapon, twenty-four for false pretense, twenty-four for obscene language, nineteen
for gambling, thirteen for selling whiskey, eight not given – don’t worry we’ll
come back to that, seven for vagrancy, five for violating a contract with a white employer,
three for bastardry, and two for selling cotton after sunset.
“Selling cotton after sunset?”
I thought this was America, how could the time of day affect the legality of the free
exchange of goods and services?
Because it didn’t, “after sunset” was code, whenever you see that, just substitute
it with the phrase “for black people.”
This is how Sundown Towns worked, because they obviously couldn’t pass a law explicitly
stating that black people weren’t welcome, they had to make it a crime to just do something
after sunset.
These sunset laws are still on the books in many places, you’ll often find them on lists
of “the weirdest laws from every state.”
It really changes your perspective when you find out what these crimes actually were:
carrying a razor in your pocket, walking along a railroad, or quitting your job.
I’ve literally done all of those things and I would never expect to go to prison for
them.
You probably noticed while going over that list that there weren’t any violent crimes,
people were being sentenced to hard labor for swearing or gambling.
John Clarke was convicted of gaming on April 11, 1903.
The usual punishment would have been ten days of hard labor, but because of court fees,
that was extended to one hundred and fourteen days and he was leased to the Coalburg Mine.
He died after thirty-four days when he was crushed by falling rock.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t think the punishment for rolling dice on the sidewalk
should be hard manual labor until death.
The Coalburg Mine alone had an annual convict death rate of 30%.
But as bad as that sounds, convict leasing was not limited to coal mines, counties often
rented out their prisoners to any farmer or plantation owner who could afford them.
Which, thanks to this new system, was basically everyone.
Slaves used to cost hundreds, even thousands of dollars, they were so expensive that only
the richest plantation owners could participate in the trade.
But leasing a convict only cost a few bucks a month, even poor farmers could afford that.
And unlike the old days, there was no incentive to keep your black laborer at least somewhat
healthy, you could literally just work them to death and then get a new one tomorrow.
This isn’t just my enlightened historical perspective, the Department of Justice held
the same opinion over a hundred years ago.
(This) system is more cruel and inhuman than the slavery of antebellum days, since then
the master conserved the life and health of the slave for business reasons just as he
did that of his horse or mule, but now the master treated the slave unmercifully and
with the sole object of getting the greatest possible amount of labor out of him.
Moreover a (convict) costs but a few dollars while a slave used to cost several hundred.
Here's where I need to introduce another important concept known as Debt Peonage, which is when
a person compels a laborer to work or holds them in servitude to pay off a debt.
I know that a lot of you are immediately going to think I’m talking about Sharecropping,
and I’m not.
Just briefly, sharecropping was when a landlord would let a tenant farmer work a piece of
their property in exchange for a share of the final crop.
While sharecroppers often fell into debt, especially after a bad season, they were still
technically free – and mostly white.
Debt Peonage is when you owe me ten dollars and you’re basically my slave until you
pay it off.
This is the same basic idea behind convict leasing, you owe money to the state or county,
so you work it off with hard labor.
But let’s say you owe a fine and you can’t pay it, you don’t want to be sent to the
mines, but you’re in luck, the sheriff’s deputy who arrested you is also a plantation
owner.
He’s willing to pay your fine for you as long as you’re willing to work off the debt
on his farm.
You sign a labor contract for nine months, not realizing that you also just agreed to
be locked up at night and pay for your own recapture should you try to escape.
Keep in mind that since your debt to the state has been settled, you’re technically not
a criminal anymore.
You’re just a laborer who has agreed to be treated like one, meanwhile, all the food,
clothing, housing, and medicine you’re being provided with is adding to your debt and increasing
your time.
At this rate, it’s going to take you years to pay off that fine.
So, alright, let’s say you’d rather avoid all that and fight the charge, you didn’t
do anything wrong, they can’t prove anything.
Good luck with that.
