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This shows the injustice in society because more black people have been killed in the past years and the number of black people may increase due to being put to death,shot and murdered by police and other people in there community.

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In 2010 he was accused of stealing a backpack and was taken to Rikers Island (toughest prison) and in solitary for two years with no trial. In 2015 he commited suicide of what he went through.

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It's been eight years since the state executed anyone. Jeffrey Motts, the last person executed in South Carolina, died by lethal injection in May 2011 for killing his cellmate in 2005. some states havent executed prisoners in awhile, and not everyone in death row are guilty.

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This shows the injustice in society because more black people have been killed in the past years and the number of black people may increase due to being put to death,shot and murdered by police and other people in there community.

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https://inequality.stanford.edu/publications/20-facts-about-us-inequality-everyone-should-know

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Teenage Death Row Prisoner Who Survived His Own Execution

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Bryan Stevenson's Equal Justice Initiative

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Bryan Stevenson's Equal Justice Initiative

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Mr. Stevenson has argued and won multiple cases at the United States Supreme Court, including a 2019 ruling protecting condemned prisoners who suffer from dementia and a landmark 2012 ruling that banned mandatory life-imprisonment-without-parole sentences for all children 17 or younger. Mr. Stevenson and his staff have won reversals, relief, or release from prison for over 135 wrongly condemned prisoners on death row and won relief for hundreds of others wrongly convicted or unfairly sentenced. https://eji.org/bryan-stevenson/

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Keith Tharpe - an African American sentenced to death 29 years ago by a jury that included a member who called him the "N-word" and doubted whether "Black people even have souls"- died on Georgia's death row January 24, 2020. He was 61 years old. In a press statement, his lawyers from the Georgia Death Penalty Resource Center said he had been suffering from cancer and likely died of complications from the disease.

Tharpe challenged his death sentence after Barney Gattie, a juror in his case, told defense investigators and then signed an affidavit saying that there were "two types of black people: 1. Black folks and 2. Ni**ers." Tharpe, Gattie said, "wasn't in the 'good' black folks category [and] should get the electric chair for what he did." Gattie's affidavit also said "[s]ome of the jurors voted for death because they felt Tharpe should be an example to other blacks who kill blacks," but denied that race had influenced his own vote.

Tharpe argued that Gattie's presence on the jury had denied him a sentencing trial by an impartial jury. However, the Georgia state and lower federal courts declined to review his challenge based upon a state-court rule prohibiting courts from considering evidence questioning why jurors reached their verdict. Subsequently, in 2017, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Peña-Rodriguez v. Colorado, declaring that state rules against impeaching a jury verdict cannot insulate a juror's overt expressions of racial bias from judicial review.

Shortly thereafter, Tharpe again raised his jury discrimination claim. As his September 2017 execution date approached, the Georgia Supreme Court and the U.S Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit both denied his request. On September 26, 2017, three hours after his execution was scheduled to start, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a stay based upon his federal appeal. On January 8, 2018, the Court granted Tharpe's petition for certiorari and vacated the judgment of the Eleventh Circuit. The Court said the fact that Gattie had never retracted his "remarkable affidavit" strongly suggested that "Tharpe's race affected Gattie's vote for a death verdict."

The Court returned the case to the Eleventh Circuit for further consideration. Less than three months later, however, the circuit court again refused on procedural grounds to consider the issue. The Georgia Supreme Court also declined to revisit the issue and the U.S. Supreme Court turned down Tharpe's second petition to review his claim.

Following Tharpe's death, Marcia Widder, one of the Georgia Resource Center lawyers who represented Tharpe in his appeals, said that "the courts' failure to confront the racism tainting Mr. Tharpe's death sentence remains a stain on the judicial system and calls for increased efforts to eradicate the poison of racism in our criminal courts."

The racial bias in Tharpe's case was not the only issue that brought the fairness of his proceedings into question. Tharpe's case rocketed through the state courts, with his death sentence imposed only three months after his offense. In that compressed trial schedule, Tharpe's jury never learned that he had an IQ measured in the 60s, within the range for him to be considered intellectually disabled. In 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled it is unconstitutional to execute individuals with intellectual disability.

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man sentenced to death by juror who questioned if ‘black people even have souls’ dies on georgia’s death row

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Man Sentenced to Death By Juror Who Questioned if 'Black People Even Have Souls' Dies on Georgia's Death Row

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In a press statement, his lawyers from the Georgia Death Penalty Resource Center said he had been suffering from cancer and likely died of complications from the disease.Tharpe challenged his death sentence after Barney Gattie, a juror in his case, told defense investigators and then signed an...

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"Acknowledging How Racial Bigotry Has Disrupted So Many Lives"

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"Acknowledging How Racial Bigotry Has Disrupted So Many Lives"

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https://eji.org/news/acknowledging-how-racial-bigotry-has-disrupted-so-many-lives/

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https://eji.org/issues/wrongful-convictions/

https://eji.org/issues/prison-conditions/

https://eji.org/issues/death-penalty/
https://eji.org/issues/children-in-prison/

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When I arrived at Central Juvenile Hall, I was expecting guards, watch towers, basically the setting of the Shawshank Redemption. I was told to wait in a small lobby room, which separated the prison from the outside world. While waiting, I saw a few inmates getting on a bus. They wore handcuffs and carried brown paper bags behind their backs. I wondered what these kids did. I looked at each one, trying to guess his crime. "Maybe he robbed a store, maybe he killed somebody, maybe he was selling drugs." Some people might ask, why would I want to write a story about juveniles in prison? Why would anyone want to read what these criminals have to say? Who cares? It's easy to judge juvenile criminals as bad kids, but not so easy when you're looking into the eyes of a teenager who is going to spend life in jail.

I know there are victims of violent crimes whose voices go unheard. But recognize that some people who commit crimes have many reasons behind their actions. It's a cycle. This is what happens to kids who didn't have direction or anybody who cared, who had to learn about life the hard way. They were brought up this way so that's how they're going to treat others. Sometimes, it's okay to give a voice to the "villains." They have been victims too.

Inside Juvenile Hall, Javier Stauring, the Catholic chaplain, was there to guide me through the facility and be present during the interviews. We sat down on a bench in the middle of the yard. He told me that high-risk offenders wore orange jumpsuits, and those wearing gray and yellow suits were minor offenders or those who violated their probation. The four teens I was going to interview were all high-risk offenders. Out of 550 inmates in Juvenile Hall, 180 were being tried in adult court, Javier said. He explained that I couldn't ask any questions about their crimes, use their full names or take pictures of their faces because they were minors and their cases were pending.

While we sat talking, a few teens walked by with a guard, their heads facing the ground and their hands behind their backs. I watched them walk. Then one of them turned to look at me, and I turned my head to avoid eye contact. I felt that he didn't want to be looked at. I wouldn't want someone who was free looking at me walking around in prison. I felt uncomfortable that day, like I didn't have any clue what these kids had been through. Did I feel sorry for them? Not right away. I was surprised by the innocence of their faces, like they didn't belong there. I was really shocked when I saw a boy who looked like he was about 10 walking in a line with other kids, wearing handcuffs. I also felt glad that my life didn't take the same road as these kids' lives had.

Then I met the four teens and I found out just how bad their situations were. Even though I had prepared a list of questions, I didn't know what to expect. Would they cry? Would they be angry? Though none of the four had an emotional outburst, some questions during the interview caused them to pause and try to hold in their emotions while thinking about painful memories.

When I first met the two girls, Mayra and Elizabeth, I was expecting two huge girls, bigger than me, with short hair and tattoos. But two petite, feminine and pretty girls walked in ... What? What could they have done, and to be wearing orange suits at that? Yet both were smiling and saying hello to me.

And when I met the two guys, they seemed calm and laid back. Though they were the same age as me, they seemed older in their ways. They had experienced a lot and you could see it in the way they carried themselves. Elizabeth was more to herself, the day-dreaming type; Mayra was tougher, more independent; Mark was heavy in size, but you could see the sensitivity in his eyes; and David was thoughtful, no doubt.

All four had drifted into a negative lifestyle at a young age. It seemed as if it was impossible for them to overcome their problems. The two girls said they had been sexually and physically abused. Both said that leaving home at a young age was the only thing they could do to save themselves from future torment. The two guys, however, had wanted that wild lifestyle. Both confessed to having been ignorant and making bad choices. What I learned from talking with them is that there are some things we have no control over-our families, where we live and who we know. It was simple for me to see that all four kids had no control over their lives. All they knew was what made them feel better at the moment.

There are a lot of negative aspects about prison, but some positive things can come out of being locked up. David even said, "I'm glad I'm in prison, or else I'd still be out there [getting into trouble]."

Prison, for many out of control teens, is stopping them in their tracks so they don't go further with a criminal and violent life. Prison allows these teens to stop and think. David told me that his time in prison has allowed him to figure out that he's a "really cool person."

Teens should get a chance to change

Even though they may take responsibility now for their actions and want to change their lives, they still have to serve their time. That's the way our system is. I know they have a debt to pay to society, but why doesn't our system allow young people to redeem themselves? I don't think our judiciary system deals well with people once they are in the system. Okay, they're in prison, now what? Mayra is only 17, what can we expect her to do with a life sentence, sit in her cell and rot? I don't think the system expects or encourages kids to change their lives around. But I can't complain too much because prison is keeping criminals off the streets and away from my family and me.

Talking to these kids, I realized they had many problems growing up. Some had no friends at all, and many have dysfunctional families. This doesn't excuse the crimes they committed, but it helps explain why.

After one day at a prison, I see that in prison, it's just you and time. Too much time for the kids I met that day. That time in prison is time they wish they had to spend with their friends and family. Time they wish they had to go on a date, to play sports, to go to school, to watch television, to lay down on their own beds, to walk free, to laugh and have a good time again. It's time spent feeling regret for their past actions. No matter how much they regret the past, they will have to finish growing up in adult prison.

'I was a chronic runaway'
'Can I get a second chance in life?'
'I carry my own weight'
'At night when nobody sees you, you cry'

Mayra, 17, serving life sentence

Were you ever into school?
I dropped out of school when I was 13, seventh grade. Because my family didn't have enough money and the rest of the girls, I used to see them every day with different kinds of clothes. I used to be with the same clothes almost every day you know. It used to hurt me seeing them have everything. So that's when I dropped out.

Did your parents try to discipline you?
I had a lot of discipline, 'cuz my dad is coming from Mexico. You know the whips for the horses, he would hit us with those. With anything he could find he hit us with until my back would be bloody. When I was in Mexico, he hang me from a tree and hang me there for one hour 'cuz I think I stole a candy. He was abusive to my mother. My dad used to leave black eyes on her, and when the cops came and she would cover it with her hair. That's one thing, it didn't work. 'Cuz that makes you angrier. After he used to hit me or whip me, he would tell me don't cry, why you crying, I'm gonna hit you harder, I ain't hitting you hard. I had to hold it in, I couldn't cry because he'd hit me more. So I had to hold my tears in and it built up you know.

David, 18, awaiting sentencing
Was your life exciting before you came in here?

I was living in the fast lane and I didn't have no time to think. Since I been off drugs I noticed I'm a real good person. I just regret those "exciting days."
I think of me now as a man. I had to grow up early. It's sad I did that to myself but I did. But I can't look at the past. As far as me getting locked up, I'm happy. If I didn't get locked up I would have kept going, I would have lost all my years.
I don't think nobody controls my fate. God controls my fate. If I get a long time, it's 'cuz I got to learn something. And if I go home it means I'm ready. God has control. And I'm very happy he has control.
How are you preparing for adult prison?

Instead of you getting ready for them, how about them getting ready for you? Be confident in yourself. Be something different. You gotta be a man of your own path.
I got something to say. It's still itching in my brain. It bothers me when people say it's easy in here. I go through a lot of pain. I sit and think about the things I done, and I sit there and cry. For people who say this is easy, they don't know how much pain we go through. I heard people down the hall from where I sleep saying they rather die than go through this. Some people are stronger than others.

David is awaiting his sentence in Central Juvenile Hall.

Mark, 17, serving 13-year sentence
Have you been in here before?
Two times before. [When I was arrested] I was just trying to figure out what was going on. I was like 'Man, this is a bad dream.' I was just waiting to wake up. Ain't waked up yet.

