Abstract
2014 was a bellwether year for ‘race’ in the United States.
The casual impunity with which police have been killing young black men and children over the decades was forced onto the national agenda with the 9 August shooting of Michael Brown by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. 1 The callous treatment of the teenager’s body that was left face down in the road in the summer heat for four hours, and the failure of a grand jury to bring an indictment against the police officer compounded the anger in the community and brought people into the streets to face a militarised police presence in full combat gear.
The events in Ferguson, the unprovoked police chokehold that extinguished the life of Eric Garner in New York, the police gunshots that killed John Crawford III as he was in an Ohio Walmart holding an air rifle that was for sale, the killing by a rookie police officer of a young father, Akai Gurley, as he was going down a darkened stairwell in a New York housing complex because the elevator was broken, and the videotaped police slaying of 12-year-old Tamir Rice as he was playing with a toy gun in a Cleveland park triggered a thousand demonstrations around the slogan ‘Black Lives Matter’ in some 200 cities and towns before the year was done. The biggest upsurge of sustained activism in forty years expunged the widely-peddled assurance that the election of Barack Obama as president meant the country had entered a ‘post racial era’.
But it has done more than that. It has brought back to the streets a language and palpable sense of racism as an enduring historical injustice that remains deeply embedded in the nation’s social, economic and political structures – a recognition that the education system, mass media and consumer culture had all but airbrushed away over the last 40 years. In an era when voting rights have been rolled back by legislatures and courts and voting districts are being re-districted to ensure perennial Republican majorities, this largely youth- and women-led movement has elbowed aside leading figures of the civil rights establishment and shows little interest in pursuing case-by-case steps towards equal treatment in the legislatures and the courts. Its focus is on human rights, not civil rights. It emphasises a fundamental iniquity that was never adequately confronted, even as civil rights victories were bringing Jim Crow segregation to an end: the failure of the nation to recognise the inherent humanity of black people. Systemic dehumanisation is a common thread running through centuries of slavery to the terror and lynching epidemic that helped re-impose white supremacy after the Civil War, to the late twentieth century’s era of mass incarceration and the indifference with which police extinguish black lives without facing indictments today. 2
Some fifty years ago, Ferguson, Missouri was a ‘sundown town’, where black people risked their lives if found within the city limits after dark. Now that it is two-thirds black but still white-controlled, dehumanisation is newly profitable, according to a US Justice Department report. 3 The police regard African Americans ‘less as constituents to be protected than as potential offenders and sources of revenue’, the report finds. They systematically charge them with minor or made up offences in order to generate an escalating series of crippling fine payments and court fees that inevitably fill the prisons. In this town of 21,000 people (14,000 of them black), more than 16,000 people – most of them African American – had outstanding court-issued arrest warrants as of December 2014, overwhelmingly for non-criminal traffic offenses. In the eyes of the white power structure, Ferguson’s African Americans are seen less as human beings than as bodies to plunder for the city’s coffers.
Two books published in 2014 vividly convey why today’s message must be ‘Black Lives Matter’, not the bland ‘All Lives Matter’ favoured by mainstream America. Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told: slavery and the making of American capitalism and Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy: a story of justice and redemption deal with the centuries-long dehumanisation of black people in ways that are as revelatory as they are profoundly moving. They both demand that readers engage fully with painful subject matter unmediated by euphemisms. The horrors they expose are jarringly at odds with comforting myths about the American experience and values that have long been taken as truisms.
Baptist, an historian who grew up in North Carolina and now teaches at Cornell University, documents the centrality of torture in the creation of American wealth. The legacy of the remorseless inhumanity he describes is laid bare by civil rights attorney Stevenson in his first-hand account of the cruelty, racial contempt and indifference to the truth endemic in the American justice system. Both writers highlight and honour the humanity and capacity for empathy that can emerge intact from the most inhospitable places imaginable: the slave camps of Mississippi where, in Baptist’s words, ‘enslavers used measurement to calibrate torture in order to force cotton pickers to figure out how to increase their own productivity’, and death row in Alabama where, Stevenson writes, there are ‘more juveniles sentenced to death per capita than any other state – or any other country in the world’. It was Bryan Stevenson, the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) in Alabama to provide pro bono legal assistance to death row prisoners (and many others), who persuaded the US Supreme Court in 2010 that children as young as 13 should not be sentenced to life without the possibility of parole for non-homicide offenses and, two years later, convinced the same court to rule that children who are convicted of homicides cannot be automatically condemned to die in prison.
