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(Translation of report file with Tokyo Stock Exchange on February 15, 2022)

Notice of Difference between Non-Consolidated Financial Results and Actual Results for the Previous Fiscal Year and Distribution of Surplus (Dividend Increase) for the Fiscal Year Ended December 31, 2021, and Abolition of Shareholder Special Benefit Plan

Hyogo, Japan-February 15, 2022-Toyo Tire Corporation (President & CEO: Takashi Shimizu)

announced today differences between its non-consolidated business results for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2021 and the actual results for the previous fiscal year. Please also be advised that its Board of Directors, at a meeting held today, resolved to propose, as follows, the year-end dividend for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2021 to the Annual General Meeting of Shareholders to be held on March 25, 2022, as well as to abolish the shareholder special benefit plan.

1. Difference between non-consolidated results for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2021 (January 1, 2021 through December 31, 2021) and actual results for the previous fiscal year

(1) Difference between non-consolidated results and actual results for the previous fiscal year

(Units: Millions of yen)

Operating

Ordinary

Net income

Net sales

Net income

per share

income

income

(yen)

Results for the previous fiscal year

(ended December 31, 2020)

184,998

20,289

18,374

2,204

14.32

(A)

Results for the current fiscal year

(ended December 31, 2021)

226,324

26,002

35,603

22,813

148.20

(B)

Amount of change (B-A)

41,326

5,172

17,229

20,608

Percentage change

22.3%

28.2%

93.8%

934.7%

(2) Reason for difference

Although the current business environment remained challenging, mainly due to soaring raw material prices and rising ocean freight rates caused by a shortage of containers, net sales, operating income, and ordinary income exceeded the previous fiscal year's figures due to strong demand for tires, especially in the North American market, a weaker yen, and the effect of cost reductions.

In addition, the amount of provision for product compensation, product compensation expenses, and loss on valuation of stocks of subsidiaries and affiliates under extraordinary loss was lower than the previous fiscal year's level. As a result, net income for the fiscal year under review exceeded the previous fiscal year's level.

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2. Distribution of surplus (year-end dividend)

(1) Details of year-end dividend

Latest dividend forecast

Results for the previous

fiscal year

Amount determined

(Announced on

(Year ended December

November 12, 2021)

31, 2020)

Reference date

December 31, 2021

Same as on the left

December 31, 2020

Dividend per share (Yen)

56

25

25

Total amount of dividends

8,620

3,848

(Million yen)

Effective date

March 28, 2022

March 31, 2021

Source of dividends

Retained earnings

Retained earnings

(2) Reason

We consider the return of profits to our shareholders as a critical management issue, and have been paying stable dividends every fiscal year. In the future, we will continue to meet the expectations of our shareholders by linking dividends to our business performance while maintaining our financial soundness and adhering to this policy of stable dividends.

While we are considering setting a consolidated dividend payout ratio of more than 30% during the period of our medium-term management plan, "Mid-term ''21 Plan" (FY2021-FY2025), we will achieve a stable and performance-linked return of profits by adjusting non-recurring and special gains and losses included in net income and linking the ratio more closely to the Company's profitability.

The Company has decided to pay a year-end dividend of 56 yen per share for the fiscal year under review. As a result, the annual dividend for the current fiscal year will be 76 yen per share (dividend payout ratio 28.3%).

This matter is scheduled to be discussed at the Annual General Meeting of Shareholders to be held on March 25, 2022.

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3. Abolition of shareholder special benefit plan

(1) Reason for abolition

We have been implementing the shareholder special benefit plan to show our gratitude to our shareholders for their daily support and to increase the attractiveness of our shares so that more people will hold our shares over the medium to long term.

However, as a result of careful discussions from the perspective of a fair return of profits to our shareholders, we have decided to concentrate on returning profits through dividends and abolish the shareholder special benefit plan.

We will continue to position the return of profits to our shareholders as a critical management issue and work to enhance our corporate value, and we appreciate your understanding in this matter.

(2) Timing of abolition

The Company will discontinue the shareholder special benefit plan after its implementation for shareholders who hold 100 shares (one unit) or more as recorded in the Company's shareholder registry as of December 31, 2021.

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Disclaimer

Toyo Tire Corporation published this content on 15 February 2022 and is solely responsible for the information contained therein. Distributed by Public, unedited and unaltered, on 15 February 2022 02:16:02 UTC.

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Toyo Tire : Notice of Difference between Non-Consolidated Financial Results and Actual Results for the Previous Fiscal Year and Distribution of...

The fault lines of todays political chasm go back to the decades that preceded the Civil War. One can see them in our geographymost of the states that will recriminalize abortion, for example, are in the old Confederacy and the rural or deindustrialized regions it influencedand in our racial division, which continues to render the country into, more or less, two camps.

A democratic society might resolve its conflicts by counting heads. But the rigid Constitution, written to protect the regressive elements of the past, still thwarts majority rule. The Senate and the Electoral College favor rural states, often producing minority rule in the Senate and the White House, which together select the Supreme Court. In the House of Representatives, the constitutional provision to count enslaved people as three-fifths of a person long supercharged the power of southern slaveholders; now gerrymandering and voter suppression, left to the unchecked will of state legislatures, thwart the principle of one man, one vote. No wonder the abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison called the founding charter a pact with the devil. When, finally, a serious political forcethe Republican Partyarose in the 1850s to address enslavement, the Supreme Court tried to freeze out abolitionism forever with the hateful Dred Scott decision.

Todays challenges are differentand no offense can be compared with the slavocracy of the antebellum periodbut anyone who cares about basic principles of democracy can see that our struggle is much the same. In 2013, the Supreme Court put the Democrats at an enormous disadvantage by gutting the Voting Rights Act and handing back elections to the minority-party-dominated rural-state legislatures. Despite repeated efforts of most of the Democratic senators, Congress has refused to pass a new voting-rights act. In several key states, Republican legislatures have set up new systems that may overturn future election results. Sometime in June, the Supreme Court is likely to rule that American women no longer have a constitutional right to refuse to bear a child, despite the fact that polls regularly show that the overwhelming majority of Americans support some level of abortion rights.

Martha S. Jones: The real origins of birthright citizenship

These are dark times, but dark times do not always prevail. Four decades after Black spokesmen told their white so-called friends in the execrable American Colonization Society that they would not be returned to Africa, and just 30-plus years after the Black activist David Walker published an appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World promising that the blacks, once started, would form a gang of tigers and lions, the newborn Republican Party won the presidency on a platform of restricting slavery. Ten years after Garrison torched his copy of the Constitution, Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. How did they do it?

The specifics of their fight are not identical to what prodemocracy Americans now face. But the work of the abolitionist movement is comprehensible and replicable. It is the closest thing we have to a blueprint for how to rescue our democracy.

Almost every tactic the mostly white abolitionists used derived from methods that Black organizers tried first. Walkers appeal, published in 1829, inspired Garrison. There was a Black convention and Lodge movement well before the first white or interracial antislavery society. But one lesson emerges loudly from history: Neither Black nor white Americans could have done it alone.

They made an alliance, and they dug in for the long haul. And they left a playbook.

I. Ideasand publishing themmatter.

In 1814, The Times of London became the first paper of note to publish off a steam machine, which ran at more than four times the speed of a manual press Less than two decades later, shortly after Garrison started The Liberator in 1831, entrepreneurial types in the antislavery movement decided to use the new technology to cheaply send copies of four antislavery publications to thousands of postal recipients all over the United States. In Georgia, enslavers set the missives on fire.

The obvious comparison is to social media today. Starting, roughly, with the Howard Dean campaign in 2004 and then Barack Obamas in 2008, the Democrats took an early lead in using the new technology of the day. But antidemocratic forces have been savvy with these tools as well. Equipped since 1998 with a captive cable-television network, Fox News, conservatives moved rapidly during the Obama era to expand into newer social media. Armies of bots, with a complete disregard for fact and extensive funding, helped the right dominate in the all-important arena of political communication; that dominance has only increased since the 2020 election.

The current climate is exhausting, but there is no reason to despair. For most of the abolitionist movement, the publications were few and subscribers scarce. The Liberator depended on the subscriptions of free Black Americans not in need of persuasion. Frederick Douglasss paper struggled to stay afloat. Most mainstream newspapers were, until the Civil War, hostile to abolition, accurately predicting that it would split the Union. The South persuaded the southern-dominated federal government to close the United States Postal Service to abolitionist literature. But with the development of the telegraph in the 1840s, national newspapers increased their reach and weighed in on the struggle. The activists just kept starting new papers, exploring different approaches and generating content until some things worked.

Read: The truth about abolition

2. Weekly meetings build solidarity.

Abolitionists quickly realized that they needed to organize in person. They had a model; a generation before, a wave of religious revival, the Second Great Awakening, had swept across the North, leaving a legacy of social activismand frequent meetings. Garrisons New England (later Massachusetts) Anti-Slavery Society met regularly for 35 years.

Because there were meetings, the members could take strength from one anothers company. When the societies dispatched speakers far and wide, those speakers had a self-perpetuating takeaway message: Start another society. Because there were meetings, new people could bring new ideas. A couple of years after the New England societys founding, a woman so beautiful and well dressed that the modest antislavery activists thought she was a spy walked into one such meeting. Lets have a fashionable bazaar, the socialite Maria Weston Chapman proposed. For a long time, it was the biggest moneymaker abolition had.

The past five years have seen a lot of reform societies: Indivisible, to organize politically across the board; Justice Democrats, to pull the Democratic Party to the left; the Sunrise Movement, to protect the environment. George Floyds murder gave new fuel to Black Lives Matter, an older organization. The left would have its own Tea Party, Indivisible proclaimed.

What is now clear is that they are in for not one election cycle but trench warfare. The antislavery societies did not have the good fortune of winning any elections for a long time, so they provide a better model than the Tea Party for how to organize in political trench warfare. Abolition had a primary goal: the immediate end of chattel slavery everywhere in the United States, and its related issue of racial equality. From time to time, other causes surfaced: defiance of the clergy as inadequately opposed to slavery, temperance, womens suffrage. The most divisive issue turned out to be whether to engage in politics or even violent resistance versus moral suasion and passive nonresistance. The lesson is clear: The branch of abolition that eschewed other causes and narrowly focused on its singular goal won out.

Knowing they were in it for the long haul and that all the institutions of government were arrayed against them, they turned to the only resource that remained: leaving their cozy meetings and organizing the people.

3. Talk and knock, far and wide.

They modeled themselves on the quintessential movement of the disenfranchisedthe middle-class British campaign to expand voting rights, which had always been limited to the landed upper classes. The British reformers used petition campaigns, gathering signatures on massive rolls of paper to pressure Parliament to let them in. In 1832, the movement succeeded. And there was a bonus. The moneyed sugar enslavers had been paying off the corrupt landowners who dominated Parliament before the suffrage reform. The newly admitted industrial and urban middle classes, uncorrupted by planter money, immediately formed the backbone of British abolition.

Why cant we use the petition like that? Garrison asked his right-hand woman, Maria Weston Chapman. Within two years, American women had more than doubled the British numbers in petitions to Congress. The regiments of women walked the sidewalks of small towns all over the North, catching a woman at home and, through her, reaching her male family members. Kitchen-table politics fed the nascent antislavery societies. When the petitions reached Congress, the southerners responded with the gag rule, refusing to accept their own citizens pleas. People who didnt care at all for abolition made alliance with the radicals in defense not of human freedom but of freedom of speech. It was the abolitionists first political victory.