You have no right to an attorney, that doesn’t start until 1964, you’re a black man and
you stand accused by a white sheriff’s deputy and the white justice of the peace has unilateral
authority to declare you guilty.
It is a foregone conclusion that you will be convicted of something.
Even more than that, the longer the trial goes on and the more witnesses that are called,
the higher the fine will be when you lose – and you will lose.
Which is why, by the 1880s, the obscure legal practice of confessing judgment had become
popular.
This is when you plead guilty to a lesser charge and accept a lesser punishment, because
fighting it and going to trial would make things much worse for you.
Nowadays we call this plea bargaining, but this is where it started.
Remember those eight people who were convicted of “not given” and sent into the Pratt
Mines?
This is what happened to them!
They just plead guilty, the court didn’t even bother to write down for what crime because
it didn’t matter.
In 1898, the largest criminal category for convict laborers in Alabama was “not given.”
In September 1901, John Davis was arrested for vagrancy, when that charge could not be
proven, he was judged guilty of “obtaining goods under false pretense” and ordered
to pay a fine of $75.
A man named John W Pace paid his fine for him and they signed a ten-month labor contract.
After twelve months on Pace’s plantation, Davis was sold to another farmer for $50;
it's unclear how long he was held there.
John Davis was arrested by a man named Robert Franklin and judged by a justice of the peace
named James Kennedy – both of whom were employed by John W Pace.
In May 1903, the Department of Justice announced an investigation into Pace’s slavery ring
and John Davis would eventually testify at the trial.
Here’s how the federal prosecutor in the case, Warren Reese, described the scheme in
his own words.
[Old timey static begins] There have been flagrant abuses and violations
on the part of wealthy and influential men.
These violations have not been confined to one or two periodical and independent instances,
but it has developed into a miserable business and custom to catch up ignorant and helpless
negro men and women upon the flimsiest and the most baseless charges and carry them before
a justice of the peace who is usually a paid hireling of these wealthy dealers.
The victim is found guilty and a fine is assessed which, in the beginning, cannot be paid by
the victim, and then it is that one of these slave dealers steps up, pretends to be the
friend of the negro, telling him he will pay him out if he will sign a contract to work
for him on his farm… the negro readily agrees rather than go to the mines, as he is informed
he will have to do, his fine is paid, the contract is signed, and the negro is taken
to the farm or mine or mill or quarry of the employer.
Placed into a condition of involuntary servitude, he is locked up at nights in a cell, worked
under guards during the day from 3 o'clock in the morning until 7 or 8 o'clock at night,
whipped in a most cruel manner, is insufficiently fed or poorly clad—in fact the evidence
in nearly all of the cases investigated reveals that the negro men are worked nearly naked,
while the women are worked in an equally disgraceful manner.
Brutal things have transpired and sometimes death has resulted from the infliction of
corporal punishment.
If they run away the dogs are placed upon their track, and they are invariably retaken
and subjected to more cruel treatment.
When the time of a good working negro is nearing an end, he is re-arrested upon some trumped
up charge and again carried before some bribed justice and resentenced to an additional time.
In this way negroes have been known to have worked on these places in this situation for
years and years.
They can get no word to friends nor is word allowed to reach them from the outside world….
They are held in abject slavery without any knowledge of what goes on in the outside world.
The indictments so far found are based upon some twenty-five negro men and women who have
been the subjects of these violations.
These are some of the most severe instances, but it has been discovered there are hundreds
of other cases. [Old timey static ends]
I know what you’re thinking, “Oh, well, it was only a few hundred people, that doesn’t sound that bad– “
Nope! In the years after the Civil War, over 800,000 people were caught up in this system.
This was one indictment in one county in one state and there were hundreds of victims.
During this same period there were similar cases being heard in Georgia, Florida, Texas,
basically everywhere.
To put that in perspective, we freed four million black people and then re-enslaved
a fifth of them as convicts and debt peons.
And before you go thinking that these cases had a happy ending, remember the primary question
of this video – when was the last slave freed in America?