What kind of country is it where a black boy has a one in three chance of being locked up at some point in his life? It is one that has never fully reckoned with its past. By the early twentieth century, Baptist writes, ‘professional historians were justifying the exclusion of Jim Crow and disfranchisement by telling a story about the nation’s past of slavery and civil war that seemed to confirm, for many white Americans, that white supremacy was just and necessary … by the 1930’s, most white Americans had been demanding for decades that they hear only a sanitized version of the past’. By the 1950s and 1960s the sanitised version was being re-evaluated and history re-written, but the assumption lingered that the slave system of the South was the foundation of a paternalist, even gracious, feudal world apart from the far more dynamic free labour system of the North that would have replaced it in time, and had little to do with the rise of the US as a nineteenth century economic powerhouse.
The Half Has Never Been Told tells a very different story. In its pages, the expanding frontier of slavery was the driver of American economic expansion before the Civil War, and made cotton the world’s most traded commodity. By 1850, the 3.2 million enslaved people were worth $1.3 billion, a fifth of the nation’s wealth and ‘the biggest pool of collateral in the United States’ that reaped profits for investors not just in the US but around the globe. Not only that: the slave labour system was more productive than free labour on northern farms and showed no sign of ever being voluntarily abandoned or replaced.
While other historians have written of the importance of cotton to the Industrial Revolution and capital accumulation, no one else has taken on the multi-layered task that Baptist sets himself. In demonstrating that ‘enslaved African Americans built the modern United States, and indeed the entire modern world, in ways both obvious and hidden’, he describes the activity of banks, slave camp entrepreneurs, politicians, land speculators, investors in the North and Europe, and various government entities as the US slave empire expanded through the southwest. A ruthless and innovative form of financial capitalism emerged with ‘new credit flows that used enslaved people’s bodies, lives and hands as the basis for lending in the cotton economy and profit-sharing by investors outside of it’. In its boom and bust cycle, the banks’ securitisation of enslaved bodies played a role remarkably similar to securitised sub-prime mortgages that spelled economic catastrophe for African American families when the mortgage bubble burst in 2008.
While on one level this is a work of persuasive and painstaking economic analysis, The Half Has Never Been Told never loses sight of the people whose commodification ‘shaped every crucial aspect of the economy and politics of the new nation’. Baptist draws on thousands of personal narratives, autobiographies and interviews conducted by the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration to give voice to the enslaved. He does more than put words in their mouths: through the power of empathy and imagination, he forces the reader to confront what slavery must have been like as a lived reality.
‘Understanding something of what it felt like to suffer, and what it cost to endure that suffering, is crucial to understanding the course of US history’, Baptist writes. And so he undertakes to convey that experience, to the extent that this is possible with words alone. The book is framed in terms of dehumanisation, with the themes of chapters classified (sometimes successfully, sometimes less so) as body parts: feet, heads, right hand, left hand, tongues, breath, seed, blood, backs, arms. Baptist vividly portrays the barbarity of forced migration: the auctions that commodify human beings and destroy families to pay planters’ debts and the torment of the coffles of the enslaved, marched south and then west, to lands opened up by the dispossession of native peoples. He is unsparing in his depiction of sexual exploitation and sadism. But nothing is more unsettling than Baptist’s searing analysis of the role played by a carefully calibrated torture regime – he calls it the ‘whipping-machine system’ – in the maximisation of efficiency and profit and the surge of economic development that made the US a world power: ‘Using torture, slavery’s entrepreneurs extracted an amount of innovation virtually equal in numerical measure to all the mechanical ingenuity in all the textile mills in the Western world.’
Although occasionally Baptist’s prose verges on the hyperbolic, The Half Has Never Been Told is a remarkable achievement. Its nearly 500 pages compellingly make the case that ‘the expansion of slavery in many ways shaped the story of everything in the pre-Civil War United States’. Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy demonstrates how we live with its consequences today.