Voter registration is the contemporary petition campaign. Last January, a newly enfranchised Black electorate in Georgia helped send two Democrats to the Senate. Because even Black Georgians were formally entitled to vote, and because they were not facing a monolithic two-party system of resistance, the project actually looks easier than the abolitionists venture into retail politics in the 1830s. But as the abolitionists learned, touching a new supporter is only the first step. The abolitionists established a lecture corps, the Seventy, and trained its members in preaching abolition to the communities they sought to organize. The Democrats face a worse problem than the abolitionists did, because their opponents are not only trying to govern from above, like the southern enslavers did; they are also playing their own turnout game.

The story of the great petitioner Chapman is also a cautionary tale. In the late 1830s, she followed her purist colleague Garrison into attacking the local churches as inadequately supportive of abolition. She learned a hard lesson about getting ahead of her troops when the more conventional churchgoing women in the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society pushed her out. Ultimately, the dynamic of antislavery shifted to the New Yorkcentered antislavery societies run by much more conventional leaders who did not require their members to leave their churches, however imperfect those churches were.

Read: How did we get here?

4. Make injustice visible to the public.

By the late 1840s, the little movement had won some elections, and in 1846, one congressman, David Wilmot of Pennsylvania, proposed banning slavery from the new territory conquered in the Mexican War. Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina began again to talk of secession. To paper it over, the slave-owning moderate Henry Clay proposed a compromise. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 established a system of rendition of fugitive enslaved people from the free states back into the slave states, under the control of the proslavery federal administration and bypassing all protections the free states had thrown up. Northerners were conscripted into helping hunt them down. Within weeks, the streets of Boston and New York were electrified, as long-term residents of these northern cities were dragged in chains back to slavery. Abolitionists gathered to demonstrate everywhere fugitives were being pursuedaround courthouses and jails, and in the streets that lined the routes taking them to the docks for their return to slavery. Sometimes the protesters even managed to free or buy out the captives, and when they did, they celebrated.

The return of illegal abortions may offer an opportunity for a return of these sorts of demonstrations. If Roe v. Wade is reversed, a tidal wave of severe restrictions will ensue. States will try to stop delivery of abortion pills into restrictive states and then to stop their citizens from leaving to seek abortions outside their borders. A resistance movement that truly draws from the abolition example will openly defy the state laws, encouraging abortion clinics to operate until patients are dragged, clanking, through the streets of Dallas or Detroit. Mobs of feminists, like the crowds of abolitionists and free Black rescuers did for the fugitives, can fight to defend abortion providers and the people who seek their services.

5. Get control of the Supreme Court.

The prospect of the Court gutting Roe v. Wade and returning women to reproductive conscription in half the states is bad enough, but the current Supreme Court could go far beyond that, overreaching as their predecessors did in 1857. Confronted with Dred Scott, a man whose enslaver had taken him to free territory, seven justices, led by the former slaveholder Chief Justice Roger Taney, ruled that Congress had no power to bar slavery from the territories. Taney thought the preemptive Supreme Court ruling would end the rising sectional tension. Instead, Dred Scott torpedoed the uneasy regional-nonaggression pact. Although the heated rhetoric of nonpersonhood in Taneys opinion is Dred Scotts most dramatic legacy, the threat of the slave empire imposing slavery on the rest of the country really fueled the Republican Partys rise. If the Constitution forbade Congress from excluding slavery from the territories, the same arguments would protect slaveowners rights to travel and reside in free states with the people they held. Lemmon v. New York, which raised that very issue, was on its way to the Supreme Court when Lincoln won.

Most white northerners may not have cared that much about the personhood of the Negro, as Taney called him, but they cared a lot about what Dred Scott meant for the expansion of slavery to the new territories. White working men of the North considering a move to the frontier surely werent going to tolerate competing with the enslaved people brought by their holders there as Dred Scott was maintained, or, worse, see slavery brought into their little towns in upstate New York and New England. When, after Lincoln was elected, the same slavery-loving chief justice ordered the new president to stop protecting the rail yards around Washington, D.C., by arresting Confederate insurgents and spies, Lincoln simply ignored the order. Lincoln took the very public occasion of his first inauguration to warn the Court that it had provoked resistance. If the Court had the last word, the new president announced, the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having handed too much power to unelected justices. After three proslavery Democrats stepped off the Court early in his first term, Lincoln replaced them with antislavery Republicans. The next hot case went for the president, by a vote of 54. In 1863, the Republican-led Congress created a Tenth Judicial Circuit to include newly admitted Oregon and, using the enlarged judiciary as an opportunity, it packed the Court with a tenth justice.

On January 13, 2022, the Supreme Court struck down President Joe Bidens program of mandatory vaccines or testing. (The Court narrowly upheld a mandate for the recipients of federal health-care funds.) Soon, the Court is likely to confront the claim that a fetus is a person and thus protected against abortion by the due-process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. As in Lemmon v. New York, a decision to that effect would impose the sexist regime largely centered in the southern and rural states from coast to coast. Will that all-powerful electoral demographic of white suburban women agree once again to fly away, as their mothers once flew to places like Sweden, for their abortions? The liberal movement needs to lay the groundwork so that when conservative overreach comes, it triggers a reaction like the one that greeted Dred Scott. By the time the feckless Chief Justice Taney deployed the unrepresentative power of the Supreme Court to douse abolition politics, the fire was too well laid.

6. Dont be intimidated.

Like todays right, supporters of slavery dominated the vigilante landscape during much of abolition. Pistol-wielding southerners in Congress threatening duels often drove abolition-inclined northern congressmen into retirement, lest they have to choose between their honor and their lives. In northern cities, anti-abolitionist mobs were particularly prominent when abolition started to get some traction in the 1830s. The balance of violence began to shift after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was enacted. The crucial change started, as usual, with the Black abolitionist forces, such as vigilance committees, formed to warn fugitives of the prospect of slave catchers. Led by Black leaders of the abolitionist movement, the reluctant followers of passive nonresistance one by one came to accept the need for force, as nonresistance looked more and more like a strategy only white men could afford to indulge. During the campaign of 1860, white forces of antislavery emerged on the street in brigades of caped young male Republicans called Wide Awakes. Although not expressly violent, the Wide Awakes adopted elaborate military rhetoric and uniforms and participated eagerly in clashes in places with close races.

By 1860, antislavery forces could see the constitutional order shifting to their side. If the future could be determined by the election rather than by who had the most firepower, they could anticipate victory ahead. On November 6, historians report, the Wide Awakes policed the polls. The Confederate states refused to accept the outcome of the election, and bloodshed unknown in America before or since ensued. But as Lincoln said, sorrowfully, in his second inaugural address, on the eve of the Confederate surrender at the Battle of Appomattox Court House, If God wills that it continue until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword as was said three thousand years ago so still it must be said the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.

After the 2020 presidential election, the rights vigilantism focused on the certification of the results, and it ultimately failed. The past year has been full of reports of local election officials who have retired rather than face the ongoing threats directed at them. The lesson from 1860 is that ultimately the forces of democratic self-governance must stand up to the vigilantes. Hopefully, law enforcement will play its proper role in keeping order and protecting the democratic process during the fraught years to come. But the hard lesson of abolition is that it never pays to yield to bullies. In The Liberators early years, when murderous mobs were a constant threat, Black allies guarded Lloyd Garrisons journey home from the office. We dont know if he even knew they were there.

7. Never give up.

This is the most important lesson of all. In 1838, the enslaved Marylander Frederick Bailey donned a nautical outfit and slipped aboard a train headed north, disguised as a free seaman on leave. He drew his first real breath, he later reported, when he reached New York. Just 27 years later, renamed Frederick Douglass, he appeared at the White House, the first Black man to try to attend an inaugural celebration. Show him in, President Lincoln told the scandalized guards. There is no one, he said to Douglass, whose opinion means more to me.

See more here:

The Fight for Democracy Will Be a Long, Long Haul - The Atlantic

If your early history education was anything like mine, we didnt learn much about the transatlantic slave trade before college. It was a Very Bad Thing that operated in a triangular fashion, that was made clear, but pedagogically speaking the late 18th through mid-19th century was little more than the quick intake of breath between weeks of waxing rhapsodic on wars for the soul of the nation. Past the ratification of the Constitution, there might be a little Monroe Doctrine here, some slavery and abolition there, occasional forays into the Second Great Awakening and Seneca Falls, but generally the nearly six-decade intermission between the Revolutionary and Civil Wars never seemed to merit more than a few hours of hasty overview.

However briefly, the slave trade did at least come up regularly, or at least biannually, usually in the form of a short reading about the Middle Passage. The images of abolitionist literature that accompanied this homework were likewise perennial: an enslaved man begging his freedom, chained, kneeling, a supplicant (aka Josiah Wedgwoods Am I not a man and a brother) or neatly diagrammed cross-sections of hand-drawn boats, their precise outlines filled to bleeding over with hundreds of cramped Black figures rendered small enough to stay abstractions. Less often, all of this was accompanied by a date, 1808, the year legislation banning U.S. participation in the international slave trade went into effect, the very earliest moment the Constitution would allow. I got my Black American history at home, but if someone had asked Young Me a question as simple on its face as when the slave trade ended, I would have somewhat confidently guessed 1808.

Much has been written detailing what students in the United States dont learn about slavery and the slave trade in school. In our contentious educational landscape, speculating on how history curricula might be reimagined to explicitly discuss the transatlantic tradeboth as context for U.S. slavery and in its own rightmight sound indulgent, or outright laughable. But feasibility can be a dangerous metric. It has the power to replace what ought to be done with individual perceptions of, and limitations on, what can be done. It's the cudgel of the status quo, beating back those who are willing to imagine a different world.

In 1808, ending the United States de facto participation in the transatlantic slave trade wasnt feasible. And it certainly wasnt the end of the transatlantic slave trade, in the U.S. or anywhere else.

There was plenty of political support for the new law, passed in 1807. Most states had banned the international slave trade decades earlier when they were still colonies in revoltby this time South Carolina was the only state that permitted it. For over a decade, ships flying American colors had been prohibited from engaging in the trade. Despite being an enslaver himself, addressing a body filled with plenty more, in 1806 President Jefferson had urged Congress to end the violations of human rights that was the international slave trade as quickly as allowed, acknowledging that, although no law you may pass can take prohibitory effect till [sic] the first day [of 1808], yet the intervening period is not too long to prevent, by timely notice, expeditions which cannot be completed before that day.

If that seems optimistic, it was. Though subsequent legislation would build on and strengthen the 1807 act, adding teeth to policy one law at a time was slow going, and those who couldnt envision a way of life or economic system without enslavement continued trafficking. The international trade in the enslaved to the United States persisted, illicitly, and sharply increased in the decade before 1860. Though building slave ships had been illegal since 1794, the Chesapeake region, particularly in and around Baltimore, was a ready supplier of the best slave ships on the water until at least the 1820s. And even without unlawful international slave trading, the United States maintained an extensive, remorseless domestic slave trade until the Civil War.

