Tag: black history month

ECP NetHappenings What we take for granted about the history of incarceration

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BLACK HISTORY MONTH

What we take for granted about the history of incarceration.
By Melanie D. Newport

https://www.publicbooks.org/slavery-is-not-a-metaphor-rethinking-mass-incarceration-with-john-bardes/

n The Carceral City: Slavery and the Making of Mass Incarceration in New Orleans, 1803–1930, historian John Bardes recounts how Southern slaveowners relied on publicly funded urban jails to discipline, torture, and break enslaved people. It’s a shocking finding, as Bardes reveals that rates of incarceration for Black people were higher during the Civil War than they are today. But the book also shows, with great care, how the intimacy of enslavement fueled incarceration in Southern “police jails.” By sending slaves there, Southern slaveholders distanced themselves from the violence it took to dehumanize people who were already viewed as chattel. In doing so, Bardes finds, these slaveholder penologists understood that enslaved people were human.

Bringing to bear the perspectives of enslaved people and free Black people through their letters, Bardes shows that this system of carceral violence criminalized all Black people and was foundational in shaping Black experiences of work, public space, and migration in early America. To me, The Carceral City opens up an incredible set of possibilities for early American carceral history. It was a treat to talk with John Bardes, an assistant professor of history at Louisiana State University whose work has been published in Journal of African American History, American Quarterly, Journal of Southern History, and Southern Cultures, and my coeditor on the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to American Carceral History

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Black History Month Knight-Ridder Profits off the Slave Economy

Knight-Ridder Profits off the Slave Economy

Media companies have helped peddle tobacco, push pharmaceuticals, entrap people in debt, and whitewash war profiteering.

Among their most heinous crimes was their role as facilitators and profiteers of the U.S. slave economy, advertising the sale of enslaved Black people or rewards for the capture of escaped slaves across both the northern and southern United States. That includes newspapers bought and sold by Knight-Ridder.

That is the industry that built the Knight Foundation’s wealth.

According to its 2019 financial statements, more than 20 percent of Knight’s $2.4 billion endowment is invested in hedge funds. For at least five years, Knight’s endowment included Alden Global Capital, the owners of Digital First Media, the company that Washington Post columnist Margaret Sullivan called “the most ruthless of the corporate strip-miners seemingly intent on destroying local journalism.”