If you hadn’t noticed, you still don’t have an answer to that question.
John W Pace and his co-conspirators were charged with violating the Federal Anti-Peonage Statute,
which was passed in 1867 to abolish the serf-like conditions that existed in the New Mexico
Territory.
When we acquired all of that land from Mexico, we also acquired the societal structure of
the people living there.
So, we got rid of the peonage system and then gave away free land to anyone willing to move
there during the various Homestead Acts.
Which were kind of like reparations… but only for white people… and they weren’t
really making up for anything, it was just kind of a bonus.
Anyway, Pace and his friends’ actual defense was that since the debts that were owed to
them were fictitious, this wasn’t peonage – it was slavery… and slavery wasn’t
illegal.
And they were right!
Their charges were dismissed or they got off on appeal!
Most of the other cases around the country fell apart for the same reason, because believe
it or not, slavery was not a crime!
The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution says, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude,
except as a punishment for crime blah blah, shall exist within the United States, or any
place subject to their jurisdiction.”
You know what it doesn’t say?
Anyone caught engaging in slavery is guilty of a felony and shall serve blah blah in prison
blah blah.
It abolished slavery as a legal concept, but didn’t provide any punishment for continuing
the practice anyway.
It does include a section that says, “Congress shall have power to enforce this article by
appropriate legislation.”
But Congress never got around to doing that!
John W Pace renewed his leasing contract with the county was found to be holding slaves
on his property less than a year later and there was nothing anybody could do about it.
As a result, this neoslavery – disguised as debt peonage – was allowed to continue
for decades.
If you’re not seething with anger right now, you need to look at yourself in the mirror
and ask yourself why that is.
[Calming breath] As I mentioned, this wasn’t isolated to
the coal mines and cotton plantations of Alabama.
Convict debt peons were cutting sugar cane in Texas, harvesting turpentine in Florida,
and working at the infamous Chattahoochee Brick Company in Georgia.
Where they liked to use child convicts because they were small enough to fit inside of the
kilns.
After public hearings on corruption and conditions within their leasing system, the state of
Georgia decided to abolish their program in 1909.
Martin Tabert was arrested for vagrancy in the winter of 1921.
He was found guilty and was imposed a fine of $25, his family actually sent the money,
but by the time it arrived, he had already been leased to a turpentine camp in Florida
on a three-month contract.
Shortly afterwards, he was whipped over a hundred times by an overseer and died of his
wounds.
Normally, this wouldn’t change anything, this happened literally every day, all over
the South, but…
Martin Tabert was a rich, white kid from North Dakota.
He was a 22-year-old on a cross-country backpacking trip when he was arrested.
His family pressed charges and the resulting media frenzy caused such a nationwide outrage
that Florida ended its convict leasing system in 1923.
Alabama didn’t end their program until 1928, making them the last state to do so.
In that final year, the state had over 37,000 prisoners leased out to various companies
and plantations. 12,500 of which were sentenced to hard labor for the sale or possession of
alcohol, because at this point, Prohibition was a thing.
2,735 were in for vagrancy, 2,014 for gaming, 458 for leaving a farm without permission,
and 154 for adultery and miscegenation.
Once a state ended its convict leasing program, they transitioned to using prison labor on
state projects like roads and highways.
These are the chain gangs you’re familiar with, they start in the 1920s and 30s.
Meanwhile, county convict leasing systems and the debt peonage scheme we discussed earlier,
which is just slavery with extra steps, continued to exist without any real challenges.
You’ve seen the length of this video, you know we’re not done yet.
While every US History teacher will correctly tell you that Reconstruction ended in 1877,
it took a few years for the reforms of that era to be dismantled.
US v Cruikshank and the Slaughterhouse Cases basically gutted the Fourteenth Amendment.
Without the presence of Union troops and without action from the federal government, southern
state governments quickly stripped freedmen of all their rights and refused to protect
them from mob violence.
For almost a century after the Civil War, white-on-black crime went virtually unpunished.