Not entirely effective then, and also not firstDenmark abolished the slave trade in 1792, though they opted to gradually phase it out so as not to disrupt colonial plantation economies in the West Indies, meaning the restriction didnt take full effect until 1803. This unlikely pair of early adopters did share one quality, thoughthey both understood that while slave trading was certainly profitable, it was nothing compared to the potential of slave breeding.

And that, at least in the United States, is where cotton comes in.

Harvesting the quintessential crop of U.S. slavery was backbreaking, incredibly onerous work, but sugar, the commodity that ruled plantations in southern Louisiana and farther south throughout the Caribbean and Americas, provided a litany of ways to die. The most vicious driver was arguably not a man in a field, but figures in a distant ledger; sugar planters found it both expedient and profitable to simply accept the maiming, burning, and dying and budget for replacement labor accordingly. (Under the plantation system, the average life expectancy for an enslaved sugar mill worker was seven years, and harvesting remains dangerous work today). Sugar production was also frequently, though not exclusively, regarded as mens work. This perception, alongside the rapid turnover required by all the untimely death and sustained by the ongoing import of the enslaved, created massive gender imbalances on most sugar producing plantations.

By contrast, most states produced cotton, not sugar. Enslavement still murdered untold numbers in the U.S.; it just wasnt producing cotton that killed them. Harvesting and processing cotton did not carry the same risks as sugar, nor was it thought to require exclusively (or even majority) male labor. A balanced enslaved population enabled the United States to maintain and expand its enslaved population through natural increase, meaning that even reproduction rates reduced by the conditions of enslavement were such that a once-trafficked labor force had become self-sustaining. What the blandness of the phrase obscures is a system in which enslaved reproduction was frequently anything but naturalreadily coerced, often forced, and yes, bred. Add to this (a rather tortured interpretation of) the English legal principle of partus sequitur ventrem that which is born follows the wombmeaning in the United States, enslaved women passed their status as human chattel to their infants and, well, no imports required.

Over the course of two and a half centuries British slave traders trafficked well over 3 million enslaved people, second only to Portugal and Brazil combined.

Natural increase wasnt happening for European empires and their increasingly fractious colonial holdingsat least not those whose coffers relied on the production of sugarand many within the planter class wholeheartedly believed they would never, could never, afford to give up enslaved labor. Towards the end of the 18th century, as abolitionist campaigns in Britain surged, slave traders and profiteers in Spain and colonial Cuba, Portugal, and colonial Brazil, even Jamaica, Englands most profitable slaving colony, likely assumed that though a few small reforms to satisfy the rabble-rousers might be forthcoming, not much would fundamentally change.

Though the English werent the first transatlantic slave tradersthat dubious distinction belongs to Prince Henry the Navigator and the Portugueseby the end of the 1700s, they had become the most prolific. John Hawkins ushered England into the slave market in the mid-1500s, snagging a knighthood from Elizabeth I in the process, and over the course of the next two and a half centuries British slave traders trafficked well over 3 million enslaved people, second only to Portugal and Brazil combined. By the beginning of the 1800s, the value added by the slave trade likely exceeded a tenth of the entire British economy. And yet, in 1807, Britain banned the slave trade. If Denmark and the United States, whom Britain slips between in the order of slave trade abolition, were comparatively small players whose shifts lacked much worldwide market impact, Britain was quite the opposite. Despite the timingthe empires ban went into effect little more than a half a year before its former coloniesthe two nations could not have arrived at the new policy more differently.

Nineteenth century African liberation, as conceived of by the British and emulated elsewhere, was not a freedom project.

The English campaign for slave trade abolition was a contentious, prolonged, and grassroots affair. Beginning in the late 1700s, a diverse coalition of British abolitionists used everything from boycotts, petitions, bills, anti-slavery literature, even the 18th century version of data analytics to try to turn the tide against this vast, inexorable, and well-funded oppression. Winning the legislative battle in 1807 didnt effectively stop the trade; those unwilling to outright defy the law could still profit indirectly. Though the quantity of British slave ships dropped precipitously, they were soon replaced by ships from nations that scrupled less, or not at all. The money was just too good.

Passionate anti-slavery advocates and the policymakers theyd (somewhat) successfully convinced found themselves strangely and suddenly united. Those who believed the trade was a moral wrong and those, less high-minded, motivated by economic concerns agreed that the deed was done and that having given up the British market share in slave trading, other nations should be encouraged to do likewise. If Britain couldnt have a slave trade, nobody could.

Enforcing the law fell to the Royal Navyturns out, for the slave trade to stop, someone had to actually stop slavers. The U.S. ban had authorized their Navy to detain slavers, but there it ended; the States wouldnt even authorize a suppression force until 1819. By contrast, the British had two ships off the African coast within months of their 1807 ban and wished them happy hunting. British ships in the Caribbean didnt even have to be sent patrolling for slavers, as their station was already a major battleground in the Napoleonic Wars. The conflict was the perfect pretext, as slavers flying enemy colors could be boarded and captured under the rules of war.

Of course wars, even wars against Napoleon, do eventually end, and in the wake of Waterloo in 1815, Britain was left with a problem: It didnt actually have the right to board foreign ships, as doing so during peace time was a possible prelude right back to war. The Royal Navy could still detain ships under British colors, but what about everyone else? The Congress of Vienna, begun in November the previous year, presaged years of inducements, cajoling, and threats on the part of Britain to obtain the right to detain, inspect, and condemn slavers, no matter what their country of origin, all while the Royal Navy continued to patrol. The crux was the right of search, the right to police the seas, and though both France and the U.S., still fresh from wars with England, refused outright, treaties would emerge between Britain and an increasing number of countries. Armed with these agreements, a squadron made up of six to eight Royal Navy vesselsand, when those often proved too slow to keep up with their quarry, supplemented by repurposed slave shipseventually coalesced along the coast of Western Africa, a place so inexorably tied up with the trade that it had for centuries simply been known as the Slave Coast.

Suppression still took decades of work on multiple fronts. Support for active suppression from England, though still vocal, waned over the years in the face of the trades seeming indefatigabilitymillions of pounds had been thrown at the problem, the lives of British sailors had been lost, and for what? Crucially, by the mid-19th century, efforts to dismantle the trade coincided with the rise of scientific racism in Europe, and though Britain would treat with some European powers (and the U.S.) as equals, using remuneration to lure the more cash-strapped empires of continental Europe into compliance, there was little compunction about deploying embargo and naval blockade when newly-formed states in the Americas or the leaders of African tribal nations did not comply. By the 1850s, thanks to renewed effort and a hodgepodge of treaties and agreements (both mutual and unilateral) with British hands all over them, the international slave trade could be said to no longer exist on the industrial scale of the previous few centuries, though it did continue on a smaller scale until the first multilateral general treaty to suppress the slave trade was signed in 1890 at the Brussels Conference.

There was no mechanism of enforcement in this new agreement, but other disruptive elements were at play. By the late 19th century, the Scramble for Africathe partitioning of nearly the entire continent between seven European powers (Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and Britain)was on, and though each of these nations would approve the Brussels Act, the overarching concern of these signatories was less human rights and more colonial might. Its not entirely bleak: Some historians have sourced the origins of the United Nations to the Brussels Conference and found the foundations of international human rights law in the international courts convened to adjudicate the fate of captured slave ships. And what we now think of as the transatlantic slave trade did, ultimately, end. However, the moral ambivalence, the racism, and the greed shared by colonialist powers would ultimately bring nations divided by the battle over continuing the licit slave trade into consensus, patting themselves on the collective back for exploiting the resources and residents of Africa without the expedient of chains.

Its difficult to fathom how men made rich by enslaved people assumed others were keen to give the practice up.

Its not surprising, really, that suppression paved the way for modern colonialism; 19th century African liberation, as conceived of by the British and emulated elsewhere, was not a freedom project. In fact, during the first half of the 1800s, at the height of suppression, those liberated by British suppression efforts soon found that they were actually recaptives, neither technically owned nor free to leave. Their choices if liberated in then-British colony Sierra Leone were resettlement in the colony to be assigned farms or menial work, conscription into a segregated regiment of the Royal Marines (for the men), and apprenticeship. The unfortunates slated for apprenticeship were shipped to where theyd been headed when the British captured their slaver-prisonsthe Caribbean. Held for a term not to exceed fourteen years and often longer, apprenticeship ruthlessly extended the lag between freedom promised and freedom delivered, and these apprentices toiled and died in the sugar cane fields of Britains island holdings until the system was abolished in 1838, five years after slavery was abolished in most of the empire and persisted elsewhere even longer. (In 1833 the British government passed a slavery ban that in 1837 also threw appeasement money at enslavers to compensate them for their losses, passing the bill to British taxpayers, who finally paid it off in 2015.)

So when did the slave trade end? Speaking broadly, the international slave trade never ended. It was driven underground, it changed and evolved and made some geographic shifts, but the trade in non-free people continues to this day.

Looking specifically to the transatlantic slave trade, it depends on how you measure results: by the standards of the treaty-makers or the exploited, according to the law or to realitybut it definitely wasnt 1808. Understanding that the slave trade did not magically disappear with the flick of a few quills and the snap of (American) fingers helps illuminate the long legacy of that oppression, as it manifests in the commodities we consume daily and for those still reckoning with the economic and political repercussions of European mercantilism, capitalism, paternalism, and racism.

There are other things we dont learn when this history isnt taught. The fact that at least some of the American politicians who enacted the 1808 ban believed that it would eventually starve the life out of Southern American slavery is striking in its naivet and shortsightedness. Its difficult to fathom how men made rich by enslaved people assumed others were keen to give the practice up. Its easy to assume why they didnt do more.

When history is gutted of accuracy for comfort or convenience, were robbed of the knowledge that wishing for better isnt enough. Maybe thats the point. But see: no system, no matter how longstanding or entrenched, is inevitable and unchangeable. Systemic problems require multi-faceted solutions, and a less abridged retelling of the transatlantic slave trade demonstrates that even in the face of epic, unmitigated suffering, the effort to craft those solutions is going to be unpopular, contentious, questionably executed, unbearably prolongedand still entirely vital. That were here, even now, is proof that the cost is worth it; its also proof that the work is not done.

Im honestly not sure if its comforting or daunting to accept that that redressing oppression is struggle measured in generations and counted in days.

But it is history.

A.E. Rooks is a two-time Jeopardy! champion with completed degrees in theater, law, and library and information science, and forthcoming degrees in education and human sexuality. Her/their new book THE BLACK JOKE: The True Story of One Ship's Battle Against the Slave Trade is published by Scribner.

Link:

Did You Study the Slave Trade in School or Were You Out That Day? - The Daily Beast

SARATOGA SPRINGS Good things come to those who wait just a little bit.

Jacqueline Madison, president of the North Country Underground Railroad Historical Association (NCUGRHA), made a pitch for a documentary about the historic Haff/Smith property in Peru to the John B. Moore Documentary Studies Collaborative (MDOCS) hosted second Community Pitch Session in November 2021.

The historical documentary will span across the generations of the Union Road farm inhabitants/abolitionists, the Rev. Abraham Haff, son of an enslaver, and Stephen Keese Smith, a documented Underground Railroad station master and Quaker.

Although we dont have any documentary evidence that shows Abraham Haff used the facilities, if he was an abolitionist, my guess is that some place on that farm was used to hide slaves, Madison said.

Even if it was just temporary.