Was your life exciting before you came in here?
Exciting like I was always watching my back? Or the parties? Robbing and stealing. It was like an adventure, yeah. But it was an adventure going nowhere.

What's a typical day here like?
Wake up, wash up. Same thing, different day. That's how it is.

What were you doing when you were free?
I was playing football. I'm mad missing out my teenage days. I regret what I did, and it's like 'Damn.' If I live in the past, that's where I'm gonna stay, in the past. Damn, it'd be fun [if I was free]. It's the new millennium. I haven't even been on a date, know what I'm saying. I ain't gonna see none of that. Don't grow up too fast, 'cuz you're gonna be mad if you do.

Did your parents try to discipline you?
I'm stubborn, I know I'm stubborn. My parents they did try to discipline me but I was too wild. It was like I couldn't be tamed at the time.

Do you have any talents?
I like to rap. I can write. (He writes plays with theater group called Usual Suspects.) Writing is one of my skills. Give me a beat and I can freestyle for you right now.

How does your family deal with you being locked up?
I know they don't like me being in here but I been in here before. When I hit 13 that was when I really stepped up the criminal ladder. It was the adrenaline rush and all that and I didn't think about my family. I try to let them know it's gonna be alright. It affects my family a lot. Even when I had a bad day I still smile. I just try to make them feel good when they're here.

How does it feel not to control your fate?
Dang, somebody else got control my life. I should be believing in God more. I should but I really started to lose faith. No ... well, I didn't lose it, I just didn't know where to put my faith. If I walk into court one day and the judge had a bad weekend, his wife trippin' on him or something, he could take it out on me. I expect the unexpected when I go in the courtroom. My fate is sealed already but my fate isn't in the court's hand, it's in my hand. Fate really has to do with what you feel inside than what people make of you. If God wants me to be in jail, it must be I got some kind of gift that God wants me to spit to other cats in here.

What do you think about Prop. 21?
Why should I walk around with a label on me because I made a mistake when I was young? Can I get a second chance in life? When you go to the pen, you don't do nothing. All you do is time, get contraband, learn to hate somebody. I want to be a positive person, somebody that helps somebody, somebody who helps the community.
Prop. 21, it's like a spear in this whole community's heart. My little brother was sitting in a car, somebody was shot, and my brother got to do adult time for that. They taking our rights away. You putting little kids in adult facilities, that's forcing them to grow up already. This little kid, he did this crime right here, but they don't see this as his first time doing it. [Little kids out there won't be deterred by longer sentences]... the homie got 25 years to life, they look up to that. I don't know why but they do. "He gonna ride it out, he's a rider."
Society's a fool if they don't see that. Little kid, he has so much to prove. Them older hounds-"I ain't got nothing, I got life. Let me go and send this kid up the river too." That little kid, he's believing the hype. "You want me to shank him, okay, I'm gonna do that, go in the hole, go to Pelican Bay, don't see my momma." Little kid, he should be put in a program. When you send them to the pen all you making is a better criminal.

Mark is serving 13 years in L.A. County Men's Jail.

Elizabeth, 18, awaiting sentencing
What was it like when you got arrested?
Really? I was high. So all kinds of things were going through my mind. Just like shock. I couldn't even cry. I just sat down quiet.

Was being a troublemaker exciting?
It was for me, back then, just my lifestyle.
When I was around fifth grade. My mom put me in a placement because I was running away. I kept running away. I was a chronic runaway. They'd put me somewhere and I'd run away from it.
I had, uh, problems at home (softly) ... and um, out of sheer boredom I guess. Mostly neglect. Well, I'd been molested for years. Finally I told my grandmother about it. That it was my stepfather. She called the cops and I ran away and right before he was supposed to go to court he shot himself in the head. My sister had a brain tumor and my mom was always busy at the hospital. We had to move into this tiny duplex and I was by myself all day. I was 11 or 12. It's really boring in Texas. That's where I'm from-Austin, Texas.
One day I'd just go out to have fun and I wouldn't go home the next day. It kept on escalating. I'd spend a day in jail and keep on going. My mom had a boyfriend, and he used to physically abuse my sister. I tried to intervene one day and he grabbed me by my neck. I started talking s-- outside the house, just yelling at him and he came out with a knife. So I really had to run. This lady called the cops and what did they do? They arrested me. They arrested me on a runaway charge. Nothing happened to him.
My mom made me seem like this bad kid. I just wanna go and have some fun. My mom didn't have very much money, and if you don't have clothes, you're an outcast [at school]. I had good grades, all A's and stuff like that, but I just couldn't take being in school so I dropped out.
How do you feel compared to the average teen?
I feel like a totally different species. I feel older actually, 'cuz I've seen so much. They don't even know, they're in school, they have their proms, and they're going to college. And I just can't relate. I feel I can't even hang out with them, they're too different.

Did your parents try to discipline you?
My mom's form of discipline was just to get rid of me. It makes me mad today. She paid my brother to kick my a- for leaving, you know, paid him. He didn't want to but he did it for the money. It just made me more mad and I ran away again.

What do you think your parents could have done that would have helped?
If my mom had set me aside and talked to me, asked me what is it you want, why are you running away. That would have helped me.

What do you say to people who think Juvenile Hall is easy, watching TV all day or something?
We rarely ever get to listen to the radio at all. TV, we get only one hour a day. We don't get the news so we don't know what's going on in the world. TV and radio, that's nice to have but you wouldn't want to sit there and watch TV all day, that's not a luxury. [Juvenile Hall is] really dirty to me. The girls, I wasn't scared of them, because I'd been living on the street all over so I wasn't scared of anything, especially not some little girls.

How does it feel to lose your freedom?
It hurts more than any kind of punch, slap, anything that was ever done to me. Having my freedom taken away is the worst thing that ever happened to me. It's not the fact I'm in jail that I'm scared. For a while I didn't know when I was gonna get out. It felt like the whole world was going on without me, and I was stuck. I have a little sister born after I started running away and I don't even know her. My family came out twice this year. You have special visits, half an hour. For the past year, I've seen someone I know from the outside for one hour, that's it. It's pretty hard being out here all by yourself. I can see what they're doing to us. How kids are sent to jail when they just need a slap on the head or something. I used to really really hate the cops. Hate 'em, hate 'em. I still don't approve of what they're doing but I understand. I used to hate other people's lifestyle. Now I know it's different people and I don't hate them anymore. I can associate with different people. I'm a lot more open-minded, don't hate so quickly, don't judge so quickly.

Elizabeth is awaiting her sentence in Central Juvenile Hall.

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Behind bars: Four teens in prison tell their stories

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When I arrived at Central Juvenile Hall, I was expecting guards, watch towers, basically the setting of the Shawshank Redemption. I was told to wait in a small lobby room, which separated the prison from the outside world. While waiting, I saw a few inmates getting on a bus.

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America is the only Western Country to use the Death Penalty

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America is the only Western Country to use the Death Penalty

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The US is the only Western country to use the death penalty. Behind China, it executes the greatest number of people each year. Consider why this might be. What about America’s history or culture has allowed for this?

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How did the war affect Herb? What do you think should have happened to him? Death penalty? Hospital? Life in prison? Why?

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https://www.cnn.com/2013/07/19/us/death-penalty-fast-facts/index.html

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A year ago today, a white police officer shot and killed a black teenager in a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri, catalyzing a firestorm of protests and re-animating national conversations on issues of race, policing, and violence in the US.

Michael Brown's bleeding corpse was subsequently left facedown in the middle of the road for four hours on the afternoon on August 9, 2014 - exposed to the midday summer sun and eyes of residents, a few of whom snapped cellphone images that would eventually spread across social media, the nation, and the world. At Brown's funeral, two weeks later, the Reverend Al Sharpton remarked that the 19-year-old was left laying in Canfield drive like his "life... didn't matter" - an observation that protesters set out to disprove when they took to the streets en masse over several months to declare that Brown's and all "black lives matter."

The protests, die-ins, and marches proceeded throughout the winter and into what some have called a "Black Spring" - a new civil rights movement led by a by a social media-wielding youth contingent. Occasionally, as more incidences of police killings came to light, the actions broke out in violence in Ferguson and in Baltimore, where 25-year-old Freddie Gray's spine was crushed while in police custody in April.

Since then, the rallies for justice have not abated, and neither have the number of deaths at the hands of police. At least 1,083 Americans have been killed by cop since August 9, 2014, according to comprehensive research and data collected by VICE News - an average of nearly three people a day.
Related: Love the Cops? That Might Depend on Where You Live
While the bulk of those killed from August 2014 to August 2015 were white, black people per population were more than twice as likely to be killed by cops than any other race, the data showed. African Americans are also more than three times as likely to be killed by police than white people, according to the statistics.

Brown's death was a seminal moment in arousing US consciousness of structural racial bias in police departments around the country, and the grand jury's decision three months later not to indict Darren Wilson, the Ferguson police officer who killed him, proved to many that that bias permeates every facet of the criminal justice system.
Related: The DHS Planned to 'Plug' Federal Officers Into the Ferguson Protests, Documents Show
"We need to recognize that the situation in Ferguson speaks to broader challenges that we still face as a nation," President Barack Obama acknowledged at a press conference immediately after the Ferguson grand jury decision in November. "In too many parts of this country a deep distrust exists between law enforcement and communities of color. Some of this is the result of the legacy of racial discrimination in this country."
Related: Want to Stop Crime? Legalize Drugs, Says Police Organization
Since Brown's death, there have been signs of progress. In the wake of the nationwide protests that gave birth to the Black Lives Matter movement, roughly 24 states have instituted at least 40 new laws or policies in place to stem officer-perpetrated violence and killings. In some cities, police departments have outfitted officers with bodycams to increase accountability, while in others, cops have been trained in impartial and community-based policing.
Related: Talking Heads: A Look Back at the Violence in Ferguson
The fast indictments of the cop who shot and killed Cincinnati man Sam Dubose last month, and of the six Baltimore officers involved in Freddie Gray's death, were also welcomed by activists across the country. But in the data gleaned on civilian deaths by police in the last 12 months, VICE News came across only 22 cases where officers were indicted or charged with crimes for killing citizens, while a significant number more - at least 257 deaths - had been either ruled an accident or investigators found the officers were justified in their use of fatal force. The majority of incidences are still under investigation.

Change has also been sluggish in St. Louis and the surrounding suburbs. After months of demonstrations, local authorities are only now working with rights groups to set up a Civilian Oversight Board that would independently investigate police misconduct. Ferguson has been slow to address a scathing Department of Justice (DoJ) report released in March, which found evidence of pervasive racial bias and excessive violent practices within the Ferguson Police Department (FPD). Negotiations for changes to the FPD in light of the report have largely been hashed out behind closed doors despite activist efforts to insert a "civilian" lawyer into the consultations, according to the Organization for Black Struggle (OBS), a group that has been working to end police violence for nearly a decade.

At a recent press conference last month, Ferguson's mayor announced the hiring of interim police chief Andre Anderson - the city's first-ever black chief - and the future rollout of bodycams for all officers in the department, but gave no timeline for the deployment of the officer-mounted cameras. A year after Brown's death, the FPD remains disproportionately white. Only four out of 54 officers are black in a community that is more than 65 percent African American.
Related: The Strange Case of Darren Wilson's Mysterious Disappearing Duty Belt

Tory Russell, co-founder of Hands Up United, a Ferguson-based social justice nonprofit set up in the wake of Brown's death, told VICE News that the response to calls for accountability have been lethargic and lukewarm in the city.
Related: Obama Outlines Criminal Justice Reform Plan After Year of Police Killings and Protests
"On the police side there's been zero accountability," Russell said from the sidelines of a peaceful march led by Brown's father, Michael Brown Sr., in St. Louis on Saturday. Hands Up United has come together with a body of other groups to coordinate four days of events and civil disobedience actions, which began Friday. Organizers have dubbed it the "Ferguson Uprising Commemoration Weekend."
Follow Liz Fields on Twitter: VICE News' Aliya Iftikhar and Tess Owen conducted the research for this report. Infographics by Sarah MacReading. @lianzifields
"All that DoJ report did was put our grievances and our pain on paper," Russell said, adding that he found VICE News' figures on the number of people killed by police "just staggering."

