26 June, 2015

Bryan Stevenson on Charleston and Our Real Problem with Race | The Marshall Project

Bryan Stevenson on Charleston and Our Real Problem with Race | The Marshall Project: "We created a narrative of racial difference to maintain slavery. And our 13th amendment never dealt with that narrative. It didn’t talk about white supremacy. The Emancipation Proclamation doesn’t discuss the ideology of white supremacy or the narrative of racial difference, so I don’t believe slavery ended in 1865, I believe it just evolved. It turned into decades of racial hierarchy that was violently enforced — from the end of reconstruction until WWII — through acts of racial terror. And in the north, that was tolerated."