CREATIVE PITCHES

Ten community organizations and collectives vied to become the new MDOCS Co-Creation Initiative Round I Partners.

With so many excellent pitches, it was a difficult decision, Angela Beallor, Documentarian in Community Co-Creation, MDOCS, said in a press release.

The selection committee was comprised of representatives of MDOCS along with Jamel Mosely, an award-winning visual storyteller in the mediums of video and photography, and co-founder of Collectiveffort, a Troy-based creative agency and coworking space, and Krystle Nowhitney Hernandez, deputy director of LifeWorks Community Action in Saratoga Springs.

We are excited to announce the new MDOCS Co-Creation Initiative Round I partners, Beallor said.

The MDOCS Co-Creation Initiative supports collaborations that connect community groups with Skidmore faculty and staff as they pursue documentary projects.

SUPPORTED GROUPS

The four organizations that will join the first Round I partner cohort and will work closely with MDOCS and other Skidmore faculty/staff in the coming year:

Harm Reduction Works - HRW a project of HRH43, Harm Reduction Works-HRW is a fully scripted, harm reduction-based self-help/mutual aid group originally conceived as an alternative to abstinence only types of organizations like 12 step etc.

Kanatsiohareke Mohawk Community the sustainable, living Onkwehon:we community grounded in Rotinonhsionni culture - its language, land, and social structure.

North Country Underground Railroad Historical Association a center that researches, preserves and interprets the history of the Underground Railroad, slavery and abolition in upstate New York.

The Peoples Voice a not-for-profit news media group addressing the concerns of marginalized groups in Saratoga Springs, NY and the greater Capital Region.

These organizations will receive $5,000 to support a year of collaborative documentary project development alongside relationship building with Skidmore faculty and staff, Beallor said.

MDOCS will also provide other in-kind support including production resources, facilitation, consultation from members of the MDOCS team, and participation in other CCI programming.

ADDOMS HISTORY

NCUGRHA will use its monetary award to publish an update of late Clinton County Historian and Beekmantown Town Historian Addie Shields 1979 book on the the Rev. John Townsend Addoms (1782-1869) homestead and the Underground Railroad in Clinton County.

We wanted to update that book because more information has come out. In doing so, because the book sort of parallels what were doing with this documentary video, Madison said.

We will take those funds and utilize them for publishing the book, so kind of a joint effort in that case. The book, though, will showcase others. It will not focus on John Haff or even Stephen Keese Smith. It will talk about the area before Europeans arrived, which will include the Indigenous people who lived here, and move into the proprietors and those who were enslavers and from there to those individuals that participated in the Abolitionist Movement and finally into people of color, free and enslaved, in the area. This will be all up until the Civil War ended, so around 1865.

This will be an expansion of what we have learned since Addie wrote the book, which really focused on John Townsend Addoms. He was an abolitionist in the Beekmantown area.

Shields mission was to get the Addoms homestead listed on the National Historic Register.

But unfortunately, the house burned down around that time, Madison said.

In addition, MDOCS will support collaborations by Sanctuary Radio | Hudson Mohawk Magazine related to the oral history of labor and radio production as well as a documentary collaboration between Saratoga Black Lives Matter and Professor Yelena Biberman-Ocakli.

OTHER PROJECTS

The Co-Creation Initiative invites community members, organizations, collectives, and interest groups of any stripe or type to form a collaborative working group or cluster collaborative with Skidmore faculty or staff partners, to brainstorm and ultimately develop projects that:

1. Have an element of nonfiction storytelling in any medium photo, video, theater etc.

2. Enrich and complicate our local, regional and global dialogues, by addressing important issues and especially those that need a deeper examination

3. Bring people into new relationships, across disparate organizations, communities and other lines of difference, cemented by making together, or co-creating.

Ultimately, we will have a documentary, Madison said.

It can be used not just for us to do presentations, but it can be utilized and available to schools and places that want to learn about the local history and maybe even beyond because like I said, this is a complete story that goes from enslaver all the way down to protector.

Email Robin Caudell:

rcaudell@pressrepublican.com

Twitter:@RobinCaudell

We are making critical coverage of the coronavirus available for free. Please consider subscribing so we can continue to bring you the latest news and information on this developing story.

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Documentary on historic Peru farm in the works - Plattsburgh Press Republican

Students awarded financial aid for PE classes received reduced-cost 3-day passes to Jiminy Peak. (Kira Hernandez/THE WILLIAMS RECORD)

During the chilly weeks of Winter Study, time is no longer a major obstacle to embracing the outdoors but for some, wealth inhibits access to winter activities that require extensive gear and experience. The Williams Outing Club (WOC) aims to increase accessibility for their Physical Education (PE) winter programming, which allows for financial aid students who are beginners in skiing or snowboarding to receive aid for ski passes and rental equipment.

Skiing is something that people love to do, and its a great winter activity, but its also incredibly exclusive and expensive, WOC President Charlotte Jones 22 said. Were able to make things more accessible.

Since WOC began providing financial aid for its winter PE classes in 2016, the financial aid program has grown from awarding aid to 40 students to 78 this year. This is the first time since the creation of Facilitators for Allocating Student Taxes (FAST) that the College has held a winter study, and therefore the first time that WOC has requested funds for this program from FAST the student body in charge of distributing funds to registered student organizations (RSOs) since it replaced College Council (CC) in March 2020. But this year, an increase in the number of students pursuing this resource caused complications, and WOC was nearly unable to provide aid.

WOC Director Scott Lewis emphasized the importance of this years WOCs winter PE offerings as an outlet for students during a Winter Study that saw heightened COVID-19 restrictions.This is not only physical education this is wellness, he said. If we can offer something to get people out, I think thats a great thing for everyone.

Students in WOCs financial aid program this winter, the majority of whom were first-years and sophomores, were covered either fully or partially based on demonstrated financial need, and received aid for a three-time ski pass to Jiminy Peak, transportation, and rental equipment. Provided that they attended all three sessions, they could earn one PE credit toward fulfilling the Colleges four-credit graduation requirement.

In past years, WOC has received funding for its year-round programming from a variety of campus organizations, including FAST. According to the Sector Allocations tab of the FAST website, WOC is designated under the Club Sports and Competitive Teams category, which is collectively 31 percent of FASTs total budget. WOCs programming and equipment have historically been funded by the Athletic Department, CC, FAST, and WOC Membership sales, Jones wrote in an email to the Record. Some larger programs, such as the new bouldering facility, are financially supported by endowments managed by the Development Office.

FAST came into existence in March 2020, sandwiched between the Colleges move to remote instruction due to COVID and the abolition of CC. Essence Perry 22, an at-large representative for FAST who was involved in dismantling CC and forming FASTs procedures, cited issues of transparency and equity as reasons for CCs dissolution.

Perry said that in one instance, CC denied funding for Black Previews, a 2019 program that allowed current Black students to introduce the College to prospective Black students. Thats not equity, Perry said. People were concerned that [CC] was denying groups who rightfully deserve the money they pay into the system. Part of the effort was to redistribute funds and make it transparent.

She also expressed discontent with CCs lack of transparency after reviewing old CC accounts during the change to FAST. [CC] could tell a group that there was no money left but there was so much money left, she said. Transparency and equity were the main reasons This has gone through iterations but weve really tried to make it as easy as possible.

Perry said she sees FASTs constitution and bylaws, which are public on the FAST website, as a way that allocating funds has been made more transparent. For us, its a yes process, she said. If we cant say yes based on our bylaws, we want to work with you to make it a yes somehow.

Jones, who was serving as WOC treasurer during the switch from CC to FAST, explained how the immediacy and scale of WOCs needs made funding complicated under both governing bodies. For example, WOC did not receive approval for funding for new bikes and bike racks in time to use them last fall. We were able to ask from FAST, but we werent able to use [the bikes] in the fall she said. And we were hoping to, but it took a while to get through the system.

One initiative built into FAST are office hours, which have taken place on Zoom this year due to COVID, where student treasurers of RSOs can meet with the five FAST student representatives to ask questions about budget requests, reimbursement forms, and other concerns. Spencer Huang 24, the FAST representative in charge of allocating funds for club sports and competitive teams, sees office hours as a way to foster communication with FAST. Its easier for people, he said. Usually we dont get too many, but we get a couple people per meeting who come in and ask questions, and we clarify.

But some students say that they still struggle to communicate with FAST. According to Sam Holmes 22, WOC Vice President and Treasurer, office hours were less convenient because of his practice schedule for the mens crew team. It was hard because I couldnt make a lot of meetings, and I couldnt be the only treasurer that was doing an athletic [commitment at that time], he speculated. To interact with FAST, you dont have to go to office hours you can submit a request without going but its a little more difficult, because you cant answer any questions, and they have their due diligence and they have to make sure your [proposals] are real.

According to Jones, WOC and FAST were in conversation with each other during FASTs formation to communicate changes that might occur in the switch from CC, including potential changes in allocations for financial aid. We were informed that FAST would not be funding financial aid for skiing, but that they said they had spoken to the financial aid office and that financial aid would cover the cost of skiing, Jones wrote in an email to the Record. FAST claimed that we could no longer use FAST funds to pay student equipment room workers under the same principles. We followed up with Financial Aid almost immediately after the meeting, and we were told that a) FAST had not confirmed skiing financial aid with them and b) the Financial Aid Office is not able to cover skiing financial aid, as they cover so many other things.

She continued by outlining the communications that have occurred to ensure that financial aid for winter programs could still be provided. The Financial Aid [Office] is incredibly helpful in helping us determine how much aid WOC members receive, and we are really grateful to be working with them, she wrote. We have repeatedly emailed and spoken with FAST representatives about solidifying a new source for aid over the past two years, and we have never gotten a clear answer. As a result, we have been meeting with other offices by ourselves over the past six months as we think that skiing financial aid is really beneficial to the student body.

Lewis and Holmes characterized a similar understanding of FASTs policies but the FAST bylaws and constitution make no mention of provisions or limits on providing financial aid. In response to the Record inquiry, Perry wrote in an email Im not aware of the financial aid bylaw, but FAST can provide funding for groups to run events of all types, especially events that are geared towards affinity groups, such as low-income students.

Despite initially seeming like FAST would not be able to provide the funding needed to provide aid, in December 2021, Holmes secured funding for the Winter Study PE classes in a last-minute bargaining meeting with FAST, in which FAST agreed to provide $4000 if WOC subsidized costs with $3500 of membership sales; an agreement that enabled the financial aid program to continue this January. That call was very easy, and it worked out really well, Holmes said. But it just happened very late.

Jones also mentioned inconsistencies with communicating with receiving funds from FAST across WOCs offerings. We tried all of our options and really needed [the financial aid] to happen, Jones said. [Holmes] went back in, and within a half hour had the funds. But with [funding] new bikes, it took us almost a month.

Its just really hard to tell what youre going to get, Jones said. Its unclear to me what the system is.

Perry provided rationale for FASTs initial decision to defer the funding. [During] conversation in December, we did not force WOC to subsidize this themselves, they actually came to us with the proposed amount of $4500, she wrote in an email to the Record. We tried to find alternative funding sources (such as reaching out to financial aid and OCL), but unfortunately, we could not find funding.