"If any other place [outside the US] were killing three of their citizens a day, America would go over there and go rescue them," he said. "It's scary - with so much technology and money - that the government can't even collect the data on how many people its police are killing every year."

Despite Obama's recent announced reforms to the country's criminal justice system across America's "communities, courtrooms, and cellblocks," many civil rights groups are calling for even greater pushes from the nation's leaders to bring about police accountability and prosecutorial justice.

"It's high time our national leaders - President Obama and Attorney General Lynch - match the courage of everyday people risking their life and liberty to end discriminatory policing," Rashad Robinson, executive director of ColorOfChange.org, said in a statement Friday. "Why is there still no national database on police use of force? Why are indictments of those responsible for the tragic deaths of victims like Sandra Bland still so rare?"

Thousands will attend concerts, prayer services, silent marches, and a day of civil disobedience in Brown's memory this weekend, with similar actions in at least 32 states across America, Russell told VICE News.

The coalition of organizing groups, which includes the Don't Shoot Coalition and the Organization for Black Struggle, have also enlisted activists across the world, and expect people to rally in solidarity in the UK, France, South Africa, Brazil, the Netherlands, and elsewhere.

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Police Have Killed at Least 1,083 Americans Since Michael Brown's Death

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A year ago today, a white police officer shot and killed a black teenager in a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri, catalyzing a firestorm of protests and re-animating national conversations on issues of race, policing, and violence in the US.

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As legal advocates continue to fight for national abolition and argue that the death penalty is unconstitutional, many states have responded to concerns about the unreliablility and excessive cost of the death penalty by ending or suspending capital punishment. Colorado, Washington, Pennsylvania, and Oregon have moratoriums on the death penalty.

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(Washington, DC) - The enormous prison population in the United States partly reflects harsh sentencing practices contrary to international law, Human Rights Watch said today in its World Report 2013. The sentencing practices include disproportionately long prison terms, mandatory sentencing without parole, and treating youth offenders as adults. The US maintains the world's largest incarcerated population, at 1.6 million, and its highest per capita incarceration rate.

Human Rights Watch research in 2012 found that the massive overincarceration includes a growing number of elderly people whom prisons are ill-equipped to handle, and an estimated 93,000 youth under age 18 in adult jails and another 2,200 in adult prisons. Hundreds of children are subjected to solitary confinement. Racial and ethnic minorities remain disproportionately represented in the prison population.

"The United States has shown little interest in tackling abusive practices that have contributed to the country's huge prison population," said Maria McFarland, deputy US program director at Human Rights Watch. "Unfortunately, it is society's most vulnerable - racial and ethnic minorities, low-income people, immigrants, children, and the elderly - who are most likely to suffer from injustices in the criminal justice system."

In its 665-page report, Human Rights Watch assessed progress on human rights during the past year in more than 90 countries, including an analysis of the aftermath of the Arab Spring. The willingness of new governments to respect rights will determine whether the Arab Spring gives birth to genuine democracy or simply spawns authoritarianism in new clothes, Human Rights Watch said.

The World Report chapter on the United States covers human rights developments related to US criminal justice and immigration, as well as issues related to health, labor, and the rights of women, children, people with disabilities, and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. It also addresses abuses related to the United States' deeply flawed counterterrorism policies.

Human rights developments within the United States over the past year include:

* Connecticut joined 16 other states and the District of Columbia in abolishing the death penalty. However, 33 states continue to allow it;

* In May, the US Department of Justice issued final standards under the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) to detect, prevent, and punish prison rape. The standards are immediately binding on all Justice Department facilities;

* In fiscal year 2012, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deported a record 396,906 non-citizens. A dramatic increase in federal prosecutions of immigration violations, and in the number of immigrants in detention, has fed a nationwide detention system that includes more than 250 facilities;

* Illegal re-entry into the US has become the most prosecuted federal crime. In 2011, prosecutions for illegal entry and re-entry into the US surpassed 34,000 and 37,000 respectively. Many of those prosecuted for these crimes have minor or no criminal history and have substantial ties to the US;

* The US Senate, in December, failed to ratify the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Sixty-one of the 100 Senators voted in favor, but 66 votes were needed for passage. Several senators have promised to make another attempt to ratify the treaty in early 2013;

* In April, the Labor Department withdrew new regulations proposed in 2011 that would have updated, for the first time in decades, the list of hazardous agricultural tasks prohibited for children under age 16;

* Congress failed to renew the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), the primary federal law providing legal protection and services to victims of domestic and sexual violence. Sexual assaults remained underreported and poorly investigated in many jurisdictions. Certain groups, such as unauthorized migrant farmworkers, face particular challenges to seeking justice;

* In June, the US Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act, which significantly expands many citizens' access to health insurance and medical care;

* HIV infections continued to disproportionately affect minority communities, men who have sex with men, and transgender women. Many states have failed to protect HIV-positive people from discrimination or to provide adequate funds for HIV prevention and care; and

* For the first time anywhere, popular votes in two states and the District of Columbia legalized same-sex marriage. However, federal law continued to bar recognition of same-sex marriage while offering no protection against discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity.

Both the Obama administration and Congress supported abusive counterterrorism laws and policies, including detention without charge at Guantanamo Bay, restrictions on the transfer of detainees held there, and prosecutions in a fundamentally flawed military commission system.

Attacks by US aerial drones were carried out in Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and elsewhere, with important legal questions about the attacks remaining unanswered.

The administration has taken no steps toward accountability for torture and other abuses committed by US officials in the so-called "war on terror," and a Justice Department criminal investigation into detainee abuse concluded without recommending any charges. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence completed a more than 6,000-page report detailing the CIA's rendition, detention, and interrogation program, but has yet to seek the report's declassification so it can be released to the public.

"The Obama administration has a chance in its second term to develop with Congress a real plan for closing Guantanamo and definitively ending abusive counterterrorism practices," McFarland said. "A failure to do so puts Obama at risk of going down in history as the president who made indefinite detention without trial a permanent part of US law."

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(Washington, DC) - The enormous prison population in the United States partly reflects harsh sentencing practices contrary to international law, Human Rights Watch said today in its World Report 2013. The sentencing practices include disproportionately long prison terms, mandatory sentencing without parole, and treating youth offenders as adults.

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How did Bryan use the media as a resource to help his case?

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Charles Manson was white man who killed 35 people and a cult leader. George Stinney Jr was an 14 year old black boy who was wrongfully accused of an murder of 2 white girls in the 40s. His trial ONLY lasted 3 hours and was no evidence against him and was sentence to death right after. 70 years later they found George innocent. It took them years to even think if Charles Manson would go to the electric chair. Never happened they just sentence Charles life in jail.

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David Keaton Florida Conviction: 1971, Charges Dismissed: 1973 On the basis of mistaken identification and coerced confessions, Keaton was sentenced to death for murdering an off-duty deputy sheriff during a robbery. The State Supreme Court reversed the conviction and granted Keaton a new trial...

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https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/policy-issues/race

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Blacks vs. White ratio of unfair treatment.

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Blacks vs. White ratio of unfair treatment.

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The vicious circle of poverty and injustice

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The vicious circle of poverty and injustice

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https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/shine-a-light/vicious-circle-of-poverty-and-injustice/
This article talks about how people who are in poverty are more "vulnerable" to crime

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Black People More Likely to Be Wrongfully Convicted of Murder, Study Shows

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Black People More Likely to Be Wrongfully Convicted of Murder, Study Shows

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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/07/us/wrongful-convictions-race-exoneration.html
Innocent blacks also had to wait disproportionately longer for their names to be cleared than innocent whites.

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https://www.news4jax.com/news/georgia/2020/01/28/a-georgia-death-row-inmate-who-argued-a-racist-juror-voted-for-his-sentence-has-died-attorneys-say/. This Georgia death row inmate argued that a racist juror voted for his death sentence just because of the color of his skin.

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In the American criminal justice system, wealth—not culpability—shapes outcomes. Many people charged with crimes lack the resources to investigate cases or obtain the help they need, leading to wrongful convictions and excessive sentences, even in capital cases. sometimes depending on the money/social status depends on if you can prove your innocence or not.

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That black skin color is born with guilt

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EJI's work with children is focused on providing legal assistance to juveniles condemned to die in prison; challenging the placement of youth in adult jails and prisons, where they face an elevated risk of assault and sexual violence; and challenging the prosecution of very young children as adults.

In the last several years, EJI has won several reforms that aid children caught in the American criminal justice system. As this report outlines, more work remains. EJI currently is seeking to end the adult prosecution of any child under age 14; to end the placement of any juvenile under age 18 in an adult jail or prison; and to abolish life imprisonment without parole and other excessive sentences imposed on children.

Equal Justice Initiative, "All Children Are Children: Challenging Abusive Punishment of Juveniles" (2017).

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All Children Are Children: Challenging Abusive Punishment of Juveniles

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EJI's work with children is focused on providing legal assistance to juveniles condemned to die in prison; challenging the placement of youth in adult jails and prisons, where they face an elevated risk of assault and sexual violence; and challenging the prosecution of very young children as adults.

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When former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd by kneeling on his neck in 2020, the world witnessed the most racist elements of the U.S. criminal legal system on broad display. The uprisings that followed Floyd's death articulated a vision for transforming public safety practices and investments. Almost one year later, Chauvin was convicted for Floyd's death, a rare outcome among law enforcement officers who kill unarmed citizens. The fight for racial justice within the criminal legal system continues, however. The data findings featured in this report epitomize the enormity of the task.

This report details our observations of staggering disparities among Black and Latinx people imprisoned in the United States given their overall representation in the general population. The latest available data regarding people sentenced to state prison reveal that Black Americans are imprisoned at a rate that is roughly five times the rate of white Americans. During the present era of criminal justice reform, not enough emphasis has been focused on ending racial and ethnic disparities systemwide.

Going to prison is a major life-altering event that creates obstacles to building stable lives in the community, such as gaining employment and finding stable and safe housing after release. Imprisonment also reduces lifetime earnings and negatively affects life outcomes among children of incarcerated parents. These are individual-level consequences of imprisonment but there are societal level consequences as well: high levels of imprisonment in communities cause high crime rates and neighborhood deterioration, thus fueling greater disparities. This cycle both individually and societally is felt disproportionately by people who are Black. It is clear that the outcome of mass incarceration today has not occurred by happenstance but has been designed through policies created by a dominant white culture that insists on suppression of others.

At the same time, states have begun to chip away at mass incarceration. Nine states have lowered their prison population by 30% or more in recent years: Alaska, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Alabama, Rhode Island, Vermont, Hawaii, and California. This decline has been accomplished through a mix of reforms to policy and practice that reduce prison admissions as well as lengths of stay in prison. Still, America maintains its distinction as the world leader in its use of incarceration, including more than 1.2 million people held in state prisons around the country.

Truly meaningful reforms to the criminal justice system cannot be accomplished without acknowledgement of its racist underpinnings. Immediate and focused attention on the causes and consequences of racial disparities is required in order to eliminate them. True progress towards a racially just system requires an understanding of the variation in racial and ethnic inequities in imprisonment across states and the policies and day-to-day practices that drive these inequities.

This report documents the rates of incarceration for whites, African Americans, and Latinx individuals, providing racial and ethnic composition as well as rates of disparity for each state. The Sentencing Project has produced state-level estimates twice before and once again finds staggering disproportionalities.

Key findings

1. Black Americans are incarcerated in state prisons at nearly 5 times the rate of white Americans.

2. Nationally, one in 81 Black adults in the U.S. is serving time in state prison. Wisconsin leads the nation in Black imprisonment rates; one of every 36 Black Wisconsinites is in prison.

3. In 12 states, more than half the prison population is Black: Alabama, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Mississippi, New Jersey, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia.

4. Seven states maintain a Black/white disparity larger than 9 to 1: California, Connecticut, Iowa, Maine, Minnesota, New Jersey, and Wisconsin.

5. Latinx individuals are incarcerated in state prisons at a rate that is 1.3 times the incarceration rate of whites. Ethnic disparities are highest in Massachusetts, which reports an ethnic differential of 4.1:1.

