American Slaveries Since Emancipation

Abstract

This chapter explores the continuing existence of slavery-like practices within the United States itself and in its sites of imperial interest between the years 1870 and 1939. It also probes the changing ways that chattel slavery has been remembered and memorialized in the United States. It constructs a narrative of the nation’s selective forgetting and obscuring of slavery. The United States worked to sever its present from the past of “our slavery days,” refusing to countenance any continuities. There was also a denial of the persistence of slavery-like labor forms within the United States. This was vocally and actively challenged, resisted, manipulated, and adapted by the African American community and its allies; the chapter also tells this story.