Enslavement

Enslavement is the historical foundation of the racial order that Bryan Stevenson traces through American law, labor, and criminal punishment. In his account, its end did not end racial subordination: the promise of freedom was followed by new forms of coercion, while the history of enslavement remained central to understanding present-day injustice.

Enslavement and the Racial Order

Stevenson identifies enslavement as the first of four institutions that shaped the American approach to race and justice. Its legacy appears not only in explicit racial hierarchy but also in the laws and social fears built to preserve that hierarchy. After the Civil War, the confluence of race and sex became a force in the dismantling of Reconstruction and the maintenance of Jim Crow. Anti-miscegenation statutes criminalized relationships such as that between Walter McMillian and Karen Kelly; in many Southern communities, law-enforcement officials treated investigating and punishing Black men intimate with white women as part of their duty.

The racial order also shaped access to political power. After federal troops left Alabama in the 1870s, Black voting rights were taken away and racially restrictive laws enforced white supremacy. Stevenson describes racial-integrity laws as part of an effort to restore the hierarchy of enslavement; laws criminalizing interracial sex and marriage were also used to justify the forced sterilization of poor and minority women. In this history, control over intimate relationships and control over civic life reinforced one another.

Coercion After Emancipation

The end of enslavement did not prevent the forced extraction of Black labor. At the end of the nineteenth century, convict leasing criminalized formerly enslaved people through offenses Stevenson describes as nonsensical, then leased men, women, and children to businesses. Private industries profited from unpaid convict labor, and thousands of African Americans died in horrific working conditions. The practice was widespread enough to be described in Douglas Blackmon’s book Slavery by Another Name, yet, Stevenson notes, it remains little known to most Americans.

The chapter follows this history into the conditions at Angola Prison, a former slave plantation before the end of the Civil War. In the era Stevenson describes, prisoners there were forced to pick cotton in the fields. Refusing work could result in disciplinary write-ups and months in solitary confinement. Those conditions left many prisoners with lengthy disciplinary records, which state lawyers later used to argue against favorable resentencing. The history does not make convict labor and enslavement identical; it shows how the coercive use of labor and punishment persisted in altered legal forms.

Historical Continuities in Criminal Justice

Stevenson connects racial terror to the development of modern punishment. He argues that lynching helped create the modern death penalty: the turn toward speedy executions partly redirected the violence of lynching while assuring white Southerners that Black men would still face the ultimate punishment. The account places capital punishment within a longer history of racial control, rather than treating it as separate from the violence that preceded it.

That history also informs the book’s account of contemporary legal institutions. Stevenson describes slavery, the terror that shaped the lives of people of color after Reconstruction until World War II, and Jim Crow as institutions that remain insufficiently understood in discussions of race and justice. He emphasizes that the effects of racial terror were not confined to individual acts of violence: its constant threat traumatized African Americans, while the legalized segregation and suppression of rights under Jim Crow continued racial subordination. The connection is historical and structural, not a claim that every modern injustice is a direct repetition of enslavement.

Memory, Symbols, and Public Reckoning

The book contrasts the celebration of familiar stories about racial justice with the difficulty of confronting the history that gives those stories their stakes. In Monroeville, local institutions marketed To Kill a Mockingbird and its story of an innocent Black defendant, even as the harder truths about race and justice in the novel failed to take root. That contrast echoes the wider problem Stevenson identifies: a public can commemorate an appealing account of justice while overlooking the historical structures behind it.

Confederate imagery provides another example of the past’s visible presence. Before visiting Avery Jenkins in prison, Stevenson encountered a pickup truck covered with Confederate flag decals and other symbols of the Old South. He places such symbols in a history in which Confederate imagery was used to intimidate Black communities and signal resistance to Black progress. In April 2018, the Equal Justice Initiative opened the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. The museum and memorial make the history of enslavement and racial terror part of a public account of the country’s continuing struggle with injustice.