Recommendations

1. Eliminate mandatory sentences for all crimes.
Mandatory minimum sentences, habitual offender laws, and mandatory transfer of juveniles to the adult criminal system give prosecutors too much authority while limiting the discretion of impartial judges. These policies contributed to a substantial increase in sentence length and time served in prison, disproportionately imposing unduly harsh sentences on Black and Latinx individuals.

2. Require prospective and retroactive racial impact statements for all criminal statutes.
The Sentencing Project urges states to adopt forecasting estimates that will calculate the impact of proposed crime legislation on different populations in order to minimize or eliminate the racially disparate impacts of certain laws and policies. Several states have passed "racial impact statement" laws. To undo the racial and ethnic disparity resulting from decades of tough-on-crime policies, however, states should also repeal existing racially biased laws and policies. The impact of racial impact laws will be modest at best if they remain only forward looking.

3. Decriminalize low-level drug offenses.
Discontinue arrest and prosecutions for low-level drug offenses which often lead to the accumulation of prior convictions which accumulate disproportionately in communities of color. These convictions generally drive further and deeper involvement in the criminal legal system.

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The Color of Justice: Racial and Ethnic Disparity in State Prisons | The Sentencing Project

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This report details our observations of staggering disparities among Black and Latinx people imprisoned in the United States given their overall representation in the general population. The latest available data regarding people sentenced to state prison reveal that Black Americans are imprisoned at a rate that is roughly five times the rate of white Americans.

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When Delores McQuinn was growing up, her father told her a story about a search for the family's roots.

He said his own father knew the name of the people who had enslaved their family in Virginia, knew where they lived-in the same house and on the same land-in Hanover County, among the rumpled hills north of Richmond.

"My grandfather went to the folks who had owned our family and asked, 'Do you have any documentation about our history during the slave days? We would like to see it, if possible.' The man at the door, who I have to assume was from the slaveholding side, said, 'Sure, we'll give it to you.'

"The man went into his house and came back out with some papers in his hands. Now, whether the papers were trivial or actual plantation records, who knows? But he stood in the door, in front of my grandfather, and lit a match to the papers. 'You want your history?' he said. 'Here it is.' Watching the things burn. 'Take the ashes and get off my land.'

"The intent was to keep that history buried," McQuinn says today. "And I think something like that has happened over and again, symbolically."

McQuinn was raised in Richmond, the capital of Virginia and the former capital of the Confederacy-a city crowded with monuments to the Old South. She is a politician now, elected to the city council in the late 1990s and to the Virginia House of Delegates in 2009. One of her proudest accomplishments in politics, she says, has been to throw new light on an alternate history.

For example, she persuaded the city to fund a tourist walk about slavery, a kind of mirror image of the Freedom Trail in Boston. She has helped raise money for a heritage site incorporating the excavated remains of the infamous slave holding cell known as Lumpkin's Jail.

"You see, our history is often buried," she says. "You have to unearth it."

**********

Not long ago I was reading some old letters at the library of the University of North Carolina, doing a little unearthing of my own. Among the hundreds of hard-to-read and yellowing papers, I found one note dated April 16, 1834, from a man named James Franklin in Natchez, Mississippi, to the home office of his company in Virginia. He worked for a partnership of slave dealers called Franklin & Armfield, run by his uncle.

"We have about ten thousand dollars to pay yet. Should you purchase a good lot for walking I will bring them out by land this summer," Franklin had written. Ten thousand dollars was a considerable sum in 1834-the equivalent of nearly $300,000 today. "A good lot for walking" was a gang of enslaved men, women and children, possibly numbering in the hundreds, who could tolerate three months afoot in the summer heat.

Scholars of slavery are quite familiar with the firm of Franklin & Armfield, which Isaac Franklin and John Armfield established in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1828. Over the next decade, with Armfield based in Alexandria and Isaac Franklin in New Orleans, the two became the undisputed tycoons of the domestic slave trade, with an economic impact that is hard to overstate. In 1832, for example, 5 percent of all the commercial credit available through the Second Bank of the United States had been extended to their firm.

This letter from 1834 held riches, and "I will bring them out by land" was, for me, the invaluable line: It referred to a forced march overland from the fields of Virginia to the slave auctions in Natchez and New Orleans. The letter was the first sign that I might be able to trace the route of one of the Franklin & Armfield caravans.

With that signal from Natchez, Armfield began vacuuming up people from the Virginia countryside. The partners employed stringers-headhunters who worked on commission-collecting enslaved people up and down the East Coast, knocking on doors, asking tobacco and rice planters whether they would sell. Many slaveholders were inclined to do so, as their plantations made smaller fortunes than many princeling sons would have liked.

It took four months to assemble the big "coffle," to use a once-common word that, like so much of the vocabulary of slavery, has been effaced from the language. The company's agents sent people down to Franklin & Armfield's slavepens (another word that has disappeared) in Alexandria, just nine miles south of the U.S. Capitol: seamstresses, nurses, valets, field hands, hostlers, carpenters, cooks, houseboys, coachmen, laundresses, boatmen. There were so-called fancy girls, young women who would work mainly as concubines. And, always, children.

Bill Keeling, male, age 11, height 4'5" | Elisabeth, female, age 10, height 4'1" | Monroe, male, age 12, height 4'7" | Lovey, female, age 10, height 3'10" | Robert, male, age 12, height 4'4" | Mary Fitchett, female, age 11, height 4'11"

By August, Armfield had more than 300 ready for the march. Around the 20th of that month the caravan began to assemble in front of the company's offices in Alexandria, at 1315 Duke Street.

In the library at Yale I did a bit more unearthing and found a travelogue by a man named Ethan Andrews, who happened to pass through Alexandria a year later and witness the organizing of an Armfield coffle. His book was not much read-it had a due-date notice from 50 years ago-but in it Andrews described the scene as Armfield directed the loading for an enormous journey.

"Four or five tents were spread, and the large wagons, which were to accompany the expedition, were stationed" where they could be piled high with "provisions and other necessaries." New clothes were loaded in bundles. "Each negro is furnished with two entire suits from the shop," Andrews noted, "which he does not wear upon the road." Instead, these clothes were saved for the end of the trip so each slave could dress well for sale. There was a pair of carriages for the whites.

In 1834, Armfield sat on his horse in front of the procession, armed with a gun and a whip. Other white men, similarly armed, were arrayed behind him. They were guarding 200 men and boys lined up in twos, their wrists handcuffed together, a chain running the length of 100 pairs of hands. Behind the men were the women and girls, another hundred. They were not handcuffed, although they may have been tied with rope. Some carried small children. After the women came the big wagons-six or seven in all. These carried food, plus children too small to walk ten hours a day. Later the same wagons hauled those who had collapsed and could not be roused with a whip.

Then the coffle, like a giant serpent, uncoiled onto Duke Street and marched west, out of town and into a momentous event, a blanked-out saga, an unremembered epic. I think of it as the Slave Trail of Tears.

**********

The Slave Trail of Tears is the great missing migration-a thousand-mile-long river of people, all of them black, reaching from Virginia to Louisiana. During the 50 years before the Civil War, about a million enslaved people moved from the Upper South-Virginia, Maryland, Kentucky-to the Deep South-Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama. They were made to go, deported, you could say, having been sold.

This forced resettlement was 20 times larger than Andrew Jackson's "Indian removal" campaigns of the 1830s, which gave rise to the original Trail of Tears as it drove tribes of Native Americans out of Georgia, Mississippi and Alabama. It was bigger than the immigration of Jews into the United States during the 19th century, when some 500,000 arrived from Russia and Eastern Europe. It was bigger than the wagon-train migration to the West, beloved of American lore. This movement lasted longer and grabbed up more people than any other migration in North America before 1900.

The drama of a million individuals going so far from their homes changed the country. It gave the Deep South a character it retains to this day; and it changed the slaves themselves, traumatizing uncountable families.

But until recently, the Slave Trail was buried in memory. The story of the masses who trekked a thousand miles, from the tobacco South to the cotton South, sometimes vanished in an economic tale, one about the invention of the cotton gin and the rise of "King Cotton." It sometimes sank into a political story, something to do with the Louisiana Purchase and the "first Southwest"-the young states of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas.

Historians know about the Slave Trail. During the last ten years, a number of them-Edward Baptist, Steven Deyle, Robert Gudmestad, Walter Johnson, Joshua Rothman, Calvin Schermerhorn, Michael Tadman and others-have been writing the million-person-migration back into view.

Some museum curators know about it, too. Last fall and this past spring, the Library of Virginia, in Richmond, and the Historic New Orleans Collection, in Louisiana, working separately, put together large exhibitions about the domestic slave trade. Both institutions broke attendance records.

Maurie McInnis, a historian and vice provost at the University of Virginia, who curated the Richmond exhibit, stood in front of a slave dealer's red flag that she tracked down in Charleston, South Carolina, where it had lain unseen in a box for more than 50 years. It sat under a piece of glass and measured about 2 by 4 feet. If you squinted, you could see pinholes in it. "Red flags fluttered down the streets in Richmond, on Wall Street in Shockoe Bottom," she said. "All the dealers pinned little scraps of paper on their flags to describe the people for sale."

Virginia was the source for the biggest deportation. Nearly 450,000 people were uprooted and sent south from the state between 1810 and 1860. "In 1857 alone, the sale of people in Richmond amounted to $4 million," McInnis said. "That would be more than $440 million today."

Outside universities and museums, the story of the Slave Trail lives in shards, broken and scattered.

The phrase "sold down the river," for instance. During the move to the Deep South, many slaves found themselves on steamboats winding down the Mississippi to New Orleans. There they were sold to new bosses and dispersed in a 300-mile radius to the sugar and cotton plantations. Many went without their parents, or spouses, or siblings-and some without their children-whom they were made to leave behind. "Sold down the river" labels a raft of loss.

The "chain gang" also has roots in the Slave Trail. "We were handcuffed in pairs, with iron staples and bolts," recalled Charles Ball, who marched in several coffles before he escaped from slavery. Ball was bought by a slave trader on Maryland's Eastern Shore, and later wrote a memoir. "My purchaser...told me that we must set out that very day for the South," he wrote. "I joined fifty-one other slaves whom he had bought in Maryland." A padlock was added to the handcuffs, and the hasp of each padlock closed on a link in a chain 100 feet long. Sometimes, as in Ball's case, the chain ran through an iron neck collar. "I could not shake off my chains, nor move a yard without the consent of my master."

(My own ancestors held slaves in South Carolina for six generations. I have studied Charles Ball and found no family link to him. But names and history contain shadows.)

Franklin & Armfield put more people on the market than anyone-perhaps 25,000-broke up the most families and made the most money. About half of those people boarded ships in Washington or Norfolk, bound for Louisiana, where Franklin sold them. The other half walked from the Chesapeake to the Mississippi River, 1,100 miles, with riverboat steerage for short distances along the way. Franklin & Armfield's marches began in the late summer, sometimes the fall, and they took two to four months. The Armfield coffle of 1834 is better documented than most slave marches. I started following its footsteps, hoping to find traces of the Slave Trail of Tears.

**********

The coffle headed west out of Alexandria. Today the road leaving town becomes U.S. Route 50, a big-shouldered highway. Part of Virginia's section of that highway is known as the Lee-Jackson Highway, a love note to Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, the two Confederate generals. But when the slaves marched, it was known as Little River Turnpike. The coffle moved along at three miles an hour. Caravans like Armfield's covered about 20 miles a day.

People sang. Sometimes they were forced to. Slave traders brought a banjo or two and demanded music. A clergyman who saw a march toward Shenandoah remembered that the gang members, "having left their wives, children, or other near connections and never likely to meet them again in this world," sang to "drown the suffering of mind they were brought into." Witnesses said "Old Virginia Never Tire" was one song all the coffles sang.

After 40 miles, the Little River Turnpike met the town of Aldie and became the Aldie and Ashby's Gap Turnpike, a toll road. The turnpike ran farther west-40 miles to Winchester, and then to the brow of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Every few miles, Armfield and his chained-up gang came to a toll station. He would stop the group in its tracks, pull out his purse and pay the man. The tollkeeper would lift the bar, and the coffle would march under it.

