Shes a former staff writer for the atlantic picture was formally a nationally syndicated columnist with opinion columns covering a broad range of issues from womens rights at home and abroad, if i middle justice, use immigration policy, poverty and maternal health. Early Childhood Development and demographic changes. Icons appear in the houston chronicle, the miami herald, the Chicago Tribune and the l. A. Times, among dozens of national and local papers. She would be in conversation with ms. Christina swarns. She is the litigation director of the naacp Legal Defense and educational funding. Christina oversees all aspects of lbs litigation in four key practice areas including economic justice, education, political participation and criminal justice. As a nationally recognized expert on issues of race and colonel justice, should participate in committees, advisory panels, strategically convening, conferences and National Media interviews including those with pbs newshour, msnbc, and democracy now . Last but certainly not least we have dr. Greg carr, associate professor of Africana Studies and chair of the department of African Studies at Howard University, an adjunct faculty at Howard School of law. He holds a phd in African American studies from Temple University and a jd from the Ohio State University college of law. He was a school, he wasnt the schools district of philadelphia first resident scholar on race and culture and his girlfriend of the Philadelphia Freedom School movement, a Community BasedAcademic Initiative that has evolved over 13,000 Elementary High School and college students. He is coeditor of the association for the study of classical african civilization, multi volume World History project and has represented Howard University as a spokesman at a wide range of Electronic Media which includes ebony magazine, the New York Times, the Washington Post, usa today, msnbc, npr, bbc america, cspan, voice of america, that have a smiley show [laughing] and cnn. [inaudible] it is a long list, okay. So please take a moment to help me welcome our guests for this evening. [applause] can anybody hear me okay . Thank you so much for joining us. You guys look good. 7 00 on a friday. You beat the week. Congratulations. So were going to try to keep it a little informal. We were having too much fun in the green room. So im going to bring a little bit of background to our conversation. First stop with the basics. Im going to read the 13th of minutes of everybody on the panel knows what will be talking about it its really short. It was ratified in the senate in 1864 and inhouse in 1865 and became law that you. It is not as the amendment abolished slavery. Im going to put that in quotations for a minute. So it reads section one, neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. Section two, Congress Shot pow power. Most of us are aware of the fine print, right . Weve always been what about the signed, the fine print or did you read the fine print . Whats the fine print what our forefathers were not subtle. They actually put the fine print in what is called an exploratory, coming here it is. Except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted. And thats what were going to spend a lot of time talking about, this fine print that was embedded right into the 13th amendment, which many people believe was essentially a loophole. It is actually standing very firmly in the proud tradition when it comes to people of african descent. When you look at the phyllis papers, Alexander Hamilton was being praised, for i dont know why, this broadway show. He and madison are having these battles. Are they people . Yes. Are they property . Yes at the same damn time. We have to resolve this for representation purposes. We are going to count you as property. The 13th amendment, the congressman from ohio pushes it, lincoln is trying to resolve this, he wants his name on it. Its the only amendment to our constitution that are president signed, even though he didnt have to. He is connected to it even though the years up to it, even here in d. C. , he is trying to free some people, keep some people enslaved, trying to work that out. By the 13th amendment the negros have been fighting and causing a contradiction. By the 15th amendment they reach a compromise, one that we still are trying to fight to figure out. We are now not property except when we are property. That basically is the summary of the 13th amendment contradiction and everything that comes after it, the black [inaudible] and the courts begin to roll that back after reconstruction and you come into the 20th century and the 13th amendment continues to diminish in stature as the courts chop away at it refusing to face the fundamental of whether we can get rid of this inkblot. All of that continues today in this fundamental question of what happens when you have classes of citizenship that are grounded in the fact that some people can literally have their humanity defined differently in the american legal universe but the 13th amendment is the nexus of that. Lets turn to the legal scholar in the room and asked her, in the immediate aftermath of enacting this, what did it mean in practice . So for a little while, the courts tried to give it real meaning. They tried to say that you cant strip africanamericans of their rights as citizens. That was a very brief period of time after the enactment of the 13th amendment. It hasnt been done very much and it hasnt been used very much at all. There were some disgraceful cases at the beginning of the 1900s. The cruickshank case where the Supreme Court says a brutal clan massacre, they