This led us to give them funding in December when they reached back out, she wrote. In addition, the fact WOC collects dues is against FASTs bylaws, as all events funded by us should be free, we still provide WOC funding, Jones wrote. We have, however, made an exception for WOC, and in return, they use some of their collected funds to help offset high-cost items. Unlike any club, WOC has access to funds from multiple places such as student dues, Athletics, and FAST. Just this year, WOC has already received over $20,000 from FAST.

Since FAST and WOC split the cost of funding for the program, the funding that they were both able to provide has had tangible effects. Liv Chambers 25, who received financial aid for beginner downhill ski lessons, characterized her experience skiing in the WOC program this winter as a positive one.

Id only ever been skiing twice before the program, Chambers said. I had fun doing [the lessons] with my friends It made me feel more connected to them and the outdoor experience at Williams.

Perry expressed hope in FASTs ability to better represent the student population. Ive been really proud to say that FAST has been a majority POC organization for the last few years, she said. I want that to keep happening and for students to feel like this is their money, and they are paid for their labor and can effectively do their job.

In the future, Perry says she envisions students shaping the trajectory of FAST. I want more transparency and for [FAST] to be even easier for students to navigate, she said. FAST is not supposed to be like an old document that is sedentary if students are uncomfortable, its something that is intentionally designed so that they can change it, and students have extreme autonomy in making those changes.

Read more from the original source:

WOC, FAST provide financial aid funding for winter programs but not without complications - The Williams record

A bill proposed last year in the Massachusetts state legislature would enact a five-year moratorium on the design and construction of prisons and jails in Massachusetts. The bill was reported out favorably from the Joint Committee on State Administration and Regulatory Oversight on Jan. 24 and is now being considered by the Senate Committee on Ways and Means, bringing it one step closer to Governor Charlie Bakers desk.

Written by formerly incarcerated women at Families for Justice as Healing and the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls, and filed by State Senator Jo Comerford of the Hampshire, Franklin and Worcester district, the bill aims to reallocate funds from prison construction to restorative justice efforts and specifically halt plans to build a new womens prison in Massachusetts that is estimated to cost over $50 million.

This bill is tremendously timely, as the state has already signed a contract for a strategic plan and study and design of a potentially new womens prison in Massachusetts, Comerford said in testimony to the Joint Committee on State Administration and Regulatory Oversight. I respectfully say we must act now.

While it would prevent any expansion of existing facilities, the moratorium would not interrupt funding for routine maintenance and repairs on existing prisons and jails.

Between 2011 and 2019, the incarcerated population decreased by 21% while spending on prison construction and maintenance increased by 25%, according to a fact sheet from the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls and Families for Justice as Healing.

Comerford testified that Massachusetts prisons operate only at around half their capacity and that the states incarceration rate has dropped by 43% between 2012 and 2021.

Instead of borrowing and paying interest for a new prison, the commonwealth should invest in proven and effective community-based alternatives to address the root causes of incarceration, she said.

State Representative Erika Uyterhoeven of the 27th Middlesex District, a petitioner of the bill, said that the moratorium on prison construction is one of her top priorities in the area of criminal justice.

My view is that prisons dont actually solve the problems that their proponents seek to solve, if we really are concerned about public safety, and particularly our communitys health, as well as creating a world where we actually address the root causes of these issues, she told the Daily. We know that prisons, in every possible way, actually make the problem worse.

Uyterhoeven, who advocates for prison abolition, said that her opportunities to visit prisons and speak with incarcerated people are one reason she supports the moratorium so strongly. She cited cases like the one uncovered by the Boston Globes Spotlight investigative team at the Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center, a maximum security prison.

The Globe reported numerous instances of retributionary abuse of prisoners by correctional officers in the wake of an assault on officers in January 2020 and found a severe lack of public access to information about correctional practices.

When you look at the Department of Corrections and what they do, particularly at the state level, the complete lack of accountability and how they treat the incarcerated and people behind the wall is, just frankly, immoral and atrocious, Uyterhoeven said. [Giving] more state money to this unaccountable entity is just a complete non-starter.

Uyterhoeven said she recognizes that many people disagree with her on the right way to solve the issues related to mass incarceration and that the bill makes space for problem solving.

I think everyone can agree that to continue this system as it stands without any sort of oversight, accountability or change is absolutely unacceptable, she said. We have to stop, we have to put the brakes on [what were doing] and were not moving forward until we figure out a better way.

Mallory Hanora, executive director of Families for Justice as Healing, said that the bill offers a chance for the state to try new methods of preventing incarceration and improving outcomes for families and communities.

We have to pass the Jail and Prison Construction Moratorium Bill this session to stop the new womens prison and shift our states focus to investing in what women, our children, and our families need to thrive, Hanora wrote in an email to the Daily.

Families for Justice as Healing leads the Building Up People Not Prisons Coalition, which works to oppose increases in spending on incarceration and advocates shifting resources toward Black and Brown communities.

Hanora echoed Uyterhoevens characterization of the bill as an opportunity to buy time to discover new solutions.

Passing the Moratorium Bill gives us the breathing room to let this work take root and flourish, Hanora wrote. It frees up the resources we must then reallocate to housing, healing, education, and economic development to stop the flow of women and girls into incarceration.

Read more:

Proposed bill would pause prison construction in Mass. for 5 years - Tufts Daily

Gov. Greg Abbott is seeking a third term in office but will first need to overcome 7 primary opponents, while 5 Democrats battle in their primary race. A Democrat has not won a governor's race in Texas since 1990.

The Wichita Falls native and former Texas Attorney General is seeking a third 4-year term in office. If he wins, he'll tie the record for a Texas governor. Abbott has made border security and defending law enforcement his top priorities as he faces the most competitive Republican primary of his 30-year career in politics.

A retired lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army, West served one term in Congress in Florida and was the chairman of the Republican Party of Texas last year. A strident critic of Gov. Abbott, West has taken a strong stance against COVID-19 restrictions and mandates.

The Dallas native runs a commercial real estate business and served one term in the Texas Senate. He has been calling for tougher border policies and the abolition of property taxes.

An attorney from Wise County who has never run for office before and has advocated loosening Texas restrictions on gambling to produce revenues that could lower property taxes.

The Humble High School graduate runs Harrison Landscape and Design in Plano and is pitching himself as an independent, anti-establishment candidate who will support legalized marijuana and expanding gambling in Texas.

The Morgans Point resident is a medical marijuana advocate who has never held elective office.

Not the former governor, but a computer engineer from near Fort Worth who had never run for office and does not appear to have a campaign website.

The New Jersey native is a comedian and entertainer who is campaigning as a political outsider.

The former Congressman and city council member from El Paso narrowly lost to U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz in 2018. ORourke has focused his campaign on fixing the power grid, attracting jobs and improving education.

A retired Seguin resident who has never run for public office before.

The Beaumont pastor has previously run for lieutenant governor and U.S. Senate and is the president of the Beaumont branch of the NAACP. Hes said education and helping teachers will be his priority.

The former journalist with KUT radio in Austin is making her first run for public office. She was raised in Mexico where her parents were American missionaries.

Incumbent Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick is facing a handful of opponents in the GOP primary for his seat, but hes widely considered the favorite with a commanding fundraising lead. Three Democrats, meanwhile, are facing off for the chance to oppose him.

The Texas radio host-turned-lawmaker is seeking a third term at lieutenant governor. Patrick has championed some of Texas most conservative legislation over the years and has been endorsed by former President Donald Trump.

Bullis hopes to bring a biblical worldview back to Texas through conservative legislative action, his website states.

Miller is the founder of the Texas Nationalist Movement, which has advocated for the secession of Texas from the United States since 2005. He has published two books on the subject, including 2018s TEXIT: Why and How Texas Will Leave the Union.

Bradford most recently served as president of the Texas Eagle Forum, a conservative grassroots organization that engages and trains activists across the state.

Sorrells is a small business owner whose campaign is centered on individual rights.

Vance is a retired Marine and Purple Heart recipient who most recently worked at an Austin cable news station.

Beckley, a pet shop owner from Carrollton, is a two-term member of the Texas House of Representatives. She is ranked among the most liberal members of the chamber.

Brailey, a longtime educator and social justice activist, is the vice chair of the Texas Democratic Party.

Collier, a Houston accountant, is vying for a rematch against Patrick after losing to the lieutenant governor by fewer than 5 percentage points in 2018.

Paxton is contending with serious challengers from his own party for the first time in his career, plus four Democrats. His foes cast Paxton's ongoing legal troubles as a liability and proof that he lacks integrity. Still, Paxton remains popular with primary voters.

Former Harris County criminal court-at-law judge who switched parties in late 2018 after he broke with members of his party to support poor defendants advocating for affordable or cash-free bond for low-level offenders.

Former ACLU attorney from Brownsville whose campaign is focused on health care, voting rights and reproductive rights.

The mediator and former Galveston mayor who wants to create a civil rights division in the office and use the office to lead a statewide effort to legalize recreational marijuana.

Nationally known civil rights attorney who has represented George Floyd's family and other victims of police violence says he wants to address the intersection of untreated mental health and police encounters.

Raynor is a Dallas attorney who wants to improve the office's process for collection of child support. He says he'd advocate to dismiss Paxton's criminal securities fraud case because it's "too distracting."

The two-term incumbent, endorsed by former President Donald Trump, is seeking a third term amid lingering legal troubles, including a more than six-year-old indictment on felony securities fraud charges and an ongoing FBI investigation into bribery and other corruption allegations by his former aides.

The sitting Texas Land Commissioner and son of former Florida governor Jeb Bush has highlighted a need to improve border security and human trafficking prosecution.

Outspoken Tea Party-aligned Congressman and former judge was one of 147 Republicans to vote to overturn the results of the 2020 US presidential election. He also sued former Vice President Mike Pence to try to force him to reject electoral votes cast for President Joe Biden.

Former justice on the Texas Supreme Court, the highest civil court in the state, Guzman made history in 2016 as the first Latina elected to statewide office with 5 million votes, the most in Texas in that year's election.

Two-term comptroller and longtime state politician Glenn Hegar goes after a third term, hoping his record of fiscal conservancy will vault him over a field of mostly Democratic challengers.

Dudding is a public accountant who previously ran for a Texas House seat in 2020. She has called for diversifying the state's revenue stream by legalizing marijuana, which has brought in new tax dollars in other states.

Hegar is a former state representative and senator first elected as comptroller in 2014. He has been a leading abortion rights opponent and most recently pushed to roll back some transparency measures around the state's large corporate tax break program, Chapter 313.

Goloby owns a wireless remote monitoring business in the oil and gas industry. He has been critical of the 313 program and has also been critical of race-centered curriculum in public schools.

Mahoney is an attorney and writer in Austin who ran against Hegar in 2018. Mahoney has worked for the Texas Observer and served as an Austin Community College trustee.

Born in Puerto Rico, Vega is now a leadership coach in Katy and has volunteered with local voter and community outreach efforts. He originally entered the congressional race for District 22, but dropped out in December to run for comptroller instead.

Eight Republicans and four Democrats are running to succeed Land Commissioner George P. Bush as head of the Texas General Land Office, which administers disaster recovery after major storms, oversees the Alamo, manages Texas' state-run veterans homes and contributes oil and gas royalties to the state's $44 billion public school endowment.

Armenta is a Houston business consultant who says he would work to improve the quality of Texas veterans homes and "fight to ensure the true history of the Alamo is preserved for future Texans."