About August 25, they reached Winchester and turned south, entering the Shenandoah Valley. Among the people who lived in these parts was John Randolph, a congressman and a cousin of Thomas Jefferson. Randolph once wrote a friend to complain that the road was "thronged with droves of these wretches & the human carcass-butchers, who drive them on the hoof to market." Comparing Virginia to a stop on the West African slave trade, Randolph sighed, "One might almost fancy oneself on the road to Calabar."

The gang headed down the Great Wagon Road, a route that came from Pennsylvania, already some centuries old-"made by the Indians," in the euphemism. Along the way, the coffle met other slave gangs, construction crews rebuilding the Wagon Road, widening it to 22 feet and putting down gravel. They were turning out the new Valley Turnpike, a macadam surface with ditches at the sides. The marchers and the roadwork gangs, slaves all, traded long looks.

Today the Great Wagon Road, or Valley Turnpike, is known as U.S. Route 11, a two-lane that runs between soft and misty mountains, with pretty byways. Long stretches of U.S. 11 look much like the Valley Turnpike did during the 1830s-rolling fields, horses and cattle on hills. Northern Shenandoah was wheat country then, with one in five people enslaved and hoeing in the fields. Today a few of the plantations survive. I stop at one of the oldest, Belle Grove. The Valley Turnpike once ran on its edge, and the coffle of 300 saw the place from the road.

Relatives of President James Madison put up the stone mansion at Belle Grove during the 1790s, and it lives on as a fine house museum run by a historian, Kristen Laise. A walk through the house, a look at the kitchen where all the work was done, a walk through the slave cemetery, a rundown of the people who lived and died here, white and black-thanks to Laise, Belle Grove is not a house museum that shorts the stories of slaves.

Recently, Laise tells me, she stumbled on evidence that in the 1820s a large number of people went up for sale at Belle Grove. She pulls out an October 1824 newspaper ad, placed by Isaac Hite, master of Belle Grove (and brother-in-law to President Madison). "I shall proceed to sell sixty slaves, of various ages, in families," Hite said. Hite expressed regret that he had to charge interest if buyers insisted on using credit. The nicest families in the Shenandoah tipped people into the pipeline south.

I pull in at various towns and ask around. In Winchester, the Winchester-

Frederick County Visitor Center. In Edinburg, a history bookshop. In Staunton, the Visitor Center. In Roanoke, at a tourist information outlet called Virginia's Blue Ridge.

Do you know anything about the chain gangs that streamed southwest through these parts?
No. Never heard of it. You say it was 150 years ago?
Well, more like 175.
Don't know what you're talking about.
People do know, however, about Civil War battles. The bloodletting here has a kind of glamour. A few people launch into stories about the brave Confederates. A few bring up their own ethnic lore.
Well, Germans and Scots-Irish settled the Shenandoah, that's who was here.
A woman at a tourist store clarified. My oh my, the Scots-Irish-they were like made of brass.

One night in September 1834, a traveler stumbled into the Armfield coffle's camp. "Numerous fires were gleaming through the forest: it was the bivouac of the gang," wrote the traveler, George Featherstonhaugh. "The female slaves were warming themselves. The children were asleep in some tents; and the males, in chains, were lying on the ground, in groups of about a dozen each." Meanwhile, "the white men...were standing about with whips in their hands."

Featherstonhaugh, a geologist on a surveying tour for the federal government, described the slave trader as a raw man in nice clothes. John Armfield wore a big white hat and striped pants. He had a long dark coat and wore a mustache-less beard. The surveyor talked to him for a few hours and saw him as "sordid, illiterate and vulgar." Armfield, it seems, had overpowering bad breath, because he loved raw onions.

Early the next morning, the gang readied again for the march. "A singular spectacle," Featherstonhaugh wrote. He counted nine wagons and carriages and some 200 men "manacled and chained to each other," lining up in double file. "I had never seen so revolting a sight before," he said. As the gang fell in, Armfield and his men made jokes, "standing near, laughing and smoking cigars."

On September 6, the gang was marching 50 miles southwest of Roanoke. They came to the New River, a big flow about 400 feet across, and to a dock known as Ingles Ferry. Armfield did not want to pay for passage, not with his hundreds. So one of his men picked a shallow place and tested it by sending over a wagon and four horses. Armfield then ordered the men in irons to get in the water.

This was dangerous. If any man lost his footing, everyone could be washed downstream, yanked one after another by the chain. Armfield watched and smoked. Men and boys sold, on average, for about $700. Multiply that by 200. That comes to $140,000, or about $3.5 million today. Slaves were routinely insured-plenty of companies did that sort of business, with policies guarding against "damage." But collecting on such "damage" would be inconvenient.

The men made it across. Next came wagons with the young children and those who could no longer walk. Last came the women and girls. Armfield crossed them on flatboats.

Today, on the same spot, a six-lane bridge crosses the New River, and there is a town called Radford, population 16,000. I walk First Street next to the river and stop in front of a shop, "Memories Past and Present-Antiques and Collectibles." A man named Daniel starts a conversation.
Local. Born 50 miles that way, Radford for 20 years. On the dark slope after 40, since you ask.
Daniel is pleasant, happy to talk about his hardscrabble days. He is white, a face etched by too much sun.
Trailer-park childhood. Life looking up since the divorce.
It is an easy chat between strangers, until I bring up the slave days. Daniel's expression empties. He shakes his head. His face acquires a look that suggests the memory of slavery is like a vampire visiting from a shallow grave.

**********

Armfield and his caravan came to the Shenandoah from Alexandria. Other coffles came from the direction of Richmond. One of them was led by a man named William Waller, who walked from Virginia to Louisiana in 1847 with 20 or more slaves.

In the deep archive of the Virginia Historical Society I discovered an extraordinary batch of letters that Waller wrote about the experience of selling people he had known and lived with for much of his life. Waller's testimony, to my knowledge, has never been examined in detail. He was an amateur slave trader, not a pro like Armfield, and his journey, though from another year, is even better documented.

Waller was 58, not young but still fit. Thin and erect, a crease of a smile, vigorous dark eyes. He wore "my old Virginia cloth coat and pantaloons" on his march, as he told his wife, Sarah Garland-the daughter of a congressman and a granddaughter of Patrick Henry, the orator and patriot. She was fancier than he.

The Wallers lived outside Amherst, Virginia, and owned some 25 black people and a plantation called Forest Grove. They were in debt. They had seen the money others were making by selling out and decided to do the same. Their plan was to leave a few slaves behind with Sarah as house servants and for William to march nearly all the rest to Natchez and New Orleans.

Waller and his gang reached the Valley Turnpike in October. "This morning finds us six miles west of Abingdon," Waller wrote home from one of the richer towns. "The negroes are above all well-they continue in fine spirits and life and appear all happy."

The sound of Waller's letters home-he wrote some 20 of them on the Slave Trail-is upbeat, a businessman sending word that there's nothing to worry about. "The negroes are happy," he says repeatedly.

But something happened early on, although it is not clear just what. Waller had been on the trail for two weeks when he wrote home to say, "I have seen and felt enough to make me loathe the vocation of slave trading." He did not give details.

It is rare to have a glimpse of slaves enchained in a coffle, because the documentary evidence is thin, but Waller's march is an exception. The people who accompanied him included a boy of 8 or 9 called Pleasant; Mitchell, who was 10 or 11; a teenage boy named Samson; three teenage sisters, Sarah Ann, Louisa and Lucy; Henry, about 17; a man named Nelson and his wife; a man in his 20s called Foster; and a young mother named Sarah, with her daughter Indian, about age 2. There were others. The three sisters had been taken from their parents, as had Pleasant, Mitchell and Samson. Most of the others were under 20. As for Sarah and Indian, they had been taken from Sarah's husband and her mother. Waller planned to sell all of them.

As he pushed his "hands" down the pike, Waller felt guilty about Sarah and Indian, he told his wife. "My heart grieves over Sarah and I do wish it could be different," he wrote. "But Sarah seems happy."

**********

Days and nights down the Valley Turnpike, the spine of the Blue Ridge, destination Tennessee, where Armfield would hand over his coffle and board a stagecoach back to Alexandria.

As U.S. 11 steps into Tennessee, the road finds the Holston River and runs parallel to it. Here the mountains thicken into the Appalachian South of deep hollows and secret hills. In the old days, there were few black people here, a lot of Quakers and the beginning of an antislavery movement. The Quakers have largely gone, and there are still many fewer black people than back in Virginia, 100 miles east.

I take the old route to Knoxville, but then get onto the freeway, Interstate 40. The path of I-40 west roughly matches a turnpike that once ran 200 miles across the Cumberland Plateau. The coffles followed the same route-through Kingston, Crab Orchard, Monterey, Cookeville, Gordonsville, Lebanon and, finally, Nashville.

At this point in the journey, other spurs, from Louisville and Lexington to the north, joined the main path of the Slave Trail. The migration swelled to a widening stream.

Armfield and his gang of 300 had marched for a month and covered more than 600 miles. When they reached Nashville, they would be halfway.

Isaac Franklin, Armfield's partner, kept house in Louisiana, but his thoughts were often in Tennessee. He had grown up near Gallatin, 30 miles northeast of Nashville, and he went there during off months. In 1832, at age 43, supremely rich from 20 years as a "long-distance trader," Franklin built a big house on 2,000 acres outside Gallatin. He called it Fairvue. Columned, brick and symmetrical, it was just about the finest house in the state, people said, second only to the Hermitage, the estate of President Andrew Jackson. Fairvue was a working plantation, but it was also an announcement that the boy from Gallatin had returned to his humble roots in majesty.

When Armfield turned up with his gang in Gallatin, he seems to have handed the group not to Isaac Franklin, but to Franklin's nephew James Franklin.

In Gallatin, I drive out to look at the old Franklin estate. After the Civil War, it held on as a cotton plantation, and then became a horse farm. But in the 2000s, a developer began building a golf course on the fields where the colts ran. The Club at Fairvue Plantation opened in 2004, and hundreds of houses sprang up on half-acre plots.

Approaching the former Franklin house, I pass the golf course and clubhouse. A thicket of McMansions follows, in every ersatz style. Palladian manse, Empire français, Tudor grand, and a form that might be called Tuscan bland. People still come to show their money at Fairvue, like Franklin himself.

I ring the doorbell at the house the Slave Trail built. It has a double portico, with four Ionic columns on the first level and four on the second. No answer, despite several cars in the drive. More than one preservationist had told me that the current owners of Fairvue are hostile to anyone who shows curiosity about the slave dealer who built their lovely home.

The man may be gone, but generations later, some of his people are still around. I ask a Nashville museum director, Mark Brown, for help in finding a member of the family in the here and now. Two phone calls later, one of the living Franklins answers.

**********

Kenneth Thomson opens the door to his house, which is clapboard and painted a pretty cottage yellow-quaint, not grand. Thomson says he is 74, but he looks 60. Short white hair, short white beard, khakis, cotton short-sleeve with flap pockets and epaulets. Shoes with crepe soles. A reedy voice, gentle manners. Thomson is an antiques dealer, mostly retired, and an amateur historian, mostly active.

"I am president of the Sumner County Hysterical Society," he cracks, "the only place you get respect for knowing a lot of dead people."

The first thing that meets the eye in Thomson's house is a large portrait of Isaac Franklin. It hangs in the living room, above the sofa. The house bursts with 19th-century chairs, rugs, settees, tables and pictures. Reading lights look like converted oil lamps. He takes a seat at his melodeon, a portable organ that dates from the 1850s, and plays a few bars of period-appropriate music. It is plain that in this branch of the Franklin family, the past cannot be unremembered.

"Isaac Franklin had no children who survived," Thomson had told me on the phone. "His four children all died before they grew up. But he had three brothers, and there are hundreds of their descendants living all around the country. My direct ancestor is Isaac's brother James. Which means that Isaac Franklin was my great-great-great-great-uncle."

It is an important gloss, as it turns out: "You see," Thomson said, "my forebear James Franklin was the family member who introduced Isaac Franklin to the slave business."

