The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

Stevenson opens the chapter by describing his work with a legal aid organization that helps assist people who have been wrongly convicted or who are on death row. The United States, a country with the highest rate of incarceration, has a history of disproportionately imprisoning Black Americans. Stevenson argues that this discrepancy is directly tied to slavery. According to Stevenson, the imprisonment of Black Americans is part of the American tradition. When slavery was abolished, the ideologies that justified the bondage of Black people were transferred to criminality. Stevenson describes these ideologies as “[t]he true evil of American slavery, which was the belief that Black people are less evolved, less human, less capable, less deserving, less trustworthy than white people” (279). Laws governing enslaved laborers now governed free Black people. Stevenson adds that, as Black citizens gained rights and fought for their place in American society, white racism fought back.

White mobs acted with impunity against Black Americans; it seemed no offense was too small to incite violence. In 1916, Anthony Crawford, a South Carolina farmer, refused to accept an under-market price for his cotton, and he was lynched. Stevenson claims that mass incarceration, inflated by the war on drugs and strict policies of surveillance and punishment, replaced slavery.