In 1883, the Supreme Court ruled that the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which prohibited
racial discrimination in public accommodations like restaurants and transportation, was unconstitutional.
Here is the majority opinion from that case.
When a man has emerged from slavery, and by the aid of beneficent legislation has shaken
off the inseparable concomitants of that state, there must be some stage in the progress of
his elevation when he takes the rank of a mere citizen, and ceases to be the special
favorite of the laws, and when his rights as a citizen, or a man, are to be protected
in the ordinary modes by which other men's rights are protected.
Less than 20 years after the Civil War and they’re already making the “aww come on,
slavery ended forever ago” argument.
This decision allowed segregation at the state level.
In 1892, Homer Plessy boarded a train and sat in the white section with the full intention
of being arrested and challenging Louisiana’s Separate Car Act.
Plessy was only one-eighth black, that’s one great grandparent.
And that was enough to put him in the colored section.
As you’re probably aware, in 1896 the Supreme Court sided with Louisiana and gave federal
approval for segregation to become the norm across the country.
Even the North was on board with segregation at this point.
You see, before the Civil War, the racial hierarchy had been justified using the bible
– it had been ordained by God.
Have you ever wondered why there’s a Southern Baptist Church?
Because in 1845, they broke away from the rest of the Baptists over the issue of slavery
and the teaching that God stained their skin black as a permanent mark of servitude.
Southern ministers told the slaves that theirs was a glorified place among the chickens and
the pigs.
In 1859, Darwin came out with his book On the Origin of Species and it didn’t take
long for amateur scientists to start measuring skulls and determining which race was superior…
care to guess which one they chose?
This was the beginning of the eugenics movement – it’s sometimes difficult to remember
that all these things were happening at the same time.
And during the 1870s, the Indian Wars were in full swing, which spawned an entire genre
of literary fiction which told fantastic tales of white men civilizing the West.
Manifest Destiny provided Americans with an idealized view of white progress.
And then, to top it all off, northerners were bombarded with the news out of the South regarding
an apparent crime wave following the abolition of slavery.
This was a result of the Black Codes, which were presented as neutral, while the freedmen
were presented as violent criminals.
If you were to ask a white northerner to describe a black person in the 1850s, before the Civil
War, they would’ve used words like loyal, dutiful, reliable, hardworking, and trustworthy.
While still servile in nature, I hope we can agree that these are mostly positive traits.
By the 1890s, when convict leasing and debt peonage were widely practiced, they were a
threat, uncivilized, demonic, a lascivious beast roaming the country.
This is it.
If you learn nothing else from this video, I want this to be it.
Southern whites used laws like vagrancy, trespassing, and false pretense to convince northern whites
that black people were incapable of living in civilized society.
This is where the myth of black criminality comes from – this is decades before the
War on Drugs.
If that doesn’t piss you off, I want you to take out your phone, turn on the camera,
flip it to selfie mode, and then ask yourself why that is.
My guess is it’s because none of the history I’ve talked about so far would have ever
applied to you.
Given all of that, is it really that much of a surprise that when Birth of a Nation
was released in 1915, everyone, North and South, bought its message?
This was the first feature-length American film and quickly became the first Hollywood
blockbuster.
In the film, the abolition of slavery is depicted as a mistake, unleashing animalistic black
men on our unsuspecting, innocent white women.
The KKK are the heroes, swooping in to save the South and restore order.
This confirmed the story that white people wanted to hear and turned the defeat of the
Confederacy into a tale of martyrdom.
This rewrite of American history is known as the Lost Cause and is still pushed by textbooks
today.
This movie is also directly responsible for the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan who began
terrorizing black families by burning crosses on their lawns.
The original KKK didn’t do that, that was invented by the movie – I told you, you
wouldn’t believe what brought them back.
Frederick Douglass died in 1895, which meant that the most influential black leader was
now Booker T Washington, who pushed a more gradualist message.
He urged black people to accommodate white demands for subservience while building up
their skills.