Taking a seat in an armchair upholstered in wine-colored brocade, he picks up the story. It was at the beginning of the 1800s. When the brothers were growing up in Gallatin, James Franklin, eight years older than Isaac, took his sibling under his wing. "They packed flatboats with whiskey, tobacco, cotton and hogs, floated them down to New Orleans, sold the goods on the levee, and then sold the boat," Thomson says. "My ancestor James was dabbling in some slave dealing on these trips-small amount, nothing big. He showed young Isaac how it was done, apprenticed him. Now, I heard this more than 50 years ago from my great-grandfather, who was born in 1874, or two generations closer than me to the time in question. So it must be true. The family story is that after Uncle Isaac came back from service during the War of 1812, which sort of interrupted his career path, if you call it that, he was all for the slave business. I mean, just gung-ho."

Thomson gets up and walks through the house, pointing out the ample Franklin memorabilia. A painting of the mansion at Fairvue. A sofa and chair that belonged to Isaac Franklin's parents. A Bible from the family of John Armfield. "After Isaac died, in 1846, they published the succession, an inventory of his belongings," he says. "It ran to 900 pages. He had six plantations and 650 slaves."

What was it like to be in the room with Isaac Franklin?

"He knew what manners and culture were," Thomson says. "He knew how to be a gentleman. Most slave traders at that time were considered common and uncouth, with no social graces. Uncle Isaac was different. He had the equivalent of an eighth-grade education. He was not ignorant. He could write a letter."

At the same time, "that doesn't mean that he didn't have bad habits," Thomson clarifies. "He had some of those. But bad habits concerning sex were rampant among some of those men. You know they took advantage of the black women, and there were no repercussions there. Before he married, Isaac had companions, some willing, some unwilling. That was just part of life." I read, in many places, that slave traders had sex with the women they bought and sold. And here, someone close to the memory of it says much the same.

"Isaac had a child by a black woman before he married," Thomson says. In 1839, at age 50, he married a woman named Adelicia Hayes, age 22, the daughter of a Nashville attorney. White. "So Isaac had at least one black child, but this daughter of his left the state of Tennessee, and nobody knows what happened to her. Actually, Uncle Isaac sent her off because he didn't want her around after he married."

It is possible, of course, that Isaac Franklin sold his daughter. It would have been the easiest thing to do.

Thomson brings out an article that he wrote some years ago for the Gallatin Examiner. The headline reads, "Isaac Franklin was a Well-liked Slave Trader." The thousand-word piece is the only thing Thomson has published on the subject of his family.

How does a person inside the family measure the inheritance of slave trading? Thomson takes a half-second. "You can't judge those people by today's standards-you can't judge anybody by our standards. It was a part of life in those days. Take the Bible. Many things in the Old Testament are pretty barbaric, but they are part of our evolution."

Thomson warms up, shifts in his seat. "I do not approve of revisionist historians. I mean, people who do not understand the old lifestyles-their standpoint on life, and their education, are what today we consider limited. That applies to Southern history, to slave history.

"You know, I have been around blacks all my life. They are great people. When I grew up, we were servanted. All the servants were black. We had a nurse, a woman who used to be called a mammy. We had a cook, a black man. We had a maid, and we had a yard man. We had a guy that doubled as a driver and supervised the warehouse. And we had all these servants till they died. I wasn't taught to be prejudiced. And I'll tell you what nobody ever talks about. There were free blacks in the South that owned slaves. And there were lots of them. They didn't buy slaves in order to free them, but to make money."

Thomson emphasizes these last sentences. It is a refrain among Southern whites who remain emotionally attached to the plantation days-that one in 1,000 slaveholders who were black vindicates in some fashion 999 who were not.

Are we responsible for what the slave traders did?

"No. We cannot be responsible, should not feel like we're responsible. We weren't there." Are we accountable? "No. We are not accountable for what happened then. We are only accountable if it is repeated."

Thomson is sensitive to the suggestion that the family took benefit from the industrial-scale cruelty of Franklin & Armfield.

"In my family, people looked after their slaves," he said. "They bought shoes for them, blankets for them, brought in doctors to treat them. I never heard of any mistreatment. On the whole, things weren't that bad. You see, blacks were better off coming to this country. It is a fact that the ones over here are far ahead of the ones over there in Africa. And you know that the first legal slaveholder in the United States was a black man? That's on the Internet. You need to look that up. I think that's interesting. Human bondage began I don't know when, but early, thousands of years ago. I think slavery developed here primarily because of the ignorance of the blacks. They first came over here as indentured servants, as did the whites. But because of their background and lack of education, they just sort of slid into slavery. No, I don't believe in revisionist history."

I grew up in the Deep South, and I am familiar with such ideas, shared by many whites in Mr. Thomson's generation. I do not believe that black people were responsible for their own enslavement, or that African-Americans should be grateful for slavery because they are better off than West Africans, or that a black man was author of the slave system. But I recognize the melody, and let the song pass.

Kenneth Thomson brings out some daguerreotypes of the Franklins and others in his family tree. The pictures are beautiful. The people in them are well-dressed. They give the impression of perfect manners.

"The way I see it," he says, "there are a lot of people you have to bury to get rid of. To get rid of their attitudes."

**********

Ben Key was a slave to Isaac Franklin at Fairvue. He was born in 1812 in Virginia. Franklin probably bought him there and brought him to Tennessee in the early 1830s. For reasons unknown, Franklin did not send Key through the burning gates of the Slave Trail, but made him stay in Tennessee.

At Fairvue, Key found a partner in a woman named Hannah. Their children included a son named Jack Key, who was freed at the end of the Civil War, at age 21. Jack Key's children at Fairvue included Lucien Key, whose children included a woman named Ruby Key Hall-

"Who was my mother," says Florence Blair.

Florence Hall Blair, born and raised in Nashville, is 73, a retired nurse. She lives 25 miles from Gallatin, in a pretty brick, ranch-style house with white shutters. After 15 years at various Tennessee hospitals, and after 15 years selling makeup for Mary Kay Cosmetics (and driving a pink Cadillac, because she moved a ton of mascara), she now occupies herself with family history.

A lot of black people, she said, do not want to know about their ancestry. "They don't do family history, because they think, 'Oh, it was too cruel, and so brutal, and why should I look at it up close?' I am not one of those people."

Her research "is like a poke salad," she says, dropping a Tennessee-ism. A plate of pokeweed yanked up from the field and put on the table is one way of saying "a mess." Blair shifts metaphors. "Researching people who were slaves is like a mystery tale. You see the names. You don't know what they did. Some names in the lists are familiar. You find them repeatedly. But you don't know who the old ones are.

"So Ben Key's son Hilery Key, who was a slave born in 1833, and brother to Jack Key, my great-grandfather, was one of the 22 men who founded the Methodist Episcopal Church in this area. He was a minister. It must be in the genes, because I have a brother who is a minister, and a cousin who is a minister, and another relative. And in Gallatin there is a church named after one of the Key family preachers. Mystery solved," she says.

What do you think about Isaac Franklin? I wonder aloud.

"I don't feel anything per se," she says, benignly. "It's been a long time. And that's what the times were." She deflects the subject politely.

"I feel a certain detachment from it, I suppose. And that includes about Isaac Franklin. I think Franklin was a cruel individual, but he was human. His humanity was not always visible, but it was there. So as far as hating him, I don't have a strong dislike for him. Time kind of mellows you out. The older I get, the more tolerant I become. It was like that. He did it, but it is what it is. If you carry hatred or strong dislike for people, all you are doing is hurting yourself."

She laughs, surprisingly. "I wouldn't have made it too well in slavery days, because I am the kind of person who just could not imagine you would treat me the way they treated people. 'You going to treat me less than a dog? Oh, no.' They probably would have had to kill me, with my temperament." She laughs again.

"You know, we carried on. Now I have five adult children, eight grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. I am married to a man with four children. Put them all together, we are like a big sports team. On holidays it is something, we have to rent a community center.

"We carried on."

**********

As autumn gathered in 1834, the caravan that John Armfield handed over left Tennessee, bound for Natchez. Records of that part of the journey do not survive, nor do records about the individual slaves in the coffle.

Like other Franklin gangs, the 300 probably got on flatboats in the Cumberland River and floated three days down to the Ohio River, and then drifted down another day to reach the Mississippi. A flatboat could float down the Mississippi to Natchez in two weeks.

The previous year, Franklin & Armfield had moved their jail and slave market in Natchez to a site on the edge of town called Forks of the Road. There-and this is conjecture, based on what happened to other gangs-half of the big gang might have been sold. As for the other half, they were probably herded onto steamboats and churned 260 miles south to New Orleans, where Isaac Franklin or one of his agents sold them, one or three or five at a time. And then they were gone-out to plantations in northern Louisiana, or central Mississippi, or southern Alabama.

Although the Armfield gang vanishes from the record, it is possible to follow in detail a coffle of people on the journey from Tennessee to New Orleans, thanks to William Waller's letters.

In Knoxville, in October 1847, Waller readied his gang of 20 or more for the second half of their journey. He expected another month on the road. It would turn out to be four.

On Tuesday, October 19, the troop headed southwest, Waller leading from his horse and his friend James Taliaferro bringing up the rear, both men armed. No steamboats for this group. Waller was pinching pennies.

In Virginia, the coffles marched from town to town. But here, they were marching through wilderness. Waller's letters are imprecise on his route, and by 1847 there were a few roads from Tennessee into Mississippi. But during the 50 years coffles were sent on the Slave Trail, the road most taken was the Natchez Trace.

The trace was a 450-mile road-"trace" being the colonial word for a native trail through forest-and the only overland route from the plateau west of the Appalachian Range leading to the Gulf of Mexico. The Natchez people first carved the footpath some 500 years before and used it until about 1800, when they were massacred and dispersed, at which point white travelers took possession of their highway.

The Natchez Trace Parkway, with asphalt flat like silk, now follows the old route. Remnants of the original Trace remain out in the woods, 100 yards from the breakdown lane, mostly untouched.

Starting in Nashville I drive down the parkway. Overland coffles would have used the road that molders off in the trees. In place of towns were "stands" every 10 or 15 miles. These were stores and taverns with places to sleep in the back. Gangs of slaves were welcome if they slept in the field, far from business. Their drivers paid good money for food.

After Duck River, in Tennessee, came the Keg Springs Stand. After Swan Creek, McLish's Stand. After the Tennessee River, where the Trace dips into Alabama for 50 miles, Buzzard Roost Stand. Swinging back into Mississippi, Old Factor's Stand, LeFleur's Stand, Crowder's Stand, others.

Waller reached Mississippi by that November. "This is one of the richest portions of the state and perhaps one of the most healthy," he wrote home. "It is a fine country for the slave to live in and for the master to make money in." And by the way, "The negroes are not only well, but appear happy and pleased with the country and prospect before them."

At the village of Benton a week before Christmas 1847, Waller huddled with his gang in a ferocious storm. "Exceedingly heavy and continued rains have stopped our progress," he told his wife. "We have been stopped for two days by the breaking up of turnpikes and bridges. Although today is Sunday my hands are engaged in repairing the road to enable us to pass on."

I put the car on the shoulder and walk into the woods to find the real Natchez Trace. It is easily stumbled into. And it really is a trace, the faint line of what used to be a wagon road. The cut is about 12 feet wide, with shallow ditches on each side. Spindly pine and oaks away off the roadbed, a third-growth woods. Cobwebs to the face, bugs buzzing, overhanging branches to duck. On the ground, a carpet of mud, and leaves beneath it, and dirt under the leaves.

The path the slaves took is beautiful. Nearly enclosed by green curtains of limbs, it feels like a tunnel. I squish through the mud, sweating, pulling off spiders, slapping mosquitoes and horseflies. It is 8 p.m., and the sun is failing. The fireflies come out in the dwindling dusk. And as night closes, the crickets start their scraping in the trees. A sudden, loud drone from every direction, the natural music of Mississippi.

**********

It was typical on the Slave Trail: People like Waller marched a coffle and sold one or two people along the way to pay the travel bills. Sarah and Indian, the mother and daughter, wanted to be sold together. The three sisters, Sarah Ann, Louisa and Lucy, also wanted to be sold together, which was not likely to happen, and they knew it.

But as Waller drifted through Mississippi, he couldn't sell anyone.

"The great fall in cotton has so alarmed the people that there is not the slightest prospect of our selling our negroes at almost any price," he wrote home.