dismiss an indictment because they say this is not something that is a product, that the 13th amendment can reach. This is currently a racially motivated crime. It was brought into federal court the prosecutor said this is exactly what this amendment was about. We cannot have a clan mass curing people based on their race and they should be prosecuted but the Supreme Court dismisses it and said its beyond the reach of the 13th amendment. And then it becomes a dormant amendment. Since then there have been two circumstances where its been used reasonably appropriately. It was enacted partly based on the 13th amendment and the express statement that you cannot brutalize people on their race. The court also says you cant sell a private real estate sale, it cannot be denied the option to purchase property based on the rates. Otherwise the courts have largely ignored it or not dealt with at all and so on the many cases that we litigate, that have been litigated over the past hundred years on the issue of race and criminal justice, the 13th amendment is largely quiet. If its largely quiet in the courtroom, there are other cases where it has helped them solve an entire industry, also known as the prison industrial complex. How does that manage to first such a thing. Only 60 of africanamerican people were held for purposes of taxation. It moves from 60 until 52 100 . If a pinch you for selling weed in brooklyn and put you in jail in virginia, guess who lost a person and gained one and neither one can vote. They lost when they gained one and they can vote. You have now people battling to put prisons in their little towns because they are a source of income. You dont just have an individual who has been harmed, whos been confined to a sub human category by the law, you then have a political economy that his or her ancestors were the fuel for a century before. In some ways the real legacy of the 13th amendment is it creates the possibility of enslaving more than just black people with that except clause. And then they cant participate. I guess theres a couple states that allow you to vote. Imagine if you cant vote and want to get out its difficult to get your rights restored. Can you find a job. People are running around saying were going to get block grants to the state in that way we can perhaps get around some of the equitable distribution of resources from the federal government and maybe in the state they can imply a work requirement where you have to have a clean record requirement and we can give some of this money to poor whites and keep these black and brown people out of it. All of that nefarious stuff is made possible by the except clause in the 13th amendment. Lets take a really quick audience survey. Who has been on an american road before . Ouwho has slept on a College Better sent off a child to sleep on a college bed . Who has driven a car with a license plate on it . Good. Theres a really high likelihood that someone in prison built that road, made that bad, punched out the drivers license number. States have these things called Prison Industries and their very wellestablished they get to pay the incarcerated person 25 cents an hour, 10 cents. Unit. It is pennies for labor. This is entirely legal. Thats talk a little bit about the financial structure that is now benefiting from this piece in the 13th amendment. That goes back a long way. The current use of prisoners is just a direct descendent of a leasing structure that existed immediately in the aftermath of slavery. We had a situation were coming out of slavery laws were created whereby vagrancy and those kinds of offensive, that will only apply to black people and those were created entirely to take black people, free slaves off of the streets and into jail that could then lease them out to back to the plantation, back to the industries that needed bodies to do the work. The structure was just brutal. Unlike slaveowners the companies had no interest. People were literally worked to death. I worked with george and he was working on cases where they were doing exactly that. They lock you up and then you dont get a trial until the distant future and in between they would come in rinse you out. Youre out there cutting grass and its a form of enslavement. That was just a few years ago. You would think we would have made progress in 150 years but thats why they put the civil rights act, congress at least then has tried to put some teeth in the 13th amendment. It survived section 1982 of u. S. Code but between then and now, this long retreat from the 13th amendment. There is a lot of labor. Anyone who had a student in college is eating at a cafeteria, you have a good chance that is the same company thats feeding the prison. Said xo is one. When you get that kind of economic clout you can then purchase politicians. You are pulled into a system where they cant get out there and vote against you. Its a nefarious kind of psycho. Its not just leasing out. There are also working areas. You have prisons that are literally working plantations. I dont know if youve ever been on the grounds of the angola farm. It is the clearest vision of a slave plantation ive ever seen. This is an enormous space with guards with shotguns on horseback and prisoners working out in the field for change. You have to work or you have a problem. Raise your hand if you knew that 70 million americans are Walking Around with a criminal record. Chances are there is someone in this very room who has a criminal record raise your hand if you knew that every year 11 Million People are cycled through local jails. 11 million. 