Slavery

Part 1 of a two-part series.

During the debate about renaming Austin schools, a recurring theme emerged: The problem isn’t just about schools being named for men who served in the Confederate military or government, but how schools teach about the Civil War and slavery.

On this edition of In Black America, producer/host John L. Hanson Jr. speaks with Dr. Daina Ramey Berry, associate professor of history and African and African diaspora studies at the University of Texas at Austin, and author of The Price for Their Pound of Flesh.

Berry talks about the domestic cadaver trade; how enslaved people responded to being appraised, bartered and sold; and the economic value of enslaved people.

Documents tell us how much people were sold for during our country's history of slavery. But a new book goes further, looking at how people who were enslaved were valued throughout their entire lives.

On this edition of In Black America, producer/host John L. Hanson Jr. speaks with Dr. Edward E. Baptist, Professor in the Department of History, and House Dean, Becker House at Cornell University.

Americans tend to cast slavery as a pre-modern institution—the nation’s original sin, perhaps, but isolated in time and divorced from America’s later success. But to do so robs the millions who suffered in bondage of their full legacy.

From Texas Standard:

Despite a war, changes to the Constitution and to state and federal laws, slavery continues to be very much a part of the American story. We've seen it echoed in the controversies around the use of police power and the consistent iconography of the confederacy.

But much of what we know about the first-hand experiences of slaves themselves comes from written accounts – transcribed interviews done in the 1930s using stereotyped misspellings.