Avila is a former Immigation and Customs Enforcement agent who in 2020 published a book about his encounter with a Mexican drug cartel that left his partner dead. He has framed himself as an "outsider who is unafraid to take on the establishment."

Buckingham, an eye surgeon from Lakeway who has served in the Texas Senate since 2017, is backed by former president Donald Trump, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz and dozens of her fellow GOP state lawmakers. On her website, she vows to "protect our proud Texas history and fight back against the Biden Administration's assault on our state's oil and natural gas industry."

Lopez is a San Antonio attorney who handles real estate, probate and personal injury cases.

Martinez is a conservative activist from San Antonio who has twice run unsuccessfully for the Texas Raildroad Commission. He previously served on the Texas Real Estate Commission and has been endorsed by Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller.

Minton, a Galveston attorney, previously served as a criminal district court judge in El Paso, a position he was twice appointed to by former Gov. Rick Perry.

Spiers is a Houston attorney and former heart surgeon who first ran for public office in 2018, when he failed to reach the runoff in the Republican primary for Texas' 2nd Congressional District.

Westley is a pastor and the historian for the Texas Republican Party. He has twice run for the 15th Congressional District, which stretches from the San Antonio area to the southern border.

Kleberg is a conservationist whose family owns the massive King Ranch property in south Texas. He ran as a Republican in 2010 for a state House seat in El Paso.

Lange is a Houston-area investment manager who previously served as a presidential delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 2016.

Martinez describes herself as a "mental wellness policy advocate" who was born and raised in San Antonio, where she still resides. She is a member of the Bexar County Child Welfare Board.

Suh is an Austin attorney, policy advocate and the founder of Immunize Texas, which she describes as a "grassroots network dedicated to supporting pro-vaccine legislation."

Two Democrats and two Republicans are vying to unseat incumbent Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, who remains the favorite in public polling on the race despite the recent indictment of his longtime political aide on corruption charges.

Counsil is a professor and rancher challenging incumbent Sid Miller, spurred by what he calls Miller's unethical behavior throughout his political career.

White, a Texas House member, heated up the race with intense criticism of incumbent Miller for his history of ethical scrutiny from the Texas Rangers.

Miller is running for a third term as agriculture commisisoner. An early supporter and ally of Donald Trump, he runs a popular Facebook page where he shares conservative memes with over 800,000 Facebook followers. He has faced scrutiny from the Texas Rangers on several occasions for allegedly mixing his personal and political interests.

Hays is an attorney from rural West Texas who advised prospective Texas hemp producers after the law changed to allow the crop in 2019, and she is centering her campaign around anger at Sid Miller after his political aide was arrested in May 2021 for allegedly soliciting thousands in cash and campaign donations in exchange for hemp production licenses.

Ireson is a businessman whose family has been running cattle in Brazos County for 130 years. He says he's running to refocus the Department of Agriculture away from politics and back toward the nuts-and-bolts of supporting Texas farmers and families.

U.S. House District 1

Four Republicans and four Democrats are vying to represent this deep-red East Texas district long held by Rep. Louie Gohmert, who is retiring to run for attorney general.

Atholi is a former Gohmert staffer, who is billing himself as a "roughneck for Congress" as he runs a campaign with an emphasis on local control.

Kilgore businessman is running as an "outsider" who isn't part of the "Smith County political bubble."

Moran has served as Smith County judge since 2016 and is running with the backing of some big Texas GOP names, including state Sen. Bryan Hughes.

A Dallas-based physician assistant, John Porro is running on a platform calling for a balanced federal budget and against critical race theory in schools. (

Dass is a Tyler native who argues that most voters in the district are politically independent and that without Gohmert on the ballot, there's a chance Democrats could pull off an upset.

Texarkana native Jefferson is an R&B singer running his third race for elected office after most recently coming up short in a 2020 bid to be mayor of Sacramento, Calif.

Running as a progressive Democrat, Kocen says he decided to run for Congress after the Jan. 6 Capitol riots.

Dunn is running as a "fiscally responsible" and "compassionately progressive" Democrat, whose website lists his top 3 issues as: "Covid 19, Covid 19, Covid 19."

U.S. House District 2

The redrawn 2nd Congressional District now stretches from Harris County into Montgomery County, picking up The Woodlands, New Caney and Splendora, which had been previously in the 8th Congressional District. By removing parts of Houston and adding more Montgomery, the district has become more Republican.

The self-employed small business owner from Conroe says hes running because the area lacks true Republican representation in Washington, D.C.

The retired Marine is a commercial airline pilot who is critical of what he calls a constitutional overreach throughout the federal government, including vaccine mandates and economic shutdowns.

The retired Navy SEAL who grew up in Katy is seeking his third term in Congress. With a growing national profile, he says in campaign materials he will continue to fight for individual liberty, limited government, and fiscal discipline.

The law school student originally from Uganda has made his Christian faith a core part of his campaign message, and vows to defend the U.S. against socialism and Marxism.

The past president of The Woodlands Democratic Club is campaigning against extremism and promoting pragmatic solutions. She is unopposed in the Democratic primary.

U.S. House District 7

Seven Republicans are vying to take on Rep. Lizzie Fletcher, once seen as one of the most vulnerable Democrats in the House whose West Houston district was redrawn to be much safer for the two-term congresswoman.

Fletcher is a former oil and gas attorney who has represented this West Houston district since she ousted longtime Republican Rep. John Culberson in 2018.

Atencio is making his second run for Congress, this time as a Republican after previously campaigining in Washington as a Whig, a Democrat, and eventually a self-proclaimed gay, liberal Republican. Atencio touts his immigrant father's story and says he is campaigning against "corrupt socialism."

A Houston native, Republican Tina Blum Cohen is campaigning on protecting borders, a powerful energy sector, efficient entitlement programs and more.

Gitau says Democrats are turning Houston into a "hotbed of terror" and has warned of growing national debt, while advocating for personal finance education in schools.

A longtime Republican activist, Rehman is calling for a balanced budget, investment in infrastructure and a stronger military.

Stewart is a Navy veteran who owns two Dickeys Barbecue Pit franchises. He is campaigning against abortion, cancel culture and over-taxation.

A former U.S. Army combat medic, Stroud is running against vaccine mandates and other policies he has deemed too "radical."

A pastor and rancher, Teague is making his second run for Congress after losing to Rep. Al Green in 2020.

U.S. House District 8

A crowded field of Republicans is vying to replace retiring U.S. Rep. Kevin Brady, R-The Woodlands, in the newly configured 8th Congressional District. State lawmakers dramatically reshaped the district last year, keeping it solidly red but adding a large chunk of west Harris County while removing part of south Montgomery County. The Republican nominee will face Democrat Laura Jones in the general election.

Jones is a former chair of the San Jacinto County Democratic Party who lists flood mitigation and expanding internet access in rural areas among her priority issues.

Bates is a surgical technician who says she wants to purge the Republican party of its failed leadership that simply can not make the tough choices to put America first.

Burrows, who describes herself as a mother and business woman, says she supports vouchers to offset the cost of private schools and has questioned the effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccine.

Collins, a conservative activist who has focused on mobilizing young Republicans, previously served as Bradys campaign manager and adviser. He is backed by several conservatives in Congress, including Sen. Ted Cruz and U.S. Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Madison Cawthorn.

Hullihan is a former military attorney who now works in commercial litigation at a Houston law firm. He lists border security as a top issue and says he wants to fight for the sovereignty of the United States.

Luttrell is a former Navy SEAL and special adviser at the Department of Energy under former Texas governor and energy secretary Rick Perry. He has drawn the support of Perry, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw.

McKaughan is a former Navy helicopter pilot who works as the vice president of a family construction business. He says America is being systematically dismantled from our classrooms to open borders by forces that hate America and the liberties she stands for.

Mitchell is a pipeliner who wants to resume the Keystone XL pipeline project and abolish the federal agency that regulates firearms.

Montgomery is a Porter resident who says he is self-employed, plans to fund his own campaign and supports term limits for members of Congress.

Philips, a retired telecommunication professional, says he wants to outlaw abortions and pass a constitutional amendment to bar deficit spending.

Wellington is a small business owner who previously served as district director for former congressman Ted Poe.

Whichard, a former drilling engineer, is the director of public works for the city of Willis. He says on his campaign website he is willing to lead the fight, to put America first, and socialists last.

U.S. House District 9

Originally posted here:

2022 Voter Guide: What to know for the March 1 Texas Primary Election - Houston Chronicle

I dont think we should praise the Georgians too much for abolition. I mean this in the sense that it took quite a long time for opinion to change, after quite a lot of education and effort from various groups, including the Quakers, who campaigned against the slave trade. And as the century went on, there were enormous numbers of local pressure groups, societies, associations and campaigners who were trying to alert people to what was happening.

The abolitionists had all sorts of tactics, poems and pictures to change peoples attitudes. There were graphic pictures of bodies stacked in the ships, and an abolitionist token featuring an enslaved man, his hands in manacles, appealing: Am I not a man and a brother?

Meanwhile, a poet called William Cowper wrote an interesting poem about ordinary people who continued to drink rum and eat sugar, knowing at the back of their minds that there might be an ethical problem attached to it, but they didnt consider it day to day because they liked their rum and sugar too much.

Eventually, Britain legislated to stop a trade over which the government had no power it didnt run the trade. So it was just asserting: This cannot happen under our authority. Having taken that step, they then set the British navy to disrupt other traders and to police the high seas.

The moment they got the slave trade abolished, the campaigners moved on to try to abolish slavery itself, which was a bigger issue. Again, they got that through, even though there were big problems in the way that they did it: for instance, generous compensation was paid to slave owners, but not to formerly enslaved people.

So there was a significant change in attitude, and it had taken an awful lot of campaigning to get public opinion which at first was hostile or unaware to swing into putting on the pressure so that eventually the government felt it had to act.

Penelope J Corfield is the author of The Georgians: The Deeds and Misdeeds of 18th-Century Britain (Yale University Press, 2022). Buy it now on:

No, I dont. No British monarch was an emperor until 1876, when Queen Victoria was made empress of India. At that time, there was a lot of debate in the House of Commons over whether she might be empress of Great Britain, and there was a lot of resistance to that because it was considered a more absolute form of rule, and they did not want that in Britain. So, no, there was no sort of masterplan.

That said, there was an expansionist mood. When the young George Vancouver arrived in Hawaii in the 1790s, he planted the flag and claimed Hawaii for the British government. But nobody told Britain, so nothing came from it. That example does show something about their mindset: Georgian explorers represented a confident and assertive power that didnt have any inhibitions, and they were quite ready to claim territory that they thought of as free and available.

The term empire, initially, was used in terms of a commercial empire. There are songs about Britains empire over the seas the Britannia of Rule Britannia rules the waves, but it isnt a worldwide empire. As the British expanded and the different forms of rule had to be organised, it did get more formalised.

I certainly think that the British empire in India in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was far more formalised and socially repressive in terms of relationships between Indians and Britons than it was in the late 17th and early 18th centuries not that it was perfect then, but it was much more free and easy. There was an enormous amount of inter-marriage between Britons and Indians, and a lot of migration to and fro.