He told them to learn a trade to hold the keys to their own advancement and not to move
up North; don’t worry, white people will come around eventually.
Needless to say, this message was praised by many southern whites.
By 1901, they had gradually disenfranchised every black person in the South by passing
laws and writing new state constitutions.
They obviously couldn’t ban an entire race from voting because of the Fifteenth Amendment.
Instead, they instituted poll taxes and literacy tests to accomplish the same goal – you
all know about these, even PragerU mentions them.
But just like the Black Codes, you probably have a very watered-down understanding of
them.
Let’s start with the literacy tests, nearly every state required you to know how to read
and write if you wanted to vote.
Which sounds reasonable on the surface, right?
Here’s an actual literacy test from the State of Louisiana.
It starts off with some fairly straight forward directions, draw a line around the number
or letter of this sentence.
Cross out the longest word, circle the first, first letter of the alphabet.
Simple.
But then you get to number ten, In the first circle below, write the last letter of the
first word beginning with L. What?
Number twelve, draw a line from circle two to circle five that will pass below circle
two and above circle four.
Oh c’mon.
This is only the first page, there are thirty total questions, and one wrong answer denotes
failure of this test.
Now be honest, is that what you thought a literacy test was when you learned about it
in school?
Because I’m willing to bet this was never explained to you.
These tests were arbitrarily given out to anyone who couldn’t prove a fifth-grade
education and the questions were just vague enough that any answer could be subjectively
wrong.
Many states also put up financial barriers to voting.
Mississippi required a poll tax of three dollars, which is just over a hundred in today’s
money – would you vote if it cost you that much to do it every time?
I doubt it.
Virginia’s was only one dollar, but you had to be paying it for each of the previous
three years before you could vote.
Louisiana required you to own at least $300 in property but included an exemption for
anyone who could vote on January 1, 1867, or, their descendants.
This is the origin of the phrase Grandfather Clause.
This loophole was intended to let poor white people vote, even if they didn’t meet the
literacy or financial requirements, as long as their grandfather was allowed to vote.
Virtually no black people were voting in the South in 1867, so their descendants didn’t
qualify.
Disenfranchisement has several knock-on effects that you might not immediately think about
– it’s a lot more than just your ability to vote.
You’ll also find it near impossible to run for office.
This obviously meant there were no black representatives in state or federal government, which is why
the nice PragerU lady stopped counting them in 1900.
But this also affected local office, there were no black sheriffs, constables, or justices
of the peace.
Not being registered to vote also means that you couldn’t be called for jury duty, so
black defendants were almost always tried and convicted by all-white juries.
By the time Birth of a Nation and Woodrow Wilson came around, black people had been
almost entirely pushed out of government.
Confederate statues were being put up in the North and South and the Lost Cause had completely
taken over the historical narrative.
Race riots occurred in places like Springfield, Illinois, Charleston, South Carolina, and
Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Lynching had become so popular that children were let out of school so they could attend
and newspapers advertised the event days beforehand.
People took selfies with the deceased and left with souvenirs and postcards.
The violence around the country got so bad that in 1936, Victor Green began publishing
The Negro Motorist Green-Book.
A travel guide with a list of hotels, gas stations, and barber shops that are friendly
to black people in every city.
They were working on a fictional version of this in the first season of Lovecraft Country
– this was based on a real thing.
These were printed all the way through the Civil Rights movement and ended in 1966.
Think about what that means for a moment.
This country was so hostile to black people that for three decades they needed to have
their own separate travel guide where every listed location had to be vetted for safety.
Because if you went into the wrong town, you might disappear forever.
[Clapping] Mister Vice President, Mister Speaker,
Yesterday…
December 7, 1941…
If you’re wondering what FDR has to do with slavery, I’m guessing you’ve forgotten
the primary question of this video… again.
After giving that speech, President Roosevelt asked his cabinet what the enemy was going
to use against the United States in the coming propaganda war.
The answer was the treatment of the negro.
In addition to disenfranchisement and segregation, the convict leasing-debt peonage system was
still holding thousands of people in bondage.
