Did The Civil War Really End Slavery?

In the November Sojourners, Lisa Sharon Harper (Shop 'til They Drop) writes:  "One of the greatest myths of American history is that the Civil War ended slavery."  I agree.  Here is her documentation:

"The 13th Amendment abolished slavery 'except as punishment for crime'.  In the years following the Civil War, Southern and Midwestern states struggled to recover from the economic impacts of war and sudden loss of 4 million unpaid laborers.  These states leveraged the constitutional exception [loophole] to revive flailing economies.  They turned to the only thing they knew for the previous 250 years---free labor. . . .  "

"Peonage laws (aka 'black codes') sprung up in states throughout the South and West.  They lowered the bar of criminality, transforming noncriminal acts, such as sitting on a bench too long, into criminal offenses.  Black codes required servitude [slavery] if prisoners could not pay their fines.  The business would pay the fine to the state in return for the prisoners' labor. . . . by 1898 as much as 73 percent of Alabama's total state revenue came from convict leasing."

Today racial profiling, mass incarceration and prison labor are combining to create a new form of slavery.  "37 states have legalized the contracting of prison labor by private corporations who bring their operations inside prison walls."  Corporations such as Nordstrom, Microsoft, IBM, Boeing, and Target.

Using the criminal justice system to enable and enforce racial oppression has a long history in America.  This is why an apology for past mistreatment of blacks by the criminal justice system by Terrence Cunningham is not good enough. Congress, the Supreme Court and the larger white society, even the white church, need to repent, change, restitute and do justice.  This is much more than just a police problem.  For much more detail read:  Douglas Blackmon's book Slavery by Another Name: The Re-enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II; also Ta-Nehisi Coates' article in The Atlantic, "The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration."