been enslaved by word i think people are stuck on the idea if i ever utter this word around my child he or she will be permanently harmed. is not true. i think allowing us to detach ourselves from the magical beliefs about the special words and the human behavior that we can understand and that we can manipulate for the good or the bad for our purposes gives us more control over language in our lives. >> and the 1200 acres and the heart of san diego. initially called the city park. it was decided the name should be changed. the name was chosen to honor the first european response

today it is home to numerous museums performing arts venues and the san diego zoo. it was here that we spoke with dennis childs. >> with the abolishment of slavery the way in which it was re- fabricated through criminal sanction. if you look at the language of the 13th amendment what it says is that slavery is outlawed except as punishment for a crime. and in my book i do a whole chapter on the debates around that amendment.

in 1865 when slavery was abolished. i go to those debates in congress to see how is it that the really important moment for human rights have this exception clause that basically allows for reinstatement of the 4 million africans have achieved freedom. the expectations of black people after this amendment was passed was actually we will live as citizens of the united states for the first time. and what the reality is that set in and the birth of the kkk and also the way in which white supremacy was not just a matter of the kkk it was enshrined and the law. the black codes and even after the codes were outlawed the only thing that was outlawed when it was done away with was specific language.

before he would say if you are a black person and you got caught stealing a hog we can put you on a chain gang. all they have to do to do the same thing was to remove the word black or negro from the law. so the expectation on the part of the population now can be full participant and the u.s. nationstate. we can lay claims to rights but there is a quick realization that that advocation of rights did not equal actual translation. and racial apartheid is what occurred in my book i write about a book she writes a letter to the president theodore roosevelt at the time and says to him basically i expected to be a free person after emancipation and what my

self my husband jackson and my whole family had landed in is a condition of slavery. she says to him and basically a 10-point letter that is numbered and gives detail by detail of how her husband through been charged and not being able to pay the fee was taken in a white person came and bought him out he was auctioned off to this person. colonel smith for the confederacy was a big player politically and the state of georgia. and this person ran a 20,000-acre plantation that had people that were leased out. you have black women.

and it had people that were supposedly free labors. give every example of the re- fabrication of black unfreedom. you need to do something about the situation. when she ended up working and the same plantation because the owner promised if she worked like her husband that it would go towards the ending of his slavery sentence. and in actuality none of the time that she worked was counted towards it. ..

>> you not only would have an extension of your time, people would cook the books and you would never get out of that debt, and also you have the threat of being killed or imprisoned if you were to try to leave that. it wasn't only the time, but there was also the real terrorism that black people endured as a result of it. that ended up in mass killings sometimes, rape as a de facto form of punishment by the master or by the company because we know that companies like u.s. steel took part in this neo-slavery formations in places like alabama and temperature. so this was a large -- and tennessee. so this was a large complex of

not only labor, the acquisition of black labor as unfree labor, but also terrorism against black people. a refabrication of white supremacy which is very important not only the fact that it was happening in the southern u.s., but this was all validated by the national government structure and by the very amendment to the u.s. constitution that's supposedly outlawing these practices. ♪ ♪ >> so the chain gang system, mostly was a county-level consort of the state-level system which was called convict leasing. convict leasing was legal from the reconstruction period, its early stages all the way through around 1930s. but the chain gang system was a county-level consort of that system. and what it meant for, say, a

misdemeanor, a petty offense, you could be put in a system where you would be put in what i call the rolling cage. and i write a whole chapter on toni morrison's novel beloved in which one of the main characters, paul d., is put on the chain gang. and he's put into this kind of tomb-like structure, and she taking her artistic license actually puts the cage underground. but in reality the cages that that scene was based on were movable and mobile. and the reason why they were movable and mobile was that these neo-slaves, as i call them in the book, or prison slaves were at work building the entire southern infrastructure that had been really decimated with the civil war, but also trying to move the south into the new south paradigm of an industrializing more in the northern image of an industrial

kind of formation. and so the railroads, the highways, turpentining, mining, all of these new industries were largely made up of workers, per se, that were actually prison slaves. and the chain gang system was mostly for people who had, who were convicted of misdemeanors, sometimes who couldn't pay a fine. so literally what was criminalized was your poverty, landlessness and dispossession. but it was very much a canny operation. in other words, the people that ran the states and sometimes governors of states would actually be players in these institutions. whether it be the misdemeanor level of the county chain gang or, again, the felony level of the convict lease system. and the convict lease system was a system where if you were convicted of a crime, you could literally be leased out to private corporations as a result of that crime.

so what was called the prison system originally in the southern states was actually private enterprise taking over the job of controlling the black population. and even after that was outlawed, i have a whole chapter in the book on how a space like angola prison plantation, the state penitentiary of louisiana, it started out as a slave plantation in the 19th century. then after the civil war it became a convict lease plantation. 18,000 acres, bigger or in area than the island -- the area of manhattan. then after convict leasing was outlawed, the state basically became jealous of the profits of the person that owned that space, it outlawed convict leasing and then turned it into the state penitentiary of louisiana which it is til this day as you and i are here under this beautiful weather in san diego. black men and others are in the same fields that africans slaved in in the 19th century picking

various crops right as we speak. so you have that real, symbolic manifestation of what i call neo-slavery in that history of a space like that. one of the main things i want people to take away from the book is the degree to which slavery -- and i'm talking about the pre-1865 variety -- is not some sort of dinosaur age, pre-modern or pre-capitalist system. that slavery, rather than being the exception, a kind of origin original sin that we've now gotten away from, is actually foundational to our current predicaments of police brutality and terrorism, of legal repression, of political disempowerment, of economic disempowerment, of educational, lack of educational access. all of the things that people find so important right now are, again, grounded in the original kind of problematics associated with slavery which in my work as

both someone that writes about the subject matter and teaches about it, often times i find that even though slavery -- and you could add indigenous genocide being so foundational to u.s. history -- so many of our most talented and brilliant youth and students have very little knowledge about that system. and if they do, they will believe in the mythos that slavery ended in 1865. and everything that i found in doing the research for the book and everything, again, like what i mentioned before, alex liechtenstein, angela davis and prison scholars say and tell us in their work, in their intellectual bearing towards this issue of there being 2.4 million people or around that number locked up in supposedly the most democratic society on the planet, everything that we learned about that history from 1865 to the present tells us

that that narrative of slavery abolition is actually a myth in large measure. that part of what we see is a ring -- refabrication rather than an ending. that's not so say that all of the wonderful sacrifices and incredible sacrifices that africans and others made to abolish slavery by the time 1865 weren't important, but it is to say that the myth of progress is something that we have to kind of really with be critical about. ♪ ♪ >> while in san diego, we drove around the city with about san diego host ken kramer to learn more about the area's history and growth. >> all right, ken. thank you for agreeing to show me around san diego.