will have a knee-jerk reaction. i think people are stuck on the idea that if i ever utter this word around my child, he's going to be harmed. there's not evidence for that type of behavior. i think allowing us to attach ourselves from our magical beliefs about these special words and instead treat them as a human behavior that we can understand and that we can manipulate for the good or bad, whatever we want to manipulate for, gives us more control. >> balboa park and its 1200 acres sit in the heart of san diego, initially called city park, it was decided the name should be changed after san diego was selected to host the 1950s panama california exhibition.

the name balboa was chosen to honor the first european response to the pacific ocean while on exploration in panama. today is home to numerous museums, performance arts venues in the san diego zoo. it was here we spoke with dennis childs about his "slaves of the state: black incarceration from the chain gang to the penitentiary". >>. [singing] >> the abolishment of slavery had to do with the way in which slavery was re-fabricated through seminal sanctions so if you look at the language of the 13th amendment to the u.s. constitution, 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. that is rightfully considered

one of the most progressive moments in us legal history in 1865 when slavery was abolished and i go to those debates in congress to tease out how is it that this really important moment for human rights and civil rights in us history had this exception clause that basically allow for reinstatement of 4 million africans who ostensibly had freedom? it's interesting 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 that set in especially after reconstruction and the birth of the kkk but also the way in which white supremacy was not just a matter of the kkk and white groups, white supremacy was enshrined in the law. black code and even after the black codes were outlawed, the only thing that was outlawed when the black codes were done away with was racially segregated language

so before it would say if you were a black person you got caught stealing a hawk which was related to hunger and possession, we could put you on a chain gang. all they had to do to do the same thing was removed the word black or negro from the law and it would pass constitutional muster of the expectation on the part of the population writ large was we now can be full kind of participants in the us nationstate. we can lay claim to rights for the 13th, 14th and 15th amendment but there was a quick realization that the application of rights did not equal actual translation into the existence of black people and racial apartheid is what occurred and in my book i write about a woman named samantha morrison from a place called erroneous georgia. 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 myself,

my husband jackson and my whole family have landed in is in a condition of slavery. she says to him in basically a 10 point letter that is number and gives detail by detail of how her husband through being charged with a petty offense and not being able to pay the fee was taken , threatened with a chain gang and then a white person came and bought them out of the chain gang sentence by paying his fee and he was basically auctioned off to this person . a colonel smith, he was a colonel for the confederates who ended up being a real big player politically in the state of georgia, bought him out. this person ran a 20,000 acre plantation that had people that were leased out or bought out of the court system like jackson morrison. it had black women that were leased out to him as the runner of one of the prisons

of georgia and it had people that were supposedly free laborers, sharecroppers so on this very space you had every example of the re-fabrication of black owned freedom and what she says president roosevelt is, you need to do something about this situation. she ended up working in the same plantation because the owner of it, she worked like her husband that it would go toward the ending of his slavery sentence and in actuality, none of the time that she worked was counted toward a sentence. they extended it out and he ended up staying there and being whipped with a plantation with and during a lot of the things we associate with pre-1865 slavery and what she says at the end of the letter was, this person colonel smith with his slaves unmercifully, black men and women are being submitted to slavery, this is not what we counted on for everything that we have done for this country and so i think that really encapsulates both the expectations and the

horrifying realities of black people enduring during that period in the early 20th century but are still enduring today and in terms of peonage which is the example jackson morrison went throughor criminal surety is another form where somebody could come to a court, pay your fine and literally buy you out is that not only you would have an extension of your time , people would basically cook the books and you would never get out of that debt and you had the threat of being killed or imprisoned if you were so tried to leave that situation so it wasn't only the extension of the time but there was also the real terrorism that black people endured as a result. 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 us steel took part in this slavery formation in places like alabama and tennessee. so this was a large complex

of not only labor but the acquisition of black later but also terrorism against black people, a re-fabrication of white supremacy which is very important, not only the fact that it was happening in the southern us this was all validated by the national government structure and by the very amendments to the u.s. constitution that supposedly outlaw these practices. >>. >> so the chain gang system, most of it was a county level concourse of the state level system which was called convict leasing. convict leasing was legal from the reconstruction. in its early stages all the way through around 1930. but the chain gang system was

a county level, coordinate system and what it meant was 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 she has a scene where one of the main characters is put on a chain gang and he's put into this kind of two like structure and she in taking her artistic license actually to show how this was like a structure of living death actually puts the cage underground. but in reality, the cage were movable and mobile and the reason why they were movable and immobile was that these neo-slaves as i call them in the book, the prison slaves were at work building the entire southern infrastructure that has been decimated with the civil war but also trying to move this out 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, turpentine, mining, all 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 were convicted of misdemeanors, sometimes who couldn't pay a fine so literally what was criminalized was your poverty, landless list and dispossession but it was very much a canny adoration, in other words the people that ran the states and sometimes governors of states would actually beplayers in these institutions , whether it be a misdemeanor level of the county chain gang or again, the felony level of the convict lease systems 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 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 chapter in this book on how a space like angola prison population, the state penitentiary of louisiana, it started out as a slave plantation in the 19th century and then after the civil war became a convict lease plantation, 18,000 acres, bigger in area than the area of manhattan. and then after it was a convict leasing outlawed, the state became jealous of the profits of the person that owned thatspace . it's outlawed convict leasing and turned it into the state penitentiary of louisiana which it is to this day as you and i are here under this awful weather in san diego, black men and others are in the same fields that africans

slave gain 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 the 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 premodern or pre-capitalist system. that slavery rather than being the exception or original sin that we've now gotten away from his actually foundational to our current predicament of police brutality and terrorism, of legal repression, of political disempowerment, of economic disempowerment, of lack of educational access. all the things that people find so important right now are again, grounded in the original kind of problematic associated with slavery which in my work as both someone

that writes about the subject matter, often times i find that even though slavery and you could add the addition of genocide being so foundational to us history and us present, so many of our most talented and brilliant you and students have very little knowledge about this. and if they do, they will believe in the mythos that slavery ended in 1865 and everything that i've found in doing the research for the book and everything again, like the scholars i mentioned before, david ocean city, alex lichtenstein, angela davis and prison scholars like angela davis, abu-jamal say and tell us in their work and their intellectual bearings towards this issue of there being 2.4 million people were around that number locked up supposedly the most democratic society on the planet. everything 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 re-fabrication rather than ending. that's not to say that all of the wonderful sacrifices and incredible sacrifices that africans and others made to abolish slavery by the time 1865 words important but it is to say that the myth of progress is something that we have to be critical about. >>. [singing] >> while in san diego we drove around the city with san diego host ken kramer to learn more about the areas history and growth thank you