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I was encouraged by the fact that nationwide the rate of mass incarceration had finally
slowed. For the first time in close to forty years, the country’s prison population did not
increase in 2011. In 2012 , the United States saw the first decline in its prison population in
decades. I spent a lot of time in California that year supporting ballot initiatives and was
encouraged that voters decided, by a huge margin, to end the state’s “three strikes” law that
imposed mandatory sentences on nonviolent offenders. The initiative won majority support in
every county in the state. California voters also came very close to banning the death penalty;
the ballot initiative lost by only a couple of percentage points. Almost banning the death
penalty through a popular referendum in an American state would have been unimaginable
just a few years earlier.
We were able to finally launch the race and poverty initiative I’d long been hoping to start
at EJI. For years I’d wanted to implement a project to change the way we talk about racial
history and contextualize contemporary race issues. We published a racial history calendar
for 2013 and 2014. We started working with poor children and families in Black Belt counties
across the South. We brought hundreds of high school students to our office for supplemental
education and discussion about rights and justice. Also, we worked on reports and materials
that seek to deepen the national conversation about the legacy of slavery and lynching and
our nation’s history of racial injustice.
I found the new race and poverty work extremely energizing. It closely connected to our
work on criminal justice issues; I believe that so much of our worst thinking about justice is
steeped in the myths of racial difference that still plague us. I believe that there are four
institutions in American history that have shaped our approach to race and justice but remain
poorly understood. The first, of course, is slavery. This was followed by the reign of terror
that shaped the lives of people of color following the collapse of Reconstruction until World
War II. Older people of color in the South would occasionally come up to me after speeches to
complain about how antagonized they feel when they hear news commentators talking about
how we were dealing with domestic terrorism for the first time in the United States after the
9 / 11 attacks.
An older African American man once said to me, “You make them stop saying that! We
grew up with terrorism all the time. The police, the Klan, anybody who was white could
terrorize you. We had to worry about bombings and lynchings, racial violence of all kinds.”
The racial terrorism of lynching in many ways created the modern death penalty. America’s
embrace of speedy executions was, in part, an attempt to redirect the violent energies of
lynching while assuring white southerners that black men would still pay the ultimate price.
Convict leasing was introduced at the end of the nineteenth century to criminalize former
slaves and convict them of nonsensical offenses so that freed men, women, and children could
be “leased” to businesses and effectively forced back into slave labor. Private industries
throughout the country made millions of dollars with free convict labor, while thousands of
African Americans died in horrific work conditions. The practice of re-enslavement was so
widespread in some states that it was characterized in a Pulitzer Prize–winning book by
Douglas Blackmon as Slavery by Another Name. But the practice is not well known to most
Americans.
During the terror era there were hundreds of ways in which people of color could commit a
social transgression or offend someone that might cost them their lives. Racial terror and the