Epilogue - The Legal Legacy of the Domestic Slave Trade

Summary

The Williams’ gang slaves illustrate the long history of wrongful convictions of defendants of color in US courtrooms as well as the compatibility of slavery with incarceration. Still, it was not until the demise of slavery as an institution that black and brown people became a majority of those incarcerated. That trend continues to the present. The latest innovation in the long history of racism and the carceral state is the emergence of private, for–profit prisons and the prison–industrial complex. Much like the domestic slave trade of another time, captives of color are redistributed to locations where their labor is in highest demand for the profits of others. But already by the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the historical memory of the internal slave trade was growing dim, the rich history of slavery in the very capital of the United States forgotten.