Reposted by Chris Herring
Chris Herring
@herringnba.bsky.social
31K followers 648 following 1.6K posts
NYT best-selling author and sportswriter. Chicagoan living in New York. Michigan alum.
NYT best-selling author and sportswriter. Chicagoan living in New York. Michigan alum.
![Jesse Jackson: Well, first of all, we had been freed without being made equal. There’s historical continuity between blacks being amassed in prison after 246 years of legal slavery. When there was a contest about it [in Dred Scott v. Sandford], the Supreme Court ruled that blacks had no rights. [After emancipation and the Civil War] those who had been slave masters became segregation masters. They took our freedom away from us; they began to lock up blacks by the thousands to do prison labor, farm labor—the whole range. They just put us back in slavery.
We finally, in 1954, broke the backbone—legally—of that system [with the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision], but we were never—there was never repair for damage done. Two hundred and forty-six years of slavery, then legal Jim Crow and [nearly] 5,000 lynchings without a conviction. And even today, discrimination by extension of that system has not completely ended.
So we had been fighting for repair. We fought against the barbarism for our freedom; now we’re fighting for our equality. We are the foundation of American society—not the bottom, the foundation. When the Declaration of Independence came, we had been enslaved for 157 years. We made cotton king. We are due a different kind of recognition.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:4vkwol5raj4hnslvsqvmpiqw/bafkreic4dao7rhh7274jfmz3jjnb6s3ak5c2ag75h4jha7mgli3r3fqbey)