600,000 people are released from prison and another six or 700,000 are put back in every year. We are not talking about an isolated group of people over there. We are actually talking about people who spend their entire lives tethered, one way or another to the criminal Justice System. Lets bring it forward to today and talk about the legacy of the 13th amendment. Chances are you are 2 degrees of separation from someone in one of those situations. How do you, in your role, as someone who tries to dismantle the system, how do you approach this in your work. What tools you have available to you. I would like you to take it from the citizens position and answer the same question. Is a hard question because the Supreme Court hasnt made it easy to challenge these kinds of laws. We have a series of decisions, if you are trying to deal and make a full frontal attack, the first thing you encounter is the kempt decision and ultimately it was the largest statistical study. The study finds that African American people, black people who are alleged or convicted of killing people are four times more likely to be sentenced to death in any other race. They take this to the Supreme Court. They say the Supreme Court, this has to be unconstitutional. Race is an arbitrary factor and cant be considered in deciding whether someone should live or die. The Supreme Court said not so fast, you just brought statistics and statistics alone are not enough and this is not enough evidence of racial disproportionality in the Death Penalty and the criminal Justice System overall is not a basis for constitutional claim. What the Supreme Court says is if we open the door here to a conversation about disproportionality in capital punishment, then we have to look at disproportionately throughout the criminal Justice System. Once you get into the courthouse, the discretion exercise bike prosecutors is always, at every discretion point in the criminal Justice System, discretion is used in a way that African Americans receive the harsher end. We have mccluske mccluskey and y thats interesting but you can do anything with that. Thats a fascinating facts. Thats a big challenge. Ultimately we need the Supreme Court and we have to get that decision overturned. Okay. In the short run we do what we can. This year i litigated a case where we tried to bring the high profile extreme cases to make it clear that this is not a situation. All that stuff about voting discrimination is a thing of the past. That doesnt happen anymore. You have to say this is whats happening. His lawyer said he was likely to commit crimes because he was black. That was his own lawyer. That fact, whether or not you are likely to commit crimes in the future was the prerequisite for a death sentence. His own lawyer presented evidence that he should be condemned to death, and he was. That was in 1997 and was very 22nd of this year, for the first time we got the sentence reversed. Lets be very clear about that. [applause] it is a good outcome. Its the right outcome, but it took from 1990 when he was on death row with court after court thing theres nothing to see here. The challenge is real. Its only because it was so explicit. They couldnt turn away, they couldnt say this isnt Racial Discrimination, this is Something Else. There was no way to avoid what was happening. It was clear and that was the thing. You cannot call the Something Else. So, its hard and we just try to be consistent and speak truth to power every time, every opportunity we get. You are in the ones of our legal minds in the country. What to the rest of us do . There are people in this room probably within open warrant. If youve missed a Court Appearance for a ticket or missed your taxes, you dont know until they put the scanner on your license plate and they hit the lights, did you know you have a warrant. There are a lot of us in this room. It isnt just in fact the police chief in the New York Times. It was very interesting, campbell has about 8000 people across the bridge from philly. They have taken a deliberate task of deescalation, trying to move away from violent confrontation, but one of the things they talked about, he said its the little nuisance tickets. What does it mean to get a 250 ticket when you only make 10000 a year. Then the fines pilot. Those are people too who are pulled into this. Again, i stress theres probably somebody in this room who might have an open warrant. A black man, thats just something we just joke about and sadly that has become our reality. In terms of what we can do, i just came here from st. Louis and its interesting because the 13th amendment, thats the one that supposed to be applied to private action. They argue the 14th amendment and 15th amendment, did you actually say nager when you hit me in the face, no but the amendment coming out of st. Louis, the housing case, you didnt sell me this house because i was black. The Supreme Court says you cant do that. Thirteenth amendment. That really reveals that the courts have this outsized power, if they wanted to use the 13th amendment they could, but as citizens, not just as citizens but as human beings, i think thats more important if you think about it because citizenship speaks to the internal struggle in the United States. If you look at the history of our country weve made the most progress when people go outside the national borders. When it take you to the un and say this is a crime against immunity. But domestic issues, race relations, law and order, sometimes with courtside but in terms of domestically what we can do, ferguson missouri the little suburb of st. Louis, we all know the name now they just had a may