A man named Charles Bledsoe plead guilty to peonage in Mobile, Alabama in October 1941,
just two months before Pearl Harbor.
America could hardly claim the moral high ground or point fingers at how Japan was treating
the Chinese or Koreans when we had our own subjugated underclass.
So, on December 12, 1941, FDR’s Justice Department issued Circular 3591.
A summary of the Department files on alleged peonage violations discloses numerous instances
of "prosecution declined" by United States Attorneys, the chief reason stated as being
the absence of the element of debt.
In the matter of control by one over the person of another, the circumstances under which
each person is placed must be determined, i.e., the subservience of the will of one
to the other.
Open force, threats or intimidation need not be used to cause a person to go involuntarily
from one place to another to work and to remain at such work; nor does evidence of kind treatment
show an absence of involuntary servitude.
In the United States one cannot sell himself as a peon or slave -- the law is fixed and
established to protect the weak-minded, the poor, the miserable.
Men will sometimes sell themselves for a meal of victuals or contract with another who acts
as surety on his bond to work out the amount of the bond upon his release from jail.
Any such contract is positively null and void and the procuring and causing of such contract
to be made violates (the law).
To assure emphasis on the issue of involuntary servitude and slavery in considering these
cases…
the Federal Bureau of Investigation has been requested to change the title on its reports
from "Peonage" to read "Involuntary Servitude and Slavery."
This memo told prosecutors to stop trying these cases under the Federal Anti-Peonage
Statute, because so many people were using the same defense as John W Pace.
That since the debt wasn’t real, this wasn’t peonage, it was slavery, and slavery wasn’t
a crime.
They were told to stop calling it peonage and start calling it was it is – slavery.
The memo provided them with a list of other statutes that could apply and told them to
aggressively prosecute these crimes as part of the war effort.
Over the next few months, dozens of cases would be opened across the country.
In September 1942, on a farm outside of Beeville, Texas, a man named Alfred Irving became the
last chattel slave to be freed in America.
Not indentured servant, or convict laborer, or debt peon – slave.
Here’s a news article from the time saying as much.
The Skrobarcek family held him as a slave for at least four years, they starved him
and beat him with chains, whips, and ropes so regularly that he was permanently disfigured.
The family was found guilty and sentenced to federal prison.
The Corpus Christi Times said the “trial and its conclusion will undoubtedly be said
in the future to have given a decisive setback to the enemy propaganda machine” So, in
a way, by bombing Pearl Harbor, the Japanese ended slavery in the United States.
When people notice the obvious inequality in our country and wonder why black people
haven’t “caught up” yet, despite slavery ending over 150 years ago…
They’re wrong, it ended eighty years ago.
When was the last slave freed in America?
It wasn’t after the Civil War, it was during World War II in September 1942.
Our current president, Joe Biden, was born two months later.
Until he graduated from college, black people had to drink out of a separate water fountain
– segregation didn’t end until the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Jim Crow ended with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which allowed black people to vote
again.
But just a few years after that, Nixon came along with his War on Drugs, which disenfranchised
and imprisoned even more black people… on purpose.
My police militarization video goes into this in more detail, but if you don’t believe
me...
The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the
antiwar left and black people.
You understand what I'm saying?
We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting
the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing
both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.
We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify
them night after night on the evening news.
Did we know we were lying about the drugs?
Of course we did.
Why haven’t we done reparations?
We clearly owe them.
And by we, I don’t mean white people, I mean the government of the United States.
Since the colonial days, the laws of this country have been used to force black people
into a permanent underclass.
For the first hundred years after independence, the Constitution not only allowed, but protected
slavery.
And immediately after it was abolished, the criminal justice system was used as leverage
to extract as much labor and wealth out of black people as possible.
Either directly, by sentencing them to hard labor in the coal mines.
Or indirectly, by issuing an exorbitant fine that was then paid for by a plantation owner
who held that debt over them while simultaneously increasing it so that it took years to pay
off.