Stevenson, an African American who grew up poor in segregated rural Delaware, is personally close to the violence, terror and racism that slavery bequeathed the country. His grandmother’s parents had been enslaved, and his grandfather was murdered when Stevenson was a teenager. Being a graduate of Harvard University Law School offered him little protection from the white police officer who, as Stevenson sat in his car outside his Atlanta apartment, pointed a gun to his head and said he would blow his brains out. It did not spare him from having a judge assume he was a criminal defendant when he made a court appearance on behalf of a client. He could have used his privileged education to escape to a part of the country that was not so redolent of nineteenth-century plantation culture (the death row he visits at Angola prison in Louisiana was once a slave labour camp). But Stevenson chooses to ‘beat the drum for justice’ even as he realises that in the courts he frequents ‘there simply was no commitment to the rule of law, no accountability, and little shame’.
Among the clients he describes in his book – many of them mentally ill, some of them young teenagers when they were arrested, all of them poor, almost all of them black – are those who, after the most half-baked trials imaginable, were condemned to spend their lives within prison walls, and sometimes decades in small concrete boxes enduring uninterrupted solitary confinement. Others are on death row. He maintains that ‘the racial terrorism of lynching in many ways created the modern death penalty’ and his defense of clients facing execution is as passionate as it is compassionate. He writes that the first time he met a prisoner on death row, the inmate ‘gave me an astonishing measure of his humanity’ and ‘altered something in my understanding of human potential, redemption, and hopefulness’. The experience of repeatedly discovering hope and humanity in the most dehumanising places convinced him that ‘each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done’.
What if the ‘worst thing’ that got a person condemned to death never happened? The centrepiece of Just Mercy is the case of Walter McMillian, an African American with his own pulp-wood business in the heart of what had once been Alabama cotton country. McMillian himself picked cotton as a child. The fear of ‘race mixing’ and interracial sex that had been a lynching matter and buttressed Jim Crow segregation was still prevalent when McMillian started a relationship with a white woman in the mid-1980s. When another white woman was murdered in 1986, he was charged with the crime by a sheriff who threatened to lynch him, and tried before a jury from which African Americans had been excluded. After a trial that lasted a day and a half, McMillian – who had a rock solid alibi – was convicted on the testimony of a single witness who claimed he saw him at the murder site with a gun in his hand and two others who said they saw his truck in the vicinity. So flimsy were the proceedings that the jury only sentenced him to life in prison, not death. The judge then overrode the sentence, and put him on death row.
All three witnesses subsequently recanted their testimony: the star witness told Stevenson that before the trial the sheriff and prosecutor knew he hadn’t really seen McMillian at the murder site and threatened him with capital charges if he refused to help convict McMillian by lying in court. Still, the guilty verdict was upheld on appeal. McMillian remained on death row until he was exonerated and finally released in 1993, after Stevenson persuaded the television programme 60 Minutes to air a segment about his case. According to Death Penalty Information Center figures, McMillian is one of 150 people who have been exonerated and freed since 1972 when the death penalty was briefly suspended by the US Supreme Court. There is no way of knowing how many of the more than 1,400 people who have been put to death since executions resumed in 1976 were innocent.
Throughout his grinding ordeal, Walter McMillian remained a man of dignity and empathy, who, in his death row conversations with his lawyer, ‘guessed what frustrations guards must be experiencing to excuse the rude things they said to him’ and retained an astonishing capacity for forgiveness. In his address to the congregation gathered for his funeral in 2013, Stevenson describes the lessons he learned from McMillian’s case about the way fear and anger can infect a community or nation and threaten justice, and from McMillian the man: ‘Walter taught me that mercy is just when it is rooted in hopefulness and freely given. Mercy is most empowering, liberating and transformative when it is directed at the undeserving.’ In a harshly punitive country with the highest rate of incarceration in the world, where confined human bodies are increasingly a source of profit and justice and mercy are in short supply, Stevenson holds high the light he finds within the darkness.
Just Mercy and The Half Has Never Been Told are unlikely to provide the impetus for the badly-needed root-and-branch transformation of the US criminal justice system. They will not by themselves convince the nation to put some kind of reparations on the table. But timing is important, and both books have the potential to open the eyes of white America to the significance of the declaration ‘Black Lives Matter’. Without the scrupulous confrontation with history and injustice that these books offer, the US is likely to become ever more viciously polarised and repressive as it reaches ‘majority minority’ demographic status in the decades ahead.