It was not just the market but the lack of full legal status in many of the states where they lived that made Black Americans vulnerable to kidnappers. As the historian Kate Masur shows in “Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, From the Revolution to Reconstruction,” a number of Northern states adopted laws restricting civil and legal rights for their Black citizens. In 1807, for example, Ohio adopted laws that required free Black settlers to register in county courts (for a fee, of course) and obtain a guarantee of good behavior from at least two white landowners. The same laws also forbade them from testifying in cases, civil or criminal, in which one party was white, severely limiting their ability to defend their most basic rights, as Masur writes, “to enforce contracts, secure wages, or obtain justice in criminal cases.” This, too, was tied to slavery and to what it seemed to imply about anyone of African descent.
What does the antebellum kidnapping and sale of free Black Americans to slavery mean for us in the present? How does it relate to the president’s seizure and rendition of immigrants — and soon, perhaps, citizens — to a brutal foreign prison from which Trump has all but said they will not emerge?
Beyond the obvious parallels and similarities, the example of free Black Americans illustrates an important principle of political life. The question of who has rights — and of whose rights are to be respected — is inseparable from our treatment of those on the margins of political life. The mere existence of a group of nonpersons threatens the freedom of those who live within the scope of concern, however far from the center they might be.
Free Black people could not escape slavery. Nor, for that matter, could whites, whose rights to speak freely and gather as they pleased were threatened by the political power of slave owners, who had grown accustomed to dominating others as a way of life. The status of all Americans was, in truth, threatened by the existence of a class of people whose rights could be arbitrarily stripped from them, if they even had rights to begin with.
You cannot restrict unfreedom to a particular class of people. It will metastasize to consume the entire society. This was true of the slave system, where the large majority of people lived in conditions of servitude; it was true of the Jim Crow South, where economic exploitation and political disenfranchisement were the rule for Black and white Americans; and it will be true of our time for as long as we continue on the current path.
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