Echoes of slavery—and the white supremacy that fueled it—continue to reverberate through the U.S. criminal legal system.
The 13th Amendment may have outlawed the enslavement of Black people, but the United States continues to devise new ways to uphold the racist hierarchies that slavery was founded on and to restrict the freedom of the descendants of enslaved people.
Today, we see alarming echoes of the Reconstruction Era, when unjust laws prevented emancipated enslaved people from voting and exercising their power and influence as citizens of a democracy.