Now, 80 years later, Mississippi has already made a “clear, sharp, unmistakable discrimination,” as if it had “chosen a particular race or nationality for oppressive treatment,” which the court specifically dismissed and condemned in Skinner..
What today’s Supreme Court strategically overlooks, legal history reminds us with astonishing clarity, specifically the appalling practices of American slavery, including the persecution, kidnapping, restraint, coercion, rape, and torture of black women and girls. In a commentary reprinted in The New York Times on January 18, 1860, slavery was described as an undertaking that “treated a Black person as a movable thing,” with as little respect for marital ties as if it were an animal. is. , is a moral prohibition. ”
Such observations were hardly unique or rare; the Library of Congress offers a comprehensive collection of newspapers, almanacs, daguerreotypes, illustrations, and other materials that make up the “African-American Mosaic: Influence of Prominent Abolitionists.” Laws dating back to the 1600s expose the sexual depravity and inhumanity of American slavery. In 1662, the Virginia Grand Assembly passed one of its first “slave laws” to settle this point, saying, “Since there was doubt as to whether children found by an Englishman on a Negro woman should be enslaved or free be, therefore, instituted and declared by this present Great Assembly, that all children born in this land will be kept as slaves or free only according to the condition of the mother. ”
Thomas Jefferson kept abundant receipts and documents related to the births of addicted children at his Monticello plantation, including those that were eventually discovered to be his own. Not surprisingly, the forced sexual and reproductive serviceability of black girls and women was at the heart of the abolition of slavery and involuntary serviceability in the 13th Amendment. Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner, who led the effort to ban slavery and implement the 13th Amendment, was nearly beaten to death in the halls of Congress two days after delivering a speech condemning the culture of sexuality violence that dominated slavery included.
Black women also spoke out about their reproductive slavery. Sojourner Truth begged the crowd of men and women gathered at the Women’s Convention in Akron, Ohio, in 1851 in her haunting speech known as “Is’t I a Woman.” to understand the seriousness and depravity of American slavery on black women’s reproductive autonomy and privacy. Reported by newspapers and recorded by history, me. Truth said she gave birth to 13 children and saw almost everyone being snatched from her arms, with no appeal to the law or courts. Was she not also a woman? Through the stories of those who gathered, including the famous feminist abolitionist Frances Gage, the room stood still and then burst into applause.
Similarly, in “Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl,” published in 1861, Harriet Jacobs describes the herculean efforts made to avoid the inevitable sexual assault and rape by her prisoner. She wrote, “I saw a man forty years of age transgressing the most sacred commandments of nature daily. He told me I was his property; that I should be subject to his will in all things.”