When cotton retailed high in New York, slaveholders in Mississippi bought people. When cotton went low, they did not. In winter 1848, cotton was down. "Not a single offer," Waller wrote.

His trip on the Slave Trail, like most others', would end in Natchez and New Orleans. Buyers by the hundreds crammed the viewing rooms of dealers in Natchez and the auction halls of brokers in New Orleans.

There was one place en route, however, with a small slave market-Aberdeen, Mississippi. Waller decided to try to sell one or two people there. At Tupelo, he made a daylong detour to Aberdeen but soon despaired over his prospects there: The market was crowded "with nearly 200 negroes held by those who have relations & friends, who of course aid them in selling."

Waller dragged his gang northwest, four days and 80 miles, to Oxford, but found no buyers. "What to do or where to go I know not-I am surrounded by difficulty," he brooded. "I am enveloped in darkness; but still, strange to say, I live upon hope, the friend of man."

It is peculiar that a man can pity himself for being unable to sell a roomful of teenagers he has known since their birth, but as Florence Blair says, that's what it was.

"My plan is, take my negroes to Raymond about 150 miles from here and put them with Mr. Dabney and look out for purchasers," Waller told his wife. Thomas Dabney was an acquaintance from Virginia who had moved to Raymond, on the Natchez Trace, 12 years earlier and doubled his already thick riches as a cotton planter. "He writes me word that a neighbor of his will take six if we can agree upon price."

Today as then, Raymond, Mississippi, is a crossroads, population 2,000. At the central square are the contradictions of a Deep South village, both of Waller's time and the present. A magnificent Greek Revival courthouse stands next to a one-room barbershop with a corrugated metal front. Pretense and bluster rub shoulders with the plain and dejected. The old railroad station, a wooden building with deep eaves, is a used-record store.

Near a school playground in the middle of Raymond, I find the Dabney family graveyard, surrounded by an iron fence. Several of Thomas Dabney's children lie beneath granite stones. His plantation is gone, but this is where he arranged for a married couple, neighbors, to see Waller's Virginia gang. "They came to look at my negroes & wanted to buy seven or eight, but they objected to the price," Waller said. Dabney told him that "I must not take less than my price-they were worth it."

Waller was touched. "Is not this kind?"

He later wrote home, "I have sold! Sarah & child $800...Henry $800. Sarah Ann $675, Louisa $650. Lucy $550....Col. Dabney has taken Henry and is security for the balance-the three sisters to one man." He was relieved. "All to as kind masters as can be found."

Sarah Waller wrote in return, "I was much pleased to learn by your letter that you had sold at such fine prices." Then she added, "I wish you could have sold more of them."

Waller himself was a little defensive about this people-selling business. He complained that his wife's brother Samuel had condescended to him a few months before. "Samuel Garland said something about negro trading that makes me infer the Church is displeased with me. As far as I am concerned I have had pain enough on the subject without being censured in this quarter."

The remainder of the gang pushed on to Natchez.

**********

Natchez, pearl of the state, stands on a bluff above the Mississippi. Beautiful houses, an antique village, a large tourist trade. But the tourist money is fairly recent. "There is no branch of trade, in this part of the country, more brisk and profitable than that of buying and selling negroes," a traveler named Estwick Evans wrote about Natchez in the early 19th century.

Just outside town, the Trace comes to an end at a shabby intersection. This is Forks of the Road, the Y-shaped junction formed by St. Catherine Street and Old Courthouse Road, where Isaac Franklin presided. His slave pen appears on old maps, labeled "negro mart."

Franklin once ran the biggest operation at Forks of the Road, moving hundreds of people every month. But by the time Waller arrived, Franklin was gone. After he died, in 1846, his body was shipped from Louisiana to Fairvue in a whiskey barrel.

Today at the Forks there is a muffler shop and, next to it, a gutter-and-awn-ing business. Across the street, five historical markers stand on a naked lawn. No buildings on that half-acre. But if New Orleans was the Kennedy Airport of the Slave Trail, the grass at Forks of the Road was its O'Hare.

In Raymond, thanks to Thomas Dabney, Waller had gotten in touch with a slave seller named James Ware, a 42-year-old with Virginia roots. Waller knew his family. "By the polite invitation of Mr. Ware," as he put it, "I passed over a hundred miles with no white persons visible and got here to Natchez in four days." He trotted into town in early 1848, the dwindling gang behind him. "This is the oldest settled portion of the state and bears the appearance of great comfort, refinement and elegance," Waller wrote.

He was not describing the Forks, a mile east of the "nice" part of town. At the Forks, Waller found a poke salad of low wooden buildings, long and narrow, each housing a dealer, each with a porch and a dirt yard in front. The yards were parade grounds that worked like showrooms. In the morning during winter, the high selling season, black people were marched in circles in front of the dealers' shacks.

Slaves for sale wore a uniform of sorts. "The men dressed in navy blue suits with shiny brass buttons...as they marched singly and by twos and threes in a circle," wrote Felix Hadsell, a local man. "The women wore calico dresses and white aprons" and a pink ribbon at the neck with hair carefully braided. The display was weirdly silent. "No commands given by anyone, no noise about it, no talking in the ranks, no laughter or merriment," just marching, round and round.

After an hour of this, the showing of the "lively" stock, the enslaved stood in rows on long overhanging porches.

They were sorted by sex and size and made to stand in sequence. Men on one side, in order of height and weight, women on the other. A typical display placed an 8-year-old girl on the left end of a line, and then ten people like stair steps up to the right end, ending with a 30-year-old woman, who might be the first girl's mother. This sorting arrangement meant that it was more likely children would be sold from their parents.

At the Forks, there were no auctions, only haggling. Buyers looked at the people, took them inside, made them undress, studied their teeth, told them to dance, asked them about their work, and, most important, looked at their backs. The inspection of the back made or broke the deal. Many people had scars from whipping. For buyers, these were interpreted not as signs of a master's cruelty, but of a worker's defiance. A "clean back" was a rarity, and it raised the price.

After examining the people on display, a buyer would talk to a seller and negotiate. It was like buying a car today.

**********

"Call me Ser Boxley," he says. "It is an abbreviation, to accommodate people."

The man in the South who has done the most to call attention to the Slave Trail was born in Natchez in 1940. His parents named him Clifton M. Boxley. During the black power years of the 1960s he renamed himself Ser Seshsh Ab Heter. "That's the type of name I should have had if traditional African cultures had stayed intact, compared to Clifton Boxley, which is the plantation name, or slave name," he says.

Ser Boxley was a big young man during the 1950s, raised in the straitjacket of Jim Crow.

"I tried picking cotton right here, outside Natchez, and I never could pick 100 pounds," he says. Machines did not replace human hands until the 1960s. "You would get paid $3 for 100 pounds of picking cotton-that is, if you were lucky to find a farmer who would employ you."

Boxley is 75. He is bearded white and gray, and half bald. He is direct, assertive and arresting, with a full baritone voice. He does not make small talk.

"I am drafted by the inactivity of others to do history work," he tells me. "I want to resurrect the history of the enslavement trade, and for 20 years, that is where I've focused."

He carries a poster, 4 by 6 feet, in the back of his red Nissan truck. It reads, in uppercase Helvetica, "STAND UP HELP SAVE FORKS OF THE ROAD 'SLAVE' MARKET SITES NATCHEZ MS." He often holds the sign while standing next to the patch of grass that is the only visible remnant of Forks of the Road.

When I meet Boxley he wears red pants, brown slip-ons and a blue T-shirt that says, "Juneteenth-150th Anniversary." Since 1995, he has annoyed the state of Mississippi and worried tourist managers with his singular obsession to mark the lives of those who passed down the Slave Trail through Forks of the Road.

He lives alone in a five-room cottage in a black section of town, away from the camera-ready center of Natchez. The tan clapboard house-folding chairs and a hammock in the front yard, cinder blocks and planks for front steps-overflows inside with books, LPs, folk art, old newspapers, knickknacks, clothes in piles and unidentifiable hoards of objects.

"Watch out for my Jim Crow kitchen," he says from the other room.

In the kitchen are mammy salt shakers, black lawn jockeys, Uncle Tom figurines and memorabilia of other irritating kinds-lithographs of pickaninnies eating watermelon, an "African" figure in a grass skirt, a poster for Country Style Corn Meal featuring a bandanna-wearing, 200-pound black woman.

In a front room, a parallel-dozens of photos of the slave factories of Ghana and Sierra Leone, where captives were held before being sent to the Americas.

Boxley left Natchez in 1960, at age 20. He spent 35 years in California as an activist, as a teacher, as a foot soldier in anti-poverty programs. He came home to Natchez in 1995 and discovered Forks of the Road.

The site is empty but for the five markers, paid for by the City of Natchez. The current names of the streets that form the Forks-Liberty Road and D'Evereaux Drive-differ from the old ones.

"I wrote the text for four of the markers," he says, sitting on a bench and looking over the grass. "You feel something here? That's good. They say there were no feelings here."

He tells the back story. "In 1833, John Armfield shipped a gang of people to Natchez, where Isaac Franklin received them. Some had cholera, and these enslaved people died. Franklin disposed of their bodies in a bayou down the road. They were discovered, and it caused a panic. The city government passed an ordinance that banned all long-distance dealers selling people within the city limits. So they relocated here, at this junction, a few feet outside the city line.

"Isaac Franklin put a building right where that muffler shop is-see the peach-colored shed, across the street? Theophilus Freeman, who sold Solomon Northup, of Twelve Years a Slave, operated over there. Across the street was another set of buildings and dealers. You have Robert H. Elam operating in the site over there. By 1835 this place was abuzz with long-distance traders.

"When I got back to Natchez, at age 55, I saw the large tourism industry, and I noticed that nowhere in this chattel-slavery museum town could I find, readily and visibly, stories that reflected the African-American presence." So he started advocating for the Forks.

He waves to a passing Ford.

"Ten years ago there was an old beer garden standing on this site, where whites watched football and drank, and there was a gravel lot where trucks were parked." The city bought the half-acre lot in 1999, thanks largely to his agitation. Since 2007, a proposal to incorporate the site into the National Park Service has been creeping toward approval. An act of Congress is needed.

"My aim is to preserve every inch of dirt in this area," Boxley says. "I am fighting for our enslaved ancestors. And this site speaks to their denied humanity, and to their contributions, and to America's domestic slave traffickers. The public recognition for Forks of the Road is for the ancestors who cannot speak for themselves."

I ask him to play a debating game. Imagine a white woman asks a question: This story is hard for me to listen to and to understand. Can you tell it in a way that is not going to injure my sensitivity?

"You got the wrong person to ask about sparing your feelings," Boxley replies. "I don't spare anything. It is the humanity of our ancestors denied that I am interested in. This story is your story as well as an African-American story. In fact, it is more your story than it is mine."

A black man asks: I am a middle-class father. I work for the government, I go to church, have two kids, and I say this story is too painful. Can you put it aside?

Boxley lets less than a second pass. "I say, your great-great-grandparents were enslaved persons. The only reason your black behind is here at all is because somebody survived that deal. The only reason why we are in America is because our ancestors were force-brought in chains to help build the country. The way you transcend the hurt and pain is to face the situation, experience it and cleanse yourself, to allow the humanity of our ancestors and their suffering to wash through you and settle into your spirit."

A hundred yards from Forks of the Road, there is a low brick bridge across a narrow creek. It is 12 feet wide, 25 feet long and covered with kudzu, buried beneath mud and brush.

"A month ago the bridge was uncovered with a backhoe by a developer," Boxley says. "Hundreds of thousands crossed this way-migrants, enslaved people, whites, Indians." He turns.

"Peace out," he says, and he is gone.

**********

William Waller left for New Orleans during the second week of January 1848, taking an 18-hour steamboat ride. James Ware, Waller's broker, was having no luck selling the truncated coffle in Mississippi. Among them were the field hand Nelson, plus his wife; a man called Piney Woods Dick and another nicknamed Runaway Boots. There was also Mitchell, a boy of 10 or 11, and Foster, 20-ish and strong, his "prize hand." In Louisiana the top prices could be had for a "buck," a muscled man bound for the hell of the sugar fields.