Theres a real lifting of the lid on peoples sexual interests and behaviours, and its to do with the freeing of the press, and the lifting of the licensing laws. No doubt people were interested in sexuality long before the 1690s, but when the press became freer it could be discussed more overtly and publicly, letting people become explicit about things they would have been hesitant about before. You can find the most amazing things in print in the 18th century some of them would make modern readers blush.

The decline of the powers of the church courts was another big factor. Before the civil wars, these courts had tried to regulate peoples moral behaviour. And although they didnt completely disappear, in the Georgian era their scope and their control over day-to-day business became minimal.

The 18th century was a great era of clubs and societies. They could cover absolutely everything there were learned societies, sports societies, scientific research clubs. Some of them were dedicated to drinking and chatting about and enjoying sex. We have accounts, for example, that say a nude woman might be brought out, and they would be talking about sex and women and so forth.

I dont know whether they brought out nude men in the gay clubs, but we do know that there were specific spaces for gay men. There werent really the same kinds of clubs for lesbians, as their actions were not so public.

Officially, not much. The laws were still very, very tough on this, but over time they were enacted with a little less rigour. Sentences of imprisonment or banishment were more common; although these still seem pretty tough, they were not as severe as hanging. Interestingly, many cases of known gay men in the 18th century did not end up in front of the law. The legal penalties were a great source of uncertainty and anxiety for everybody, because the law was and this is one of the things that reformers point out administered so arbitrarily, and was really unfair. An awful lot of people, including a number of famous people, werent prosecuted.

In the case of legislation on sexual matters, its notable that behaviour tends to change long before the law changes. The law waits quite a long time; the politicians are worried to rock the boat. And theologians, of course, are always strongly opposed. So if you look at the history of something through the legislation, it appears far harsher than it really was.

George IV is a wonderful instance for historians of how inappropriate behaviour in a role can put the whole institution at risk. Republican feeling in Britain was at its height in the 1830s, partly as a result of Georges behaviour and failure to play by the rules publicly during and before his reign [182030]. Plenty of monarchs were playboys in secret, but he was flamboyantly and publicly so, and he was a spendthrift, which people didnt like either. His marriage to Caroline was never a happy one. From the first night, they both expressed displeasure with the others person, so it didnt succeed at any level.

As time went on, their marriage deepened divisions within British society. The more traditional forces tended to rally behind the monarchs, as they were the head of state, head of the army and head of the church. However, those who were more radical and wanted change the sort of people who would favour abolition of slavery, for example were rallying against George, by supporting his wife. Caroline, who had an easy, open, friendly manner, became a public symbol of opposition to monarchy.

She garnered a huge amount of public support, as seen in the reaction to her death. She died in 1821, just after the kings coronation, when she had been denied entry to Westminster Abbey so hammered on the doors trying to get in and join the ceremony before being turned away.

Shed asked to be buried back in Germany and there was a cortge to take her coffin to the ports. It was decreed it should not pass through central London, for fear of huge crowds showing up in support. The crowds did indeed gather and were so outraged that people blocked the intended route and so forced the procession into the city.

This was very much a liberal good cause, stemming in part from the increased education and literacy of the time. The Georgians suddenly realised that disabled people had all sorts of skills, and the right thing was to care for them and improve their education and allow each one to develop to their full potential.

This was in stark opposition to earlier times, when literature was full of jokes at the expense of disabled people. For instance, there were jokes that if you saw a blind man walking, you should direct him into a wall and then laugh as he hit himself. That was supposed to be funny. By the end of the 18th century, people would think that was an absolutely terrible thing to do. In the Georgian era, there were schools for the blind. But again, I wouldnt say that all behaviour changed just like that its not just a simple progress story.

The Gin Craze was partly a product of successful agriculture, because grain was cheap and therefore gin was cheap. So it wasnt that people suddenly all let their hair down and began drinking gin in unprecedented numbers.

This was an era, by the way, when people didnt drink much water because water wasnt cleansed that was something again that was gradually being worked on in the 18th century but they used to drink beer and gin and, in the case of the upper classes, wine. When gin became cheap, consumption of it spread like wildfire. Eventually, they had to bring in regulation of gin shops and raise the excise to control it.

The craze led to accusations that the poor were forgetting to work, forgetting their duty, and forgetting hierarchy by not acknowledging their betters. And, worse still, women and servants were taking to drinking gin. Its quite an interesting episode, both for the history of consumption and the history of social attitudes. Its also part of this longer shift between talking of a society in terms of ranks and degrees and clearly graded hierarchies, into a looser, more general language of class. That is often thought to start in the 19th century, but thats not true: Ive chased it well back throughout the 18th century. For a long period, terms for both ranks and classes were used side by side, but gradually, a looser concept of class emerged.

I would stress that one of the early ideas of class was that classes might co-operate; they werent necessarily viewed in a Marxist sense of class conflict. Yet over time, rather like the Indian empire, this became more formalised and class turned into a source of oppression.

Some of them were quite charming, but in my view its because of historical distance. People love a rogue at a distance. When we read that Horace Walpole was stopped outside London and robbed of his fob watch by a gentlemanly highwayman who quoted some Latin at him, that all seems quite charming. But of course, today, we wouldnt like it if we were held up on the A30 and robbed as we were trying to drive into London.

Ive found about 700 instances of people from the 18th century writing in their diaries and letters: This is an age of, or a century of x, y or z. One example of the sort of thing I mean can be found in the intimate diary of Thomas Turner, a Georgian shopkeeper. If things were going wrong, he would write something like: Oh, what terrible times we live in. The nations in decay and everything is going to the dogs. But then a few days later, hed been in a happier frame of mind and maybe reading some improving book and would say something along the lines of: Ah, what an era of light and progress we live in.

Theres a broad distinction between the optimists and the pessimists, but over time the optimistic narrative came to the fore. The power of Britains global trade was encouraging; Britain was triumphing in war, especially after 1815, and there was a lot of literature of self-congratulation. There was also the spread of literacy, the spread of learning. There were scientific discoveries Newton, Faraday, the first steam engine and people were tremendously aware that they were living through a time of experimentation and invention.

These innovations are, of course, the source of some of our major problems today. This was when the first intensive use of fossil fuels began, which has had huge ramifications on climate change though if we could transport the Georgians to the 21st century, many would likely be involved in debates about climate change and how we can slow it.

The Georgians were always debating their deeds and misdeeds, and trying to get a grip on them. It was such a dynamic time.

Penelope J Corfield is the author of The Georgians: The Deeds and Misdeeds of 18th-Century Britain (Yale University Press, 2022). Buy it now on Amazon, Waterstones or Bookshop.org

This article was first published in the February 2021 issue of BBC History Magazine

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The Triumphs And Scandals Of Georgian Britain - BBC History Magazine

This 1870s engraving depicts an enslaved woman and young girl being auctioned as property.

Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries people were kidnapped from the continent of Africa, forced into slavery in the American colonies and exploited to work as indentured servants and labor in the production of crops such as tobacco and cotton. By the mid-19th century, Americas westward expansion and the abolition movement provoked a great debate over slavery that would tear the nation apart in the bloody Civil War. Though the Union victory freed the nations four million enslaved people, the legacy of slavery continued to influence American history, from the Reconstruction, to the civil rights movement that emerged a century after emancipationand beyond.

Hundreds of thousands of Africans, both free and enslaved, aided the establishment and survival of colonies in the Americas and the New World. However, many consider a significant starting point to slavery in America to be 1619, when the privateer The White Lion brought 20 enslaved African ashore in the British colony of Jamestown, Virginia. The crew had seized the Africans from the Portugese slave ship Sao Jao Bautista.

Throughout the 17th century, European settlers in North America turned to enslaved Africans as a cheaper, more plentiful labor source than indentured servants, who were mostly poor Europeans.

Though it is impossible to give accurate figures, some historians have estimated that 6 to 7 million enslaved people were imported to the New World during the 18th century alone, depriving the African continent of some of its healthiest and ablest men and women.

READ MORE:The Last Slave Ship Survivor Gave an Interview in the 1930s. It Just Surfaced

In the 17th and 18th centuries, enslaved Africans worked mainly on the tobacco, rice and indigo plantations of the southern coast, from the Chesapeake Bay colonies of Maryland and Virginia south to Georgia.

After the American Revolution, many colonistsparticularly in the North, where slavery was relatively unimportant to the agricultural economybegan to link the oppression of enslaved Africans to their own oppression by the British, and to call for slaverys abolition.

Did you know? One of the first martyrs to the cause of American patriotism was Crispus Attucks, a former enslaved man who was killed by British soldiers during the Boston Massacre of 1770. Some 5,000 Black soldiers and sailors fought on the American side during the Revolutionary War.

But after the Revolutionary War, the new U.S. Constitution tacitly acknowledged the institution of slavery, counting each enslaved individual as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of taxation and representation in Congress and guaranteeing the right to repossess any person held to service or labor (an obvious euphemism for slavery).

In the late 18th century, with the land used to grow tobacco nearly exhausted, the South faced an economic crisis, and the continued growth of slavery in America seemed in doubt.

Around the same time, the mechanization of the textile industry in England led to a huge demand for American cotton, a southern crop whose production was limited by the difficulty of removing the seeds from raw cotton fibers by hand.

But in 1793, a young Yankee schoolteacher named Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, a simple mechanized device that efficiently removed the seeds. His device was widely copied, and within a few years the South would transition from the large-scale production of tobacco to that of cotton, a switch that reinforced the regions dependence on enslaved labor.

READ MORE:40 Years a Slave: The Extraordinary Tale of an African Prince Stolen from His Kingdom

Slavery itself was never widespread in the North, though many of the regions businessmen grew rich on the slave trade and investments in southern plantations. Between 1774 and 1804, all of the northern states abolished slavery, but the institution of slavery remained absolutely vital to the South.

Though the U.S. Congress outlawed the African slave trade in 1808, the domestic trade flourished, and the enslaved population in the United States nearly tripled over the next 50 years. By 1860 it had reached nearly 4 million, with more than half living in the cotton-producing states of the South.

An escaped enslaved man named Peter showing his scarred back at a medical examination in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1863.

Library of Congress

READ MORE:The Shocking Photo of 'Whipped Peter' That Made Slavery's Brutality Impossible to Deny

Enslaved people in the antebellum South constituted about one-third of the southern population. Most lived on large plantations or small farms; many masters owned fewer than 50 enslaved people.

Land owners sought to make their enslaved completely dependent on them through a system of restrictive codes. They were usually prohibited from learning to read and write, and their behavior and movement was restricted.

Many masters raped enslaved women, and rewarded obedient behavior with favors, while rebellious enslaved people were brutally punished. A strict hierarchy among the enslaved (from privileged house workers and skilled artisans down to lowly field hands) helped keep them divided and less likely to organize against their masters.

Marriages between enslaved men and women had no legal basis, but many did marry and raise large families; most owners of enslaved workers encouraged this practice, but nonetheless did not usually hesitate to divide families by sale or removal.

READ MORE: Enslaved Couples Faced Wrenching Separations, or Even Choosing Family Over Freedom

Rebellionsamong enslaved people did occurnotably ones led by Gabriel Prosser in Richmond in 1800 and by Denmark Vesey in Charleston in 1822but few were successful.

The revolt that most terrified enslavers was that led by Nat Turner in Southampton County, Virginia, in August 1831. Turners group, which eventually numbered around 75 Black men, murdered some 55 white people in two days before armed resistance from local white people and the arrival of state militia forces overwhelmed them.

