When Did Slavery End?

In America this is a sensitive question, the answer to which could garner a lot of criticism, anger and indignation. Even the question when slavery began is known to have the same effect; just look at the backlash following the New York Times' 1619 Project. This post will try to shed some light on the subject.

For me personally, and you'll know this if you're a regular visitor, slavery never ended at all. The Constitution of the United States, ratified in 1788, has nothing to say on the subject, and the 1865 Thirteenth Amendment, the one that officially ended slavery, made an exception for convicted criminals; prison labor is in fact slave labor. The text says: " Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." See? No slavery except as punishment.

The Thirteenth Amendment came into effect in the same year America's civil war ended, which may be the most direct proof that this war was fought over the abolition of slavery. Many conservatives will claim the war was about state's rights, but then again, the eleven southern Confederate States of America wanted the right to keep slavery independent from the United States of America; no matter what angle you want to approach this from, ultimately the main point of contention was the right to own slaves. And although many will answer 1865 when asked the question in the title, it's that little exception in the Thirteenth Amendment that guaranteed the continued existence of slavery for many decades after that.

Yes, slavery continued to exist, it was just given another name: "debt peonage, "debt slavery" or "debt bondage." Southern states issued a slew of new laws that on paper were color-blind, but in practice were almost exclusively targeted at black Americans. Most egregious among these was the felony of "vagrancy" which made it a crime to be homeless or unemployed and forced into employment any person who appeared to be unemployed or homeless. There were many of these laws with the aim, not to put convicted blacks in prison, but to put them to work. If a black man was convicted, for example, for having sexual relations with a white woman, the punishment was usually to pay a fine, one that the convict could never pay. What would then happen is that a white farmer would pay that fine placing a debt on the convict that had to be paid through labor.

A side effect was that blacks statistically became the most criminally inclined section of the population, even in the northern states; these southern laws, known as Black Codes are the origin of the reputation of "criminal blacks" which persists to this day;

The best known of them were passed in 1865 and 1866 by Southern states, after the American Civil War, in order to restrict African Americans' freedom, and to compel them to work for low wages.
_{source: Wikipedia}

Combine that with debt bondage, and you can replace "low wages" with "no wages" or slavery. Would you believe that the last slave working under debt bondage to be given his freedom was a slave until 1942, only two months before America's current president Joe Biden was born? And only a couple of decades later the "war on drugs" started under Nixon, flooding American prisons with blacks, made worse by the 1994 Criminal Justice Act. I've only touched on a few critical points, but I'd like you to watch the below linked video; it paints a history of the relation between the American government, its people and African Americans that's not often heard and explains how and why there's still such a big social and economical gap between black and white America.

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