Slavery After Slavery
Revealing the Legacy of Forced Child Apprenticeships on Black Families, from Emancipation to the Present
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
An acclaimed historian narrates the stories of newly emancipated children who were re-enslaved by white masters through apprenticeships and their parents fights to free them
While the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, white southerners established a system of apprenticeship after the Civil War that entrapped Black children and their families, leading to undue hardships for generations to come. In Slavery After Slavery, historian Mary Frances Berry traces the stories behind individual cases from southern supreme courts to demonstrate how formerly enslaved families and their descendants were systemically injured through white supremacist practices, perpetuated by the legal system.
By filling in the family trees of formerly enslaved people to their descendants, Berry documents the intergenerational harm they experienced. The resulting damage of trafficking Black children through apprenticeship laws has been a largely overlooked source of inequality, yet these cases provide specific examples of the kind of economic and physical harm Black families have endured.
Slavery After Slavery tells individual stories, but the fates of their descendants tell our collective American story—contributing powerfully to a case for reparations and restorative justice.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this eye-opening and disturbing account, historian Berry (History Teaches Us to Resist) reveals that Black children were routinely "trafficked" by white Southerners via so-called apprenticeships following the Civil War. Through archival sleuthing, she uncovers a pattern of court cases in which Black parents tried to retrieve children stolen by wealthy whites, like the Alabama couple Nathan and Jenney Cox, who in 1865 lost five of their children—ages ranging from three to 16—to Francis Jones, their former enslaver. Jones—whom Berry characterizes as wanting "to keep his unpaid laborers as long as possible"—had applied to a court to indenture the children on the grounds that their parents could not support them, and that by granting his application the county would be spared the cost of their upkeep. The judge, a former Confederate officer, ruled in his favor, rejecting Nathan and Jenney's protests that they were able to provide for their family. Other chapters recount similarly harrowing episodes that highlight additional cudgels used by the courts to traffic Black children, like how marriages that Black people had entered into during slavery were not considered legal, making their children legally orphans. Tracing the impact such forced separations had on later generations of these same families, Berry makes a forceful case for reparations. The result is a persuasive look at how the material harms of racism are still quantifiable today.