Supporters of slavery pointed to Turners rebellion as evidence that Black people were inherently inferior barbarians requiring an institution such as slavery to discipline them, and fears of similar insurrections led many southern states to further strengthen their slave codes in order to limit the education, movement and assembly of enslaved people.

In the North, the increased repression of southern Black people only fanned the flames of the growing abolitionist movement.

From the 1830s to the 1860s, the movement to abolish slavery in America gained strength, led by free Black peoplesuch as Frederick Douglass and white supporters such as William Lloyd Garrison, founder of the radical newspaper The Liberator, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, who published the bestselling antislavery novel Uncle Toms Cabin.

While many abolitionists based their activism on the belief that slaveholding was a sin, others were more inclined to the non-religious free-labor argument, which held that slaveholding was regressive, inefficient and made little economic sense.

Free Black people and other antislavery northerners had begun helping enslaved people escape from southern plantations to the North via a loose network of safe houses as early as the 1780s. This practice, known as the Underground Railroad, gained real momentum in the 1830s. Conductors like Harriet Tubman guided escapees on their journey North, and stationmasters included such prominent figures as Frederick Douglass, Secretary of State William H. Seward and Pennsylvania congressman Thaddeus Stevens. Although estimates vary widely, it may have helped anywhere from 40,000 to 100,000 enslaved people reach freedom.

The success of the Underground Railroad helped spread abolitionist feelings in the North; it also undoubtedly increased sectional tensions, convincing pro-slavery southerners of their northern countrymens determination to defeat the institution that sustained them.

READ MORE: How the Underground Railroad Worked

WATCH:Missouri Compromise

Americas explosive growthand its expansion westward in the first half of the 19th centurywould provide a larger stage for the growing conflict over slavery in America and its future limitation or expansion.

In 1820, a bitter debate over the federal governments right to restrict slavery over Missouris application for statehood ended in a compromise: Missouri was admitted to the Union as a slave state, Maine as a free state and all western territories north of Missouris southern border were to be free soil.

Although the Missouri Compromise was designed to maintain an even balance between slave and free states, it was able to help quell the forces of sectionalism only temporarily.

WATCH:Kansas-Nebraska Act

In 1850, another tenuous compromise was negotiated to resolve the question of slavery in territories won during the Mexican-American War.

Four years later, however, the Kansas-Nebraska Act opened all new territories to slavery by asserting the rule of popular sovereignty over congressional edict, leading pro- and anti-slavery forces to battle it outwith considerable bloodshedin the new state of Kansas.

Outrage in the North over the Kansas-Nebraska Act spelled the downfall of the old Whig Party and the birth of a new, all-northern Republican Party. In 1857, the Dred Scott decision by the Supreme Court (involving an enslaved man who sued for his freedom on the grounds that his master had taken him into free territory) effectively repealed the Missouri Compromise by ruling that all territories were open to slavery.

In 1859, two years after the Dred Scott decision, an event occurred that would ignite passions nationwide over the issue of slavery.

John Browns raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginiain which the abolitionist and 22 men, including five Black men and three of Browns sons raided and occupied a federal arsenalresulted in the deaths of 10 people and Browns hanging.

The insurrection exposed the growing national rift over slavery: Brown was hailed as a martyred hero by northern abolitionists, but was vilified as a mass murderer in the South.

The South would reach the breaking point the following year, when Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln was elected as president. Within three months, seven southern states had seceded to form the Confederate States of America; four more would follow after the Civil War began.

A map of the United States that shows 'free states,' 'slave states,' and 'undecided' ones, as it appeared in the book 'American Slavery and Colour,' by William Chambers, 1857.

Stock Montage/Getty Images

Though Lincolns anti-slavery views were well established, the central Union war aim at first was not to abolish slavery, but to preserve the United States as a nation.

Abolition became a goal only later, due to military necessity, growing anti-slavery sentiment in the North and the self-emancipation of many people who fled enslavement as Union troops swept through the South.

READ MORE: How Many US Presidents Owned Enslaved Workers?

On September 22, 1862, Lincoln issued a preliminary emancipation proclamation, and on January 1, 1863, he made it official that slaves within any State, or designated part of a Statein rebellion,shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.

By freeing some 3 million enslaved people in the rebel states, the Emancipation Proclamation deprived the Confederacy of the bulk of its labor forces and put international public opinion strongly on the Union side.

Though the Emancipation Proclamation didnt officially end all slavery in Americathat would happen with the passage of the 13th Amendment after the Civil Wars end in 1865some 186,000 Black soldiers would join the Union Army, and about 38,000 lost their lives.

READ MORE: What Is Juneteenth?

WATCH:The Civil War and Its Legacy

The 13th Amendment, adopted on December 18, 1865, officially abolished slavery, but freed Black peoples status in the post-war South remained precarious, and significant challenges awaited during the Reconstruction period.

Previously enslaved men and women received the rights of citizenship and the equal protection of the Constitution in the 14th Amendment and the right to vote in the 15th Amendment, but these provisions of Constitution were often ignored or violated, and it was difficult for Black citizens to gain a foothold in the post-war economy thanks to restrictive Black codes and regressive contractual arrangements such as sharecropping.

Despite seeing an unprecedented degree of Black participation in American political life, Reconstruction was ultimately frustrating for African Americans, and the rebirth of white supremacyincluding the rise of racist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan (KKK)had triumphed in the South by 1877.

Almost a century later, resistance to the lingering racism and discrimination in America that began during the slavery era led to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, which achieved the greatest political and social gains for Black Americans since Reconstruction.

PHOTOS: See Americas First Memorial to its 4,400 Lynching Victims

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U.S. Slavery: Timeline, Figures & Abolition - HISTORY

Martin Luther King Jr. shakes hands with President Lyndon B. Johnson at the signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Credit: AFP/Getty Images

The "peculiar institution of slavery was abolished nearly a hundred years after the Declaration of Independence called for freedom and equality for all in 1776. But it took another century before landmark legislation would begin to address basic civil rights for African Americans.

This slow progress was the product of decades of work amongst anti-slavery constitutionalists, activists and abolitionists.They agitated in Congress, the courts and the streets. The fruits of their labor were not enacted immediately and were often foiled by a highly adaptable architecture of discrimination. Poll taxes and literacy tests hampered African Americans from voting in the aftermath of the Civil War. Likewise, the equal access promised in the 1960s did not mark the end of de-facto segregation.

Between 1865 and 1968, much was on the agenda: the abolition of slavery, extending legal protections for the emancipated and their descendants, birthright citizenship and ending segregation in public facilities.

When President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863 in the midst of the Civil War, he was not ending slavery or declaring it illegal. The executive order was a wartime measure that promised slaves in the Confederacy their freedom should they make it to Union lines. It even purposefully overlooked slaves in those border states that had not joined the Confederacy. Instead, the 13th Amendment of December 6, 1865, abolished slavery.

Still, African Americans were vulnerable to subjugation. The South was passing so-called black codes that effectively tried to re-enslave freed persons, creating a form of neo-slavery by criminalizing Black behavior, says Baher Azmy, legal director of the Center of Constitutional Rights. So, there were statutes that prohibited vulgarities or spitting, or if you did not have employment, you could be imprisoned and then leased as labor to whites in a form of debt bondage.

The first Civil Rights Act established that all those born in the United States were to be granted American citizenship. It was a radical notion for its time, seeking to grant birthright citizenship and all the associated rights and protections, helping to counter the black codes of 1865.

Darren Lenard Hutchinson, director of the Center for Civil Rights and Social Justice at Emory University says the Civil Rights Act of 1866 also sought to reverse the Supreme Courts ruling in the 1857 Dred Scott case that Black people werent U.S. citizens and had no legal rights. Opposition to the act soon followed.

President Andrew Johnson vetoed the legislation on the grounds that it discriminated against whites. As early as the 19th century, advancement in the condition of people of color was seen or perceived to be an affront or harm to whites, says Hutchinson.

The 14th Amendment, ratified on July 9, 1868, forbid state governments, not just the national government, from abridging the rights and privileges enjoyed by citizenship. Congress now had the power to enforce and protect citizens from state and federal encroachment. However, the 14th Amendment did not promise political rights, which the next amendment addressed.

The 15th Amendment expressly banned the states and U.S. government from denying citizens the right to vote on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. Ratified on February 3, 1870, the monumental piece of legislation also gave Congress the power to enforce legislation.

These rights were still curtailed when states devised their own voter qualifications, like literacy tests and other regulations. These onerous requirements were sometimes disguised as neutral but were enforced in an entirely arbitrary and discriminatory way.

With respect to voting, the laws did not say Blacks cannot vote; instead they imposed literacy tests against Blacks, asking things like, 'How many bubbles are in this bar of soap? How many jellybeans are in this jar?' The Klan and Southern sheriffs would terrorize Blacks who tried to register to vote through violence, so there was almost no Black voting in the Deep South until the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, says Azmy.

The Civil Rights Act of 1871also known as the Ku Klux Klan Act or the Enforcement Actempowered the federal government to use military force against people and organizations that conspire to violate the constitutional rights of other citizens. This act targeted racial terrorism in the South (particularly in South Carolina) and attempted to dismantle not only the KKK and other white supremacist organizations, but also organizations like rifle clubs that threatened or used violence.

The period from 1865 and 1871 was one of the most dramatic and radical conversations about freedom and equality probably in the history of humankind, says Azmy. "During Reconstruction, the United States government became fully committed to reconstructing the South in the northern image, and an image based on equality, which included U.S. troops in the South to enforce laws and protect Blacks. It created very significant proportions of Black representation in southern statehouses and produced three Black senators and multiple congresspersons from Mississippi and Alabama in an 11-year period."

This behemoth legislation is a benchmark act that banned labor discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin. Proposed by President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and passed by President Lyndon B. Johnson, it also ended racial segregation in public facilities, public education and in federally funded programs.

This statute, along with more aggressive judicial enforcement of Brown v. Board of Education, helped to accelerate desegregation in southern schools, says Hutchinson. When the legislation passed, less than 3 percent of Blacks attended schools with Whites in the South, despite the fact that Brown had been decided 10 years earlier. In the decade following the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, southern schools became the most integrated in the U.S.

In addition to outright violence and intimidation that existed at the grassroots level, states developed an array of tools to prevent African Americans from voting: the grandfather clause, literacy tests and poll taxes. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 forcefully addressed these issues.

According to Hutchinson, a key nuance of the legislation includes banning, not only specific prejudicial policies (such as literacy tests), but more generally any policies that could potentially have a racially disproportionate effect.

In addition to enforcement rights, the act requires that states with histories of discrimination receive a green light from the federal government before any changes to their voting practices. (In 2013, the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 ruling in Shelby County v. Holder gutted these protections arguing that they were "based on 40-year-old facts having no logical relationship to the present day.")

A week after the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the Civil Rights Act of 1968, also known as the Fair Housing Act, was signed into law and banned discrimination in housing.

The Fair Housing Act bans discrimination in public housing and in certain private units. The statute covers actions that discriminate by impact as well as intent. Thus, it has been used to strike down arguably race-neutral policies like zoning laws that make housing unaffordable for persons of color in a particular jurisdiction, says Hutchinson.

Read more:

8 Key Laws That Advanced Civil Rights - History