Now, 80 years later, Mississippi has already made a “clear, pointed, unmistakable discrimination,” as if it has “selected a particular race or nationality for oppressive treatment,” which the court specifically struck down and condemned in Skinner.
What today’s Supreme Court strategically overlooks, legal history reminds us with stunning clarity, specifically the terrifying practices of American slavery, including the stalking, kidnapping, confinement, coercion, rape and torture of Black women and girls. In a commentary reprinted in The New York Times on Jan. 18, 1860, slavery was described as an enterprise that “treats” a Black person “as a chattel, breeds from him with as little regard for marriage ties as if he were an animal, is a moral outlaw.”
Such observations were hardly unique or rare; the Library of Congress offers a comprehensive collection of newspapers, almanacs, daguerreotypes, illustrations, and other materials that comprise the “African-American Mosaic: Influence of Prominent Abolitionists.” Laws that date back to the 1600s expose the sexual depravity and inhumanity of American slavery. In 1662, the Virginia Grand Assembly enacted one of its first “slave laws” to settle this point, expressing, “Whereas some doubts have arisen whether children got by any Englishman upon a Negro woman should be slave or free, be it therefore enacted and declared by this present Grand Assembly, that all children born in this country shall be held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother.”
Thomas Jefferson kept a lot of receipts and documents regarding the births at Monticello plantation of enslaved children, including those that were later discovered to be his. It’s not surprising that slavery and involuntary service were at the core of the 13th Amendment’s abolishment was the forced sexual, and reproductive servitude of Black girls. Two days after giving a speech condemning the culture of sexual violence that dominated slavery, Senator Charles Sumner, Massachusetts, almost died in the halls Congress.
Black women spoke out about their reproductive bonds. In 1851, in her compelling speech known as Ain’t I a Woman, Sojourner Truth implored the crowd of men and women gathered at the Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, to understand the gravity and depravity of American slavery on Black women’s reproductive autonomy and privacy. Ms. Truth be told, she had borne 13 children, and nearly all of them were taken from the arms. There was no appeal to the law or courts. Wasn’t she a woman, too? According to the accounts of all present, including Frances Gage (famous feminist abolitionist), the room remained still, and then it erupted into applause.
Similarly, in “Incidents In The Life of A Slave Girl,” Harriet Jacobs’ 1861 book describes the heroic efforts she made to avoid being sexually assaulted and raped by her captor. She wrote, “I saw a man forty years my senior daily violating the most sacred commandments of nature. He told me I was his property; that I must be subject to his will in all things.”
Source: NY Times
