“Punishment” by Bryan Stevenson

Chapter 10 is prefaced by a picture of William Headly, a young man who escaped from enslavement near Raleigh, North Carolina, in the 1860s.

In chapter 10, Bryan Stevenson discusses the Black American experience in the court system through the lens of his organization, the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI).

The United States incarcerates more people than any nation on earth, and a disproportionate percentage of those incarcerated are Black. The social and cultural mechanisms that allow this to happen are complex and unjust, and follow the racist patterns established by slavery. To illustrate this point, Stevenson highlights the case of Matthew, a client he once represented. By the time they met, Matthew had been in prison for over forty years for a non-homicide crime committed as a child. He was one of sixty-two such prisoners serving life sentences in Louisiana; almost ninety percent of these prisoners were Black. As a result of mandatory sentencing and three-strike laws, Stevenson has found himself representing prisoners whose life sentences result from crimes as petty as bike theft or marijuana possession during his tenure.

Criminality has a long history of being imposed on Black people in the United States. During the years of slavery, emancipated and free-born Black people were often assumed to be fugitives and chased, captured, or sold by white citizens. The result was a sort of paradox—Black people were ascribed human agency when perceived to be committing a crime but were otherwise assumed to be incapable of that same agency. When the Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery, it made a damning provision that still reverberates: involuntary servitude was no longer constitutional, unless it was punishment for a crime.

Among populations eager to retain slavery, this precipitated a loophole. If Black people could be caught breaking any law or committing an invented offense, no matter how small, they could be arrested and incarcerated. The incarcerated, then, could be hired out to those looking for cheap labor under a system called “convict leasing.” This effectively reinstituted slavery, but it also created an incredibly damaging stereotype that persists to this day: because the system targeted Black people by making everything they did into a crime, others began to view Black people as inherently criminal.

“Race Riot” by Forrest Hamer

“Race Riot” is prefaced by an epigraph dated November 10, 1898, the date of the Wilmington, North Carolina, coup. Over a thousand white men overthrew the newly elected biracial government, destroyed a business district, killed dozens of Black people, and displaced thousands from their homes. In a series of short varied-length stanzas, Hamer’s poem interrogates the absence of this event from North Carolina’s history books, the violent power of white supremacy, and the dangerous rhetoric that allowed the massacre to happen in the first place.

“Greenwood” by Jasmine Mans

“Greenwood” is preceded by an epigraph dated May 31, 1921, the date on which Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood, known as “Black Wall Street,” was destroyed by a white mob. In varied-length free verse stanzas, Jasmine Mans describes the violence and displacement, the victims of the massacre, and the memories left behind from the tragedy.