Waller had never been to such a big city. "You cannot imagine it," he wrote home. As the steamboat churned to dock, it passed ships berthed five or six deep, "miles of them, from all nations of the earth, bringing in their products and carrying away ours." The arrival, gangplank on the levee, cargo everywhere. "You then have to squeeze through a countless multitude of men, women, and children of all ages, tongues, and colors of the earth until you get into the city proper."

He had heard bad things about New Orleans, expected to be frightened by it, and was. The people "are made in part of the worst portion of the human race," he wrote. "No wonder that there should be robberies and assassinations in such a population."

**********

During the 50 years of the Slave Trail, perhaps half a million people born in the United States were sold in New Orleans, more than all the Africans brought to the country during two centuries of the Middle Passage across the Atlantic.

New Orleans, the biggest slave market in the country, had about 50 people-selling companies in the 1840s. Some whites went to the slave auctions for entertainment. Especially for travelers, the markets were a rival to the French Opera House and the Théâtre d'Orléans.

Today in New Orleans, the number of monuments, markers and historic sites that refer in some way to the domestic slave trade is quite small. I make a first estimate: zero.

"No, that's not true," says Erin Greenwald, a curator at the Historic New Orleans Collection. "There is one marker on a wall outside a restaurant called Maspero's. But what it says is wrong. The slave-trade site it mentions, Maspero's Exchange, was diagonally across the street from the sandwich place."

Greenwald stands in front of two beige livery coats hanging behind a pane of glass. The labels in the coats once read, "Brooks Brothers." She is in the French Quarter, in a gallery of the archive where she works, and all around her are artifacts about the slave trade. The two livery coats, big-buttoned and long-tailed, were worn by an enslaved carriage driver and a doorman.

"Brooks Brothers was top-of-the-line slave clothing," Greenwald says. "Slave traders would issue new clothes for people they had to sell, but they were usually cheaper." She is petite, talkative, knowledgeable and precise. This year, she curated an exhibition at the Historic New Orleans Collection, "Purchased Lives: New Orleans and the Domestic Slave Trade, 1808-1865."

As she talks and points out objects, I notice something I had never seen during many visits to this archive: black people. Although the Historic New Orleans Collection is the city's most serious and extensive history center, it attracted few blacks until this year.

"We in New Orleans have come a long way since Hurricane Katrina in terms of the comfort level of addressing certain subjects. Katrina was cataclysmic, and it changed the way people thought about our collective history," Greenwald says. "We had never done a dedicated exhibition on the slave trade, on slavery. And it was really past time."

She points to a document from the steamer Hibernia, which arrived from Louisville in 1831. The paper lists people's names, their color and place of origin. "All these people came from Virginia," she says. "So it is likely they were force-marched from Albemarle County, Virginia, to Louisville, and then boarded a steamer downriver to here." She waves a hand toward the Mississippi levee two blocks away.

She points to a beautiful piece of silk printed with the sentence, "Slaves must be cleared at the Customs House." "It's a sign that probably hung in staterooms on steamships." A kind of check-your-luggage announcement.

"Now those," gesturing at some more yellowed papers, "are the worst for me," she says. "They are a manifest, or list, of one group of 110 people moved by Isaac Franklin in 1829. They record the names, heights, ages, sex and coloration as determined by the person looking at them. And there are many children on the list alone....

"You have this understanding that children were involved. But here is a group with dozens, aged 10 to 12. Louisiana had a law that said children under 10 could not be separated from their mothers. And you see a lot of records in which there are an unusual number of 10-year-olds alone. These children were not 10. They were probably younger, but nobody was checking."

Developing the exhibit, Greenwald and her team created a database of names of the enslaved who were shipped from the Eastern states to New Orleans. William Waller and his gang, and other hundreds of thousands arriving by foot, did not leave traces in government records. But people who arrived by ship did.

"We studied hundreds of shipping manifests and compiled data on 70,000 individuals. Of course, that is only some."

In 1820, the number of ships carrying slaves from Eastern ports into New Orleans was 604. In 1827, it was 1,359. In 1835, it was 4,723. Each carried 5 to 50 slaves.

The auction advertisements at the end of the Slave Trail always said, "Virginia and Maryland Negroes."

"The words 'Virginia Negroes' signaled a kind of brand," Greenwald says. "It meant compliant, gentle and not broken by overwork.

"One thing that is hard to document but impossible to ignore is the 'fancy trade.' New Orleans had a niche market. The 'fancy trade' meant women sold as forcible sex partners. They were women of mixed race, invariably. So-called mulatresses."

Isaac Franklin was all over this market. In 1833, he wrote the office back in Virginia about "fancy girls" he had on hand, and about one in particular whom he wanted. "I sold your fancy girl Alice for $800," Franklin wrote to Rice Ballard, a partner then in Richmond. "There is great demand for fancy maids, [but] I was disappointed in not finding your Charlottesville maid that you promised me." Franklin told the Virginia office to send the "Charlottesville maid" right away by ship. "Will you send her out or shall I charge you $1,100 for her?"

To maximize her price, Franklin might have sold the "Charlottesville maid" at one of the public auctions in the city. "And the auction setting of choice was a place called the St. Louis Hotel," Greenwald says, "a block from here."

**********

The St. Louis Hotel is one of several places that can be identified as once-upon-a-time slave-trading sites. Next door to it was another, the New Orleans Exchange. The exchange's granite facade can be still found on Chartres Street near the corner of St. Louis Street. On the lintel above the door you can see in faded paint its old sign, which reads, "___ CHANGE." The St. Louis Hotel was razed in 1916, but it was in the hotel that the Slave Trail ended in the most spectacular scenes.

At the center of the hotel was a rotunda 100 feet in diameter-"over which rises a dome as lofty as a church spire," a reporter for the Milwaukee Daily Sentinel wrote. "The floor is a marble mosaic. One half the circumference of the rotunda is occupied by the bar of the hotel," and the other half by entrances to the vaulted room. There were two auction stands, each five feet above the floor, on either side of the rotunda. And beneath the dome, with sunlight shafting down through windows in the apse, both auction stands did business simultaneously, in French and in English.

"The auctioneer was a handsome young man, devoting himself exclusively to the sale of young mulatto women," the reporter wrote of a sale in 1855. "On the block was one of the most beautiful young women I ever saw. She was about sixteen, dressed in a cheap striped woolen gown, and bareheaded."

Her name was Hermina. "She was sold for $1250 to one of the most lecherous-looking old brutes I ever set eyes on," the reporter noted. That is the equivalent of $35,000 today.

Here, too, in the St. Louis Hotel's beautiful vaulted room, families at the end of the Slave Trail were divided. The same reporter described "a noble-looking woman with a bright-eyed seven-year-old." When mother and boy stepped onto the platform, however, no bids came for them, and the auctioneer decided on the spur of the moment to put the boy on sale separately. He was sold to a man from Mississippi, his mother to a man from Texas. The mother begged her new master to "buy little Jimmie too," but he refused, and the child was dragged away. "She burst forth in the most frantic wails that ever despair gave utterance to."

**********

William Waller's depression lifted after he left New Orleans and returned to Mississippi. "I have sold out all my negroes to one man for eight thousand dollars!" he told his wife. Then came second thoughts, and more self-pity: "I have not obtained as much as I expected, but I try and be satisfied."

James Ware, the slave dealer Waller had met in Natchez, had come through on the sales, and he offered Waller an itemized statement. "The whole amount of sales for the twenty"-the entire group that had come with him from Virginia-"is $12,675." (About $400,000 now.) The journey ended, the business done, Waller headed home. It was March 13, 1848.

"I am now waiting for a safe boat to set out for you," he wrote. "Perhaps in an hour I may be on the river."

On April 1, Waller reached home. His wife and children greeted him. Also, an elderly black woman named Charity, whom he and Sarah had kept at home, knowing that no one would offer money for her. The slave cabins were vacant.

**********

The first polite questions appeared in newspapers in the summer of 1865, right after the Civil War and Emancipation. Former slaves-there were four million-asked by word of mouth, but that went nowhere, and so they put announcements in the papers, trying to find mothers and sisters, children and husbands swept away from them by the Slave Trail.

Hannah Cole was one of them, maybe the first. On June 24, 1865, two months after the truce at Appomattox, in a Philadelphia newspaper called the Christian Recorder, she posted this:

Information Wanted. Can anyone inform me of the whereabouts of John Person, the son of Hannah Person, of Alexandria, Va., who belonged to Alexander Sancter? I have not seen him for ten years. I was sold to Joseph Bruin, who took me to New Orleans. My name was then Hannah Person, it is now Hannah Cole. This is the only child I have and I desire to find him much.

It was not an easy matter to place an ad. It took two days' wages if you earned 50 cents a day, what "freedpeople"-a new word-were starting to get for work. It meant hiring someone who could write. Literacy had been against the law for slaves, so few of the four million knew how to write.

But the idea grew.

The editors of the Southwestern Christian Advocate published their paper in New Orleans, but it went out to Methodist preachers in Arkansas, Mississippi, Tennessee, Texas and Louisiana. The paper started a column called "Lost Friends," a page on which people called out for family that had disappeared on the Slave Trail. One lost friend wrote:

Mr. Editor-I was bred and born in Virginia, but am unable to name the county, for I was so young that I don't recollect it; but I remember I lived twelve miles from a town called Danville....I was sold to a speculator whose name was Wm. Ferrill and was brought to Mobile, Alabama at the age of 10 years. To my recollection my father's name was Joseph, and my mother's Milly, my brother's Anthony, and my sister's Maria....My name was Annie Ferrill, but my owners changed my name.

The black churches picked it up. Every Sunday, preachers around the South looked out at congregations and read announcements from "Lost Friends" and columns like it. A message from a woman who had been snatched from her mother when she was a girl might reach hundreds of thousands.

I wish to inquire for my relatives, whom I left in Virginia about 25 years ago. My mother's name was Matilda; she lived near Wilton, Va., and belonged to a Mr. Percifield. I was sold with a younger sister-Bettie. My name was Mary, and I was nine years old when sold to a trader named Walker, who carried us to North Carolina. Bettie was sold to a man named Reed, and I was sold and carried to New Orleans and from there to Texas. I had a brother, Sam, and a sister, Annie, who were left with mother. If they are alive, I will be glad to hear from them. Address me at Morales, Jackson Co., Texas.-Mary Haynes."

Year after year the notices spread-hundreds, and then thousands. They continued in black newspapers until World War I, fully 50 years after Emancipation.

For almost everyone, the break was permanent, the grief everlasting. But the historian Heather Williams has unearthed a handful of reunions. One in particular gives the flavor.

Robert Glenn was sold at age 8 from his mother and father in North Carolina and spent the rest of his childhood in Kentucky. After Emancipation, now a "freedman" of about 20, Glenn remembered the name of his hometown-Roxboro. He knew how rare this was, so he decided to go back to his birthplace and look for his parents.

"I made a vow that I was going to North Carolina and see my mother if she was still living. I had plenty of money for the trip," he said. After a few days Glenn turned up in Roxboro. And there, in an accident hardly repeated by any of the million on the Slave Trail of Tears, he found his mother.

"I shook my mother's hand and held it a little too long, and she suspicioned something," Glenn said. She had seen him last when he was 8, and did not recognize him. The expectation of so many slaves was that their families would be annihilated, and so it became important to be able to forget.

"Then she came to me and said, 'Ain't you my child?'" Glenn recalled. "'Tell me, ain't you my child whom I left on the road near Mr. Moore's before the war?' I broke down and began to cry. I did not know before I came home whether my parents were dead or alive." And now, "mother nor father did not know me."

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When Delores McQuinn was growing up, her father told her a story about a search for the family's roots. He said his own father knew the name of the people who had enslaved their family in Virginia, knew where they lived-in the same house and on the same land-in Hanover County, among the rumpled hills north of Richmond.

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African Americans make up 42% of people on death row and 34% of those executed, but only 13% of the population of the US is black. 

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African Americans make up 42% of people on death row and 34% of those executed, but only 13% of the population of the US is black. 

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Criminal Justice Reform | Equal Justice Initiative

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EJI is working to end our misguided reliance on over-incarceration.

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What is the connection between money and justice? Stevenson believes "The opposite of poverty is not wealth. The opposite of poverty is justice." Do you believe this? Why or why not? In what ways does poverty contribute to injustice?