{"id":63730,"date":"2022-05-06T00:38:49","date_gmt":"2022-05-06T00:38:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=63730"},"modified":"2022-05-06T00:38:50","modified_gmt":"2022-05-06T00:38:50","slug":"abolition-democracys-forgotten-founder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=63730","title":{"rendered":"Abolition Democracy\u2019s Forgotten Founder"},"content":{"rendered":"

Abolition Democracy\u2019s Forgotten Founder<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Boston Review<\/a>
\n2022-04-19<\/p>\n

Robin D. G. Kelley<\/strong><\/a>, Gary B. Nash Professor of American History
\nUniversity of California, Los Angeles<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a>
T. Thomas Fortune<\/a>. Image: NYPL<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

While W. E. B. Du Bois<\/a> praised an expanding penitentiary system, T. Thomas Fortune<\/a> called for investment in education and a multiracial, working-class movement.<\/em><\/p>\n

Nearly every activist I encounter these days identifies as an abolitionist. To be sure, movements to abolish prisons and police have been around for decades, popularizing the idea that caging and terrorizing people makes us unsafe. However, the Black Spring rebellions revealed that the obscene costs of state violence can and should be reallocated for things that do keep us safe: housing, universal healthcare, living wage jobs, universal basic income, green energy, and a system of restorative justice. As abolition recently became the new watchword, everyone scrambled to understand its historical roots. Reading groups popped up everywhere to discuss W. E. B. Du Bois\u2019s<\/a> classic, Black Reconstruction in America<\/em><\/a> (1935), since he was the one to coin the phrase \u201cabolition democracy,\u201d which Angela Y. Davis<\/a> revived for her indispensable book of the same title.<\/p>\n

I happily participated in Black Reconstruction<\/em> study groups and public forums meant to divine wisdom for our current movements. But I often wondered why no one was scrambling to resurrect T. Thomas Fortune\u2019s<\/a> Black and White: Land, Labor, and Politics in the South<\/em><\/a>, published in 1884. After all, it was Fortune who wrote: \u201cThe South<\/a> must spend less money on penitentiaries and more money on schools; she must use less powder and buckshot and more law and equity; she must pay less attention to politics and more attention to the development of her magnificent resources.\u201d Du Bois, on the other hand, praised Reconstruction<\/a> efforts to establish and improve the penitentiary system in what proved to be a futile effort to eliminate the convict lease. Much shorter but no less powerful, Fortune\u2019s Black and White anticipates Du Bois\u2019s critique of federal complicity in undermining Black freedom, but sharply diverges by declaring Reconstruction a miserable failure. He argues that the South\u2019s problems can be traced to the federal government allowing the slaveholding rebels to return to power and hold the monopoly of land, stripping Black people of their short-lived citizenship rights, and refusing to compensate freed people for generations of unpaid labor. The result was a new kind of slavery: \u201cthe United States took the slave and left the thing which gave birth to chattel slavery and which is now fast giving birth to industrial slavery.\u201d Du Bois echoes Fortune, but adds that white labor\u2019s investment in white supremacy ensured \u201ca system of industry which ruined democracy.\u201d…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While W. E. B. Du Bois praised an expanding penitentiary system, T. Thomas Fortune called for investment in education and a multiracial, working-class movement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1245,459,1196,8,23674,20],"tags":[11064,33457,9833,9835],"class_list":["post-63730","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-biography","category-history","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-social-justice","category-usa","tag-boston-review","tag-robin-d-g-kelley-2","tag-t-thomas-fortune","tag-timothy-thomas-fortune"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63730","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=63730"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63730\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":63731,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63730\/revisions\/63731"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=63730"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=63730"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=63730"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}