If they tried to leave, they’d be arrested for breaking a labor contract and given even
more hard labor.
This blatantly unjust system created generations of people who rightfully fear going out alone
and have learned not to expect help from the authorities.
They don’t trust the police and have lost all faith in the criminal justice system.
And who can blame them?
For almost a hundred years, the primary purpose of the judicial system was to coerce black
people into meeting the labor demands and social customs of the white majority.
This created a century-old myth about black criminality that persists to this day.
The government of the United States did that, not some slave owners who died over 150 years
ago and they arguably continue to do it with the War on Drugs.
Joe Biden was instrumental in introducing the modern version of Pig Laws when he was
in the Senate.
We went from the Slave Codes and chattel slavery to the Black Codes and neoslavery, which is
convict leasing and debt peonage, to the War on Drugs and the prison industrial complex.
It’s basically a continuum of oppression against black people.
This version of history, otherwise known as what actually happened, explains much more
about the current state of racial inequality in our country than the Standard American
History Myth we were all taught.
Have you noticed that I haven’t shown you a PragerU clip in the last half hour?
Because this part of the story is almost always skipped over – we learn about the Pilgrims,
the revolution, the Civil War… and that’s pretty much it.
You’ll eventually learn about segregation and how Martin Luther King ended racism.
Also in our time, all Americans are equally protected under the law and have equal voting
rights, regardless of race.
We even had a black president, two terms!
Today, America is the most successful multi-racial country in history.
The only white-majority country to elect a black president, twice.
PragerU is basically presenting the same version of history that we all learned in elementary
and high school.
The only difference is that their target audience consists entirely of adults – specifically
parents.
They’re pushing for school choice, so they’re trying to scare parents into believing their
kids are learning Critical Race Theory or that America is a racist country.
But I can assure you, no child is learning about anything I’ve talked about during
this video.
There are history and Social Studies teachers watching this right now who have never heard
about debt peonage before – I know I hadn’t when I was a teacher.
Finally learning about this stuff has given me a serious crisis of conscience.
I was taught the Standard American History Myth, which is just a watered-down version
of the Lost Cause, and then I helped spread that narrative to the next generation of kids.
As an educator, there is nothing worse than realizing you’ve been teaching a lie, even
if it’s only a lie by omission.
The full story makes so much more sense that I wish this stuff was taught in school, because
then, we might actually demand some changes.
Which is exactly why PragerU keeps telling you the same story you learned in fifth grade.
History is the only subject where they repeatedly say you shouldn’t learn anything new, because
then you might feel bad about being white or American.
You learned everything you need to know about history in elementary school.
I don’t feel any guilt for being white, but I do feel guilty that I believed the fairy
tale version of American history for so long…
at least now, I know better and so do you.
Now that you know all of this, it’s time to confront your implicit racial biases, which
you can do over at curiositystream.com/knowingbetter.
CuriosityStream is a subscription streaming service that offers thousands of documentaries
and non-fiction titles that you can access across multiple platforms.
Are You Racist?
Find out by watching the show Are You Racist?
Which ran multiple subjects through a battery of psychological tests to reveal subconscious
prejudices against certain other people.
Do you think some people are just genetically more likely to commit crime?
This documentary is for you.
Check it out by heading over to curiositystream.com/knowingbetter, where you can also get access to Nebula, the
streaming service built by fellow youtubers to escape the unjust rules of the algorithm.
All of my content is hosted over there ad-free and most of my recent videos include special
content that can only be seen on Nebula.
Sign up today by heading over to curiositystream.com/knowingbetter, where you can get access to both CuriosityStream
and Nebula for only $14.79 a year.
You’ll also be supporting the channel when you do.
I’m not going to apologize for the length of this video or the delay in its release
because you’ve come to expect that by now.
I’d like to give a shout out to my newest Golden Fork patrons, Adam and SpecialistAngelFigueroa.
If you’d like to add your name to this list of debt peons, head on over to patreon.com/knowingbetter,
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