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13th Amendment Should Be Abolished Essay

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Many Americans believe that 13th amendment abolished slavery, changing the fabric of society forever. Ever since the emancipation proclamation was issued in 1865, the racial caste system has been abolished from American soil. Or is it? In 2018, slavery is still alive and well, with workers being stripped of their civil rights. Even after the ratification of the 13th amendment, America continues to profit of the backs off Black Americans through sharecropping, eventually transforming to become the modern prison industrial complex. The prison pipeline system will continue to run if we do not reform the prison system to become a figure of justice not oppression. America became involved in the gruesome and barbaric Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade …show more content…

The Black Codes were “ modeled on former slave laws” with the sole intention to “ limit the new freedom of emancipated African Americans by restricting their movement and by forcing them into a labor economy based on low wages and debt”(Virginia Commonwealth University). People of color were kept line through the law and public lynchings. Acts violence kept the Black population in fear and with federal laws infected in Jim Crow ideologies, Black people were subjected to brutal violence. Lynchings were “a common occurance”(Du Bois) with people able to clearly see “Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze… Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees”(Holiday). This methods of invoking terror was highly effective in small scale communities. Near the end of the Jim Crow era, “laws allowed black [people] to be arrested for minor infractions. A system of penal labor known as convict leasing was established at this time”(Virginia Commonwealth University). This system of conviction is eerily similar to our current system. Like in the Jim Crow, we exploit a clause in the 13th amendment to allow